(Photo of Freddie Hubbard by John McKenzie from www.jazzprofessional.com)

Sad to say that another jazz great has passed. Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard died today at the age of 70 (from the Associated Press):

Freddie Hubbard, the Grammy-winning jazz musician whose style influenced a generation of trumpet players and who collaborated with such greats as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, died Monday, a month after suffering a heart attack. He was 70.

Hubbard died at Sherman Oaks Hospital, said his manager, fellow trumpeter David Weiss of the New Jazz Composers Octet. He had been hospitalized since suffering the heart attack a day before Thanksgiving.

A towering figure in jazz circles, Hubbard played on hundreds of recordings in a career dating to 1958, the year he arrived in New York from his hometown Indianapolis, where he had studied at the Arthur Jordan Conservatory of Music and with the Indianapolis Symphony.

Soon he had hooked up with such jazz legends as Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley and Coltrane.

“I met Trane at a jam session at Count Basie’s in Harlem in 1958,” he told the jazz magazine Down Beat in 1995. “He said, `Why don’t you come over and let’s try and practice a little bit together.’ I almost went crazy. I mean, here is a 20-year-old kid practicing with John Coltrane. He helped me out a lot, and we worked several jobs together.”

In his earliest recordings, which included “Open Sesame” and “Goin’ Up” for Blue Note in 1960, the influence of Davis and others on Hubbard is obvious, Weiss said. But within a couple years he would develop a style all his own, one that would influence generations of musicians, including Wynton Marsalis.

“He influenced all the trumpet players that came after him,” Marsalis told The Associated Press earlier this year. “Certainly I listened to him a lot. … We all listened to him. He has a big sound and a great sense of rhythm and time and really the hallmark of his playing is an exuberance. His playing is exuberant.”

Hubbard played on more than 300 recordings, including his own albums and those of scores of other artists. He won his Grammy in 1972 for best jazz performance by a group for the album “First Light.”

As a young musician, Hubbard became revered among his peers for a fiery, blazing style that allowed him to hit notes higher and faster than just about anyone else with a horn. As age and infirmity began to slow that style, he switched to a softer, melodic style and played a flugelhorn. His fellow musicians were still impressed.

In tribute we’re posting one of his more out-there titles, Sing Me a Song of Songmy, a collaboration from 1971 with the Turkish electronic composer Ilhan Mimaroglu. You can download the album here.

(above photo of Mauricio Kagel from www.chamberoperamemphis.org)

Argentinian composer Mauricio Kagel died yesterday (from the Guardian’s obituary):

An artist’s originality depends less on ingenious invention than a strongly personal point of view. Mauricio Kagel, who has died aged 76, held a unique position in music of the last half century.

While widely celebrated elsewhere, in Britain he remained perhaps the least well known of the great post-second world war avant garde composers. Only Luigi Nono was comparably under-exposed; Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, György Ligeti and Iannis Xenakis all, to some extent, reached a wider public.

Kagel’s originality reflects his status as an outsider. Born in Buenos Aires, he came from an Argentine-Jewish family of leftist political views. He did not study music at university or conservatory, but privately with several teachers – none for composition, incidentally – and he studied philosophy and literature at the University of Buenos Aires, where the poet and short-story-writer Jorge Luis Borges was one of his lecturers. Kagel became a repetiteur at the famous Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, and music adviser at the university, as well as being editor of cinema and photography for the journal Nueva Visión.

Film remained a practical interest after Kagel moved to Cologne in 1957 on a West German government scholarship. He lived there for the rest of his life, with frequent trips abroad as a guest professor or artist-in-residence.

By the mid-1950s Cologne was one of the great centres of avant garde musical experiment, where Stockhausen was king, but Kagel came to succeed, or replace, him as a magnet for aspiring composers at the Hochschule, and instituted a new course in music theatre.

Although Kagel had no formal education in composition, he acquired a mastery of new vocal and instrumental techniques with surprising speed. Anagrama, a large-scale piece for solo singers, speaking chorus and instrumental ensemble, was written only one year after Kagel’s arrival in Cologne and remains one of the most striking and inventive pieces of its time; it may even have had an influence on Stockhausen’s Momente and Berio’s Laborintus II.

…There is hardly an aspect of contemporary culture that Kagel has not playfully pulled to bits and reassembled like a Heath-Robinson contraption: “early music” was desiccated in Musik für Renaissance-Instrumente (1966), opera and ballet turned inside-out in Staathstheater (1970), Country Music and Nostalgia affectionately travestied in Kantrimiusik (1975), colonialism (characteristically reversed as non-Europeans invading the Mediterranean) lampooned in Mare Nostrum (1975; revised in 1997), the circus celebrated in Variété (1977) and totalitarianism caricatured in Der Tribun (1979) – a harangue which is perhaps too much like the real thing. More recently, The Pieces of the Compass Rose (1988-94) reflect the paradoxes of “world music” with amiable nonchalance.

There have also been tributes-with-a-difference to other composers: the film Ludwig Van celebrated the bicentenary of Beethoven’s birth in 1970 with a burlesque representation of the kitsch cultural tourist industry in which, effectively, Beethoven became a mere consumer product. In Variationen ohne Fuge (1972), Brahms and Handel once more join battle, as they had, very differently, in Brahms’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel. Stravinsky is grist to Kagel’s mill in Fürst Igor (1982), and Debussy in Interview Avec D (1994), in both of which Kagel re-creates, in ghostly form, music of the past, bearing a relation to it much like Miss Havisham to her wedding day.

For the tercentenary of JS Bach’s birth in 1985, Kagel composed his Sankt-Bach Passion – a perfectly respectful re-enactment of Bach’s own life in the manner of one of Bach’s Gospel settings. Kagel characteristically quipped, “No one believes in God any more, but everyone believes in Bach,” a half-truth, as he would surely have admitted.

If you’re unfamiliar with his works, ubuweb has two important albums, Acustica and Der Schall, available for download here: http://www.ubu.com/sound/kagel.html. Some of his films are available here: http://www.ubu.com/film/kagel.html.

Listening to my vinyl copy of 1898 right now. If I get the chance to update this post with more downloads, I will.