Jimmy Owens Award of Recognition

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FONT Music Presents
Jimmy Owens – Award of Recognition from FONT Music Community 2019

Jimmy Owens (tp), Danny Mixon (p), Kenny Davis (b), Winard Harper (dr), Cascadu (percussion, vocals)
Special guest trumpeters: Linda Briceno, Jonathan Finlayson, Keyon Harrold, Nabate Isles

FONT’s annual Award of Recognition has honored creative pioneers and revolutionary teachers who have made remarkable contributions to the field. Past awardees have included Wadada Leo Smith, Laurie Frink, Bobby Bradford, Kenny Wheeler, Charles Tolliver, Raymond Mase, John McNeil, and Tom Harrell. In 2019 this award is presented to Jimmy Owens.

Legendary Jazz artist JIMMY OWENS (trumpet, flugelhorn) has over forty-five years of experience as a Jazz trumpeter, composer, arranger, lecturer, and music education consultant. His experience covers a wide range of international musical achievement, which includes extensive work as a studio musician, soloist, bandleader, and composer of orchestral compositions, movie scores, and ballets.

Jimmy is one of the few trumpeters of his generation who played as a sideman with such extraordinary Jazz leaders as Lionel Hampton, Hