Happy Hump Day Everyone!
We continue looking at African-Americans in the violin game. Today’s genre of choice: Jazz
Ken Ford (born November 14, 1968) is an American jazz violinist. Growing up, Ford began as a classical violinist, with prominent orchestra positions in his youth, and is a sought-after musician whose electric violin has also graced the tracks of hit artists ranging from R&B, neo soul, contemporary jazz and more.
Born in St. Louis, Ken Ford lived in Detroit, MI before his parents moved with their only child to make their permanent home in Atlanta, GA. With his father as a DJ, Ford grew up surrounded by the sounds of jazz, blues, and R&B from Earth, Wind & Fire to Al Green and more. After trying numerous instruments, at the age of nine Ford settled on the violin. In his Atlanta school years, he trained classically on the violin, with training from various members of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and became a founding member of the DeKalb Youth Pops Orchestra. With his talents and passion for violin, Ford also joined the African American Philharmonic Orchestra (AAPO), working his way up to the esteemed position of Concert Master. While playing with the AAPO, he also had the rare opportunity of performing for the late, great Barry White. Growing up hearing different genres, Ford also followed his father’s footsteps for a time as a DJ, and counts Stevie Wonder and pioneering violinists Noel Pointer and Jean-Luc Ponty among his musical influences.
Ford has released a trio of albums, with his following multiplying on each successive album: Burnt Toast (2001), Chevelle Lane (2003), and his third, the 2009 release Right Now. His fourth album State of Mind, was most recently released on August 16, 2011 on the new Twelve Music Group label.
An Atlanta fixture as a musician and activist, Ford is also an ardent supporter of keeping music education alive in the schools, playing and hosting benefits, and meeting with youth wherever he can while touring, to educate them on music appreciation as part of his foundation. In July 2010 he created The Ken Ford Foundation to advocate for the role of arts and music in enhancing a child’s education, creativity and self-confidence, as well as dispelling unpopular notions about violin and stringed instruments among youth as an unexciting instrument solely for classical music.
Leroy Jenkins
Leroy Jenkins (March 11, 1932 – February 24, 2007) was a composer and free jazz violinist and violist.
Mr. Jenkins grew up on the South Side of Chicago. He started playing violin around age 7 and performed in recitals at St. Luke Church, one of the city’s biggest Baptist churches, accompanied by a young pianist named Ruth Jones, later known as the singer Dinah Washington. Mr. Jenkins subsequently joined the orchestra and choir at Ebenezer Baptist Church, directed by Dr. O. W. Frederick, who tutored him in the music of black composers like William Grant Still and Will Marion Cook.
At DuSable High School, Mr. Jenkins played alto saxophone under the band director Walter Dyett, a legendary figure in jazz education. He then attended Florida A & M University on a bassoon scholarship, though ultimately he played saxophone and clarinet in the concert band and studied the violin again.
After college, Mr. Jenkins spent four years as a violin teacher in Mobile, Ala. On returning to Chicago in 1964, he joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (A.A.C.M.) a cooperative for jazz musicians determined to follow through on the structural advances of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and others who were widening the jazz tradition. In time, he became one of the most visible members of the organization, which persists today.
With Anthony Braxton, Steve McCall and Leo Smith, he formed the Creative Construction Company; the musicians in the group shifted to Paris, where they and other members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians built their international reputations in 1969 and 1970.
In the mid-1970s, after returning to the United States and after years of cooperative projects, he became a bandleader, and also wrote music for classical ensembles. He led the group Sting, which played a kind of splintered jazz-funk, and made a series of his own records for the Italian label Black Saint. He began to work in more explicitly classical situations, often with old Chicago colleagues like the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams. And he wrote music performed by the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Kronos Quartet and other ensembles.
Mr. Jenkins’s trajectory eventually led him toward collaborations with choreographers, writers and video artists. They included “The Mother of Three Sons,” a collaboration with Bill T. Jones’s dance company, staged at New York City Opera in 1991; “The Negro Burial Ground,” a cantata; “Fresh Faust,” a jazz-hip-hop opera; and “Three Willies,” a multimedia opera. In recent years, Mr. Jenkins went back to smaller music-only projects, including the trio Equal Interest, with the pianist Myra Melford and the saxophonist Joseph Jarman; in 2004, he reunited with the Revolutionary Ensemble.
Leroy died of lung cancer in 2007, leaving a brilliant legacy of free style jazz through the violin.