Henry Franklin | |
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 Franklin at Pierce Street Jazz - 2014 | |
| Background information | |
| Born | October 1, 1940 Los Angeles, California |
| Genres | Jazz |
| Occupation(s) | Musician |
| Instrument(s) | Double bass |
| Years active | 1960–present |
| Labels |
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Henry "Skipper" Franklin (born Henry Carl Franklin on October 1, 1940) is an American jazz double bassist. [1] [2]
Franklin played on Hugh Masekela's 1968 number one single, "Grazing in the Grass," as well as with Masekela's band at the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967. In addition, Franklin played and recorded with Gene Harris and the Three Sounds, Hampton Hawes, Freddie Hubbard, Bobbi Humphrey, Willie Bobo, Archie Shepp, O.C. Smith, Count Basie, Stevie Wonder, Al Jarreau, Curtis Amy, Teddy Edwards, and Sonny Criss. Franklin's recording—composed by Sanifu Al Hall, Jr.— "Soft Spirit" was featured on the Breakbeat compilation Tribe Vibes as it had been sampled by the musical group A Tribe Called Quest.
Encouraged by his father, Sammy Franklin, a jazz trumpeter and bandleader, [3] he studied with Al McKibbon and George Morrow, while listening to Paul Chambers and Doug Watkins.
While attending the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, he played with his first professional band – the Roy Ayers Latin Jazz Quintet. About that time, Franklin worked with Harold Land and Hampton Hawes. Years later, he toured Europe with Hawes [4] and recorded five albums with him. In Los Angeles, Franklin also played with Don Cherry, and Billy Higgins. [5]
In 1968, after Henry's year-long tour of the East Coast playing with Willie Bobo and working gigs with Archie Shepp, Lamont Johnson, Beaver Harris and Roswell Rudd on his days off, Hugh Masekela heard him play and made him an offer. Three and a half years later, the two collaborated on Grazing in the Grass. In 1972, Franklin released his debut album The Skipper through Black Jazz Records. Music critic, Tom Hull, [6] described it as "adventurous postbop."
He continued touring during the next several years, working internationally with O.C. Smith, The Three Sounds, Freddie Hubbard, and Count Basie. Franklin collected a gold record with Stevie Wonder on Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants. Collaborating with John Carter and Bobby Bradford, Franklin produced two albums: Self-Determination Music and Secrets. He performed on five albums with Dennis Gonzales, John Purcell and William Richardson and also played extensively with Pharoah Sanders, Joe Williams, Sonny Rollins, [7] Bobby Hutcherson, Sonny Fortune and Milt Jackson.
For over a decade until 2011, Franklin played a regular, five-night-per-week gig at The Mission Inn, in Riverside, CA. In the summer of 2009, the director of the summer program and the provost of La Sierra University in Riverside partnered with Franklin to provide some on-campus, summer jazz concerts. These continued in the fall, eventually becoming a regular campus concert series, "Pierce Street Jazz" (PSJ). Still organized and headlined by Franklin, PSJ continues to feature well-known local and national jazz musicians as guests performing with the regular house trio. [8] For many years he has also been a regular performer in the Friday night jazz events at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) [9] in Los Angeles and at Jazz in the Pines, [10] an annual, summer jazz festival in Idyllwild, CA.
Franklin's latest disc, Henry Franklin: JID014, was released in Sep 2022 – the 14th by Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad on the Jazz Is Dead label. [11] In his review, Chris May considers the album to be the label's “most satisfying disc to date” and one that has “done Franklin proud.” [12] In 2023, this album won the 54th NCAAP Image Award for "Outstanding Jazz Album - Instrumental." [13]
He also published a jazz bass player's method book entitled, Bassically Yours. Originally released in 1975 in printed form, it is now available only as an online .pdf download. The book, with melody lines and chords, contains 225 tunes, including many standards by such notables as Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Freddie Hubbard, Cole Porter, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, McCoy Tyner and others, including, of course, the Skipper. [14]
Throughout his career, Franklin has appeared on more than 160 albums, many of which he produced. The following is a selection of these:
As leader
With 3 More Sounds (group)
As sidemanWith John Carter and Bobby Bradford
With Daggerboard
With Dennis González
With Hampton Hawes
With Bobbi Humphrey
With Calvin Keys
With Hugh Masekela
With Julian Priester
With Freddie Redd
With Sonny Rollins
With Woody Shaw
With The Three Sounds
With Phil Woods
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Here is a lyrical assessment of the double bass and its role in Jazz: [15]
Laying in the bouquet of any jazz ensemble, of any era, playing any style, is the bass. Sturdy and stoic, but also capable of providing the emotional crux, the bass is an essential unit, a compass on which the rest of the ensemble relies on, the provider of the heartbeat, the rhythm, the feel. The conjurer of traditions, the conductor of an elastic orchestra, writing symphonies in real time.
