randy brecker
Randy Brecker was born in Philadelphia on November 27, 1945. He learned classical trumpet in Philadelphia before attending Indiana University, where he studied Jazz theory with Dave Baker and played in the big band that won first prize at the collegiate Jazz festival at Notre Dame. During a tour of Europe with this band he decided to leave the university and remained abroad for some months before moving to New York where he joined Blood, Sweat and Tears in 1967.
Preferring a stronger Jazz orientation than this group provided, he played with Horace Silver’s quintet between 1968 and 1969, and worked with several big bands, including those led by Clark Terry, Duke Pearson, Thad Jones/Mel Lewis, Joe Henderson and Frank Foster.
In 1969 Brecker and his brother Michael formed the Jazz-rock band Dreams with Billy Cobham. The band was not commercially successful, but the brothers were in constant demand as studio musicians, and after it disbanded Brecker played with Larry Coryell’s Eleventh House band (1973-74) and with Billy Cobham’s band (1974).
From 1974 to 1979 Randy and Mike led The Brecker Brothers Band. Some Skunk Funk, from the group’s first album, typifies the Brecker Brothers’ approach: it includes a complex, angular melody that is played rapidly and precisely over staccato funk rhythms. Thereafter Randy led a group with his wife, Eliane Elias, and continued to work as a studio musician. During the nineties, Randy has worked with the re-created Mingus Big Band, and has appeared with several all-star packages in most every Jazz Festival in America, Europe and Asia. Established and greeted with great popular and critical acclaim in the seventies, the Brecker Brothers reunited in the mid nineties to win a pair of Grammys for their Out of the Loop of 1994.
One of the most amazing aspects about Brecker’s widely varied experiences is his stylistic continuity. Whatever the context, like the Jazz masters of the past, one can always recognize his inimitable approach, his big, brassy sound with echoes of Miles Davis, Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard, and his impassioned heart-on-sleeve lyricism.