Artist: Harold Mabern
Harold Mabern Jr. was an American jazz pianist and composer, principally in the hard bop, post-bop, and soul jazz fields.
Mabern moved from Memphis, Tennessee to Chicago, intending to attend the American Conservatory of Music. He was unable to afford to attend music college because of a change in his parents' financial circumstances, but had private lessons there for six months and developed his reading ability by playing with trombonist Morris Ellis' big band. He also developed by listening to Ahmad Jamal and others in clubs and "playing and practicing 12 hours a day" for the next five years, but he remained self-taught as a pianist. Mabern went on to play with Walter Perkins' MJT + 3 and others in Chicago. Mabern learned orchestration techniques from bassist Bill Lee, and comping and chord voicing from pianists Chris Anderson and Billy Wallace.
Mabern moved to New York City in 1959. According to his own account, he moved there with saxophonist Frank Strozier on November 21, 1959, checked in at a hotel and then went to Birdland, where he met Cannonball Adderley, who asked him if he wanted a gig. Mabern accepted and was shown inside, where trumpeter Harry "Sweets" Edison, who was looking for a pianist to replace the soon-to-depart Tommy Flanagan, auditioned him and offered him the place. A few weeks later, most of the members of this band then joined Jimmy Forrest for a recording in Chicago that resulted in the albums All the Gin Is Gone and Black Forrest, which were also guitarist Grant Green debut recordings.
Mabern steadily built a reputation in New York as a sideman, playing with, among others, Lionel Hampton's big band in 1960 (including a tour of Europe), the Jazztet for 18 months in the period 1961–62, accompanying vocalists, including Betty Carter, Johnny Hartman and Arthur Prysock, and working with trumpeter Donald Byrd and drummer Roy Haynes. After completing a 1963 tour with Haynes, he had a six-week engagement at the Black Hawk in San Francisco with Miles Davis. Mabern toured in Europe with Wes Montgomery later in 1965. From 1965, Mabern also worked with Freddie Hubbard, Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley, Blue Mitchell (1966), Sarah Vaughan, and Joe Williams (1966–67).
Mabern had a career resurgence after his album Straight Street was a success in Japan in 1989. Mabern's repute in Japan was reflected in his signing by the Japanese label Venus, which resulted in six albums from 2002.
A longtime faculty member at William Paterson University (from 1981), Mabern was a frequent instructor at the Stanford Jazz Workshop.
In 2015, Mabern released Afro Blue, "the first of Mabern's two dozen leader dates to showcase the context in which he worked frequently during the 1960s: accompanying vocalists". "Mabern played in Britain [...] in 2017 and 2018 with a quartet featuring Alexander, and finally for two evenings with his trio at Ronnie Scott's club in May 2019." Mabern, who was a regular at Smoke (jazz club) recorded his final four albums on the club's label Smoke Sessions.
Further information about Harold Mabern is found here and here.
Photography credit: Jimmy Baikovicius, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
This content was excerpted from the Wikipedia article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Mabern, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).