Total Eclipse

Bobby Hutcherson is a jazz vibraphone and marimba player. His vibraphone playing is suggestive of the style of Milt Jackson in its free-flowing melodicism, but his sense of harmony and group interaction is thoroughly modern. Hutcherson has influenced younger vibraphonists like Steve Nelson, Joe Locke and Stefon Harris. In year 2010 he received lifetime the Jazz Master Fellowship Award from NEA, National Endowment for the Arts which is an... independent federal agency. National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters is the highest honor given in Jazz established in 1982. Attracted foremost to more experimental free jazz and post-bop, Hutcherson made early recordings in this style for the Blue Note label with Jackie McLean, Eric Dolphy, Andrew Hill, Grachan Moncur III, Joe Chambers, and Freddie Hubbard, both as a leader and a sideman. In spite of the numerous avant-garde recordings made during this period however, Hutcherson's first session for Blue Note, The Kicker , demonstrates his background in hard bop and the blues, as well as the early session Idle Moments for Grant Green, for example.
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Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in black communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a... mix of African and European music traditions. Its black African pedigree is evident in its use of blue notes, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation and the swung note. From its early development until the present day jazz has also incorporated music from American popular music. As the music has developed and spread around the world it has drawn on many different national, regional and local musical cultures giving rise, since its early 20th century American beginnings, to many distinctive styles: New Orleans jazz dating from the early 1910s, big band swing, Kansas City jazz and Gypsy jazz from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s and on down through West Coast jazz, cool jazz, avant-garde jazz, Afro-Cuban jazz, modal jazz, free jazz, Latin jazz in various forms, soul jazz, jazz fusion and jazz rock, smooth jazz, jazz-funk, punk jazz, acid jazz, ethno jazz, jazz rap, cyber jazz, Indo jazz, M-Base, nu jazz, urban jazz and other ways of playing the music. In a 1988 interview, trombonist J.J. Johnson said, "Jazz is restless.
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