Here is an assessment of the bassist, Henry Franklin: [16]
There is one such maestro whose own legacy, much like their instrument, has been obscured while remaining ever present. Through a closer listen it becomes evident that the music and career of Henry "The Skipper" Franklin is among the most luminous of any jazz artist....Recognized by his peers and contemporaries, Franklin's entry for Jazz Is Dead gives the living legend his flowers and recognizes the contributions The Skipper has made as one of jazz's most influential heartbeats.
Walter Theodore "Sonny" Rollins is an American jazz tenor saxophonist who is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential jazz musicians. In a seven-decade career, he has recorded over sixty albums as a leader. A number of his compositions, including "St. Thomas", "Oleo", "Doxy", and "Airegin", have become jazz standards. Rollins has been called "the greatest living improviser".
Frederick Dewayne Hubbard was an American jazz trumpeter. He played bebop, hard bop, and post-bop styles from the early 1960s onwards. His unmistakable and influential tone contributed to new perspectives for modern jazz and bebop.
Benny Golson is an American bebop/hard bop jazz tenor saxophonist, composer, and arranger. He came to prominence with the big bands of Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie, more as a writer than a performer, before launching his solo career. Golson is known for co-founding and co-leading The Jazztet with trumpeter Art Farmer in 1959. From the late 1960s through the 1970s Golson was in demand as an arranger for film and television and thus was less active as a performer, but he and Farmer re-formed the Jazztet in 1982.
Walter Davis Jr. was an American bebop and hard bop pianist.
Pete "La Roca" Sims was an American jazz drummer and attorney. Born and raised in Harlem by a pianist mother and a stepfather who played trumpet, he was introduced to jazz by his uncle Kenneth Bright, a major shareholder in Circle Records and the manager of rehearsal spaces above the Lafayette Theater. Sims studied percussion at the High School of Music and Art and at the City College of New York, where he played tympani in the CCNY Orchestra. He adopted the name La Roca early in his musical career, when he played timbales for six years in Latin bands. In the 1970s, during a hiatus from jazz performance, he resumed using his original surname. When he returned to jazz in the late 1970s, he usually inserted "La Roca" into his name in quotation marks to help audiences familiar with his early work identify him. He told The New York Times in 1982 that he did so only out of necessity:
I can't deny that I once played under the name La Roca, but I have to insist that my name is Peter Sims with La Roca in brackets or in quotes. For 16 or 17 years, when I have not been playing the music, people have known me as Sims....When I was 14 or 15, I thought ["La Roca"] was clever; right now, it's an embarrassment. I thought that it would be something that people would probably remember - boy, was I ever right on that one! I can't make my conversion.
Michael Wayne Carvin is an American jazz drummer.
George Andrew Cables is an American jazz pianist and composer.
Gerald Stenhouse Jemmott is an American bass guitarist. Jemmott was one of the chief session bass guitarists of the late 1960s and early 1970s, working with many of the period's well-known soul, blues and jazz artists.
Albert Preston Dailey was an American jazz pianist.
Bernard Atwell McKinney, later Kiane Zawadi is an American jazz trombonist and euphonium player, one of the few jazz soloists on the latter instrument.
Yasmina, a Black Woman is a jazz album by Archie Shepp, recorded in 1969 in Paris for BYG Actuel. It features musicians from the Art Ensemble of Chicago. The first track, giving its title to the album, is a long free jazz piece by an 11-piece orchestra; in it, the references to Africa that Shepp had experimented with only a few weeks earlier in Algiers are to be found in the use of African percussion instruments, or the African incantations sung by Shepp himself at the beginning of the track. The other two pieces, a homage to Sonny Rollins written by trombonist Grachan Moncur III and a standard, played by a more traditional quintet and quartet respectively, are more reminiscent of the hard bop genre, although the fiery playing of the musicians, notably Shepp himself, gives them a definite avant-garde edge. It was originally issued on CD by Affinity, mastered from an incredibly noisy vinyl source and later reissued by Charly from the original master tapes.
Oscar Brashear was an American jazz trumpeter and session musician from Chicago, Illinois.
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Monnette Sudler was an American jazz guitarist from Philadelphia.
The Golden Number is an album of four duets by bassist Charlie Haden recorded in 1976 and released on the Horizon label in 1977. Haden’s duet partners are trumpeter Don Cherry, tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp, pianist Hampton Hawes and alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman. Hawes died shortly before the album’s release, and Haden dedicated the work to him in the liner notes.
Spider Webb is an American jazz drummer and session musician.
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The Seance is a live album by American jazz pianist Hampton Hawes recorded in 1966 but not released on the Contemporary label until 1969.
Something Special is a live album by American jazz pianist Hampton Hawes recorded in 1976 and released on the Contemporary label in 1994.
Pierce Street Jazz (PSJ) is a free, straight-ahead jazz concert series held on the campus of La Sierra University in Riverside, CA.
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