Longineu Parsons - 1980 - Longineu Parsons

Longineu Parsons

1980

Longineu Parsons

01. Take The High Road

02. Spaced

03. It Will Be Better

04. Quiet Nights

05. Funkin Around

06. Beverly's Song

07. McCraven's Walk

Alto Saxophone, Soprano Saxophone – Sulaiman Hakim

Bass – Jack Gregg

Drums – Chris Henderson

Percussion – Roger Raspail

Piano – Georges Eduard Nouel

Trumpet, Recorder – Longineu Parsons

I think when musicologists look back on the 20th century, they will say that the last third was about funk as being the dominant rhythm for the whole world,” says trumpeter Longineu Parsons, a paid-up member of the jazz avant garde. “That means that James Brown is one of the most important musical figures in the whole world for the last third of the 20th century.”

Born in 1950, Parsons studied classical trumpet and played R&B in “all the cut ’em up-shoot ’em up joints in Alabama, Georgia, south Florida.” At 19, Parsons went jazz 24-7 (“I was hearing a sound that wasn’t restricted by meter or anything else.”) and by the late ’70s he was gigging with Sun Ra. In 1980, Parsons recorded a self-titled album that few outside of the Parisian underground heard. Discouraged, he went back to school, earning a Masters degree in classical composition from the University of Florida, where he is now an assistant professor.

He lived in Europe for four years during the late 1970s and early 1980s. After a brief stint in New York, he accepted a teaching position at the Centre D'Etudes Musicales in Guadalupe. Upon moving back to the U.S. in 1986, he was selected in a national audition to perform in the production Satchmo as understudy to the leading roles of Louis Armstrong and Joe "King" Oliver.

Longineu Parsons has a B.S. degree in music from Florida A&M University, a Master of Music from the University of Florida and has studied at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He is on the faculty at Florida A&M University and continues to perform internationally with his own ensemble and with Nancy Wilson, Billy Harper, the Louis Armstrong Legacy Band, and the Cannonball Adderley Tribute Band. In addition he appears frequently as a soloist with symphony orchestras.

Chaotic funk jazz and beyond from this fellow who is hard to pigeonhole. This is a collection that I continue to pull off the shelf every few years and it never disappoints. Would somebody please reissue this man's music in full, properly?