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Sonny Simmons

Huey "Sonny" Simmons (b. August 4, 1933, Sicily Island, Louisiana) is an American jazz musician.
He grew up in Oakland, California, where he began playing the english horn. At age 16 he took up the alto saxophone, which became his primary instrument. He is one of the few jazz musicians to use the english horn as a solo instrument.
In the early 1960s he worked with Charles Mingus and Prince Lasha before recording his own LPs for ESP-Disk.

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Sunny Murray

James Marcellus Arthur "Sunny" Murray (born Idabel, Oklahoma in 1936) is one of the pioneers of the free jazz style of drumming. Murray spent his youth in Philadelphia before moving to New York City where he began playing with Cecil Taylor: "We played for about a year, just practicing, studying - we went to workshops with Varèse, did a lot of creative things, just experimenting, without a job". He featured on the influential 1962 concerts in Denmark released as Nefertiti the Beautiful One Has Come.

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Moneytree

Signed to: Sotones A band, in the experience of many, is a carefully and deliberately selected group of people (often not close friends) bent on acheiving a pre-existing sound, look, attitude. Many bands only exist in the practise room and on the stage and are keen to delegate the other things that come along with playing to roadies, agents, managers etc. Moneytree however is nearer to a nerdy club than most peoples conception of a band.

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Ed Askew

Ed Askew, a gay man, cut one of the best and most obscure LPs in the original ESP Disk’s vague rock/folk/freak series, issued eponymously and since reissued as Ask the Unicorn, before apparently dropping off the edge of his world. Years later, thanks to detective work by - naturally - Mr Clint Simonson of the De Stijl Records imprint, it turned out that not only was Askew still breathing but he had actually recorded a follow-up to his ESP Disk in 1970 that had lain in the can for decades.

Read more about Ed Askew on Last.fm.

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Alan Silva

Alan Silva (born Alan Treadwell da Silva, Bermuda, January 22, 1939) is an American free jazz double bassist and keyboard player. Born a British subject to an Azorean Portuguese woman (Irene da Silva) and a black Bermudian man known only as "Ruby" at the very height of segregation, Silva emigrated to the United States at the age of five with his mother, eventually acquiring U.S. citizenship by the age of 18 or 19. He adopted the professional name Alan Silva in his twenties.

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Bob James

Bob James (born December 25, 1939) is a two-time Grammy Award-winning jazz keyboardist. Though he has recorded a couple of straight jazz albums, most of his recordings contain "pop-jazz" which is a type of instrumental pop music. Bob James was an important figure in turning 1970s fusion jazz more commercial. For their album One on One, Earl Klugh and Bob James received a Grammy award for Best Pop Instrumental Performance of 1981.

Read more about Bob James on Last.fm.

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