Artist: Richie Kamuca

Richie Kamuca was an American jazz tenor saxophonist. 

Kamuca was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, and, like many players associated with West Coast jazz, grew up in the East before moving West around the time that bebop changed the prevailing style of jazz. His early playing, in what is generally considered the Lester Young style, was done on tour with the big bands of Stan Kenton  and Woody Herman, where he became a member of the later line-ups of Herman's Four Brothers  saxophone section with Al Cohn and Bill Perkins. 

Kamuca stayed on the West Coast, playing with the smaller groups of Chet Baker,  Maynard Ferguson,  Shorty Rogers, and others. He was one of the  Lighthouse All-Stars in 1957 and 1958, and recorded with Perkins, Art Pepper, Jimmy Rowles, Cy Touff and many others in those years, as well as leading recording sessions in his own right. 

Kamuca was a member of the group Shelly Manne and His Men from 1959 through 1962, when he returned East and settled in New York. Here he worked with Gerry Mulligan, Gary McFarland, and Roy Eldridge, before returning to the West Coast in 1972, where he recorded in the studios and performed with local groups. 

Further information about Richie Kamuca is found here.

Photography credit: CoolJazz5Television broadcast of Jazz Scene USA, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

This content was excerpted from the Wikipedia article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Davis, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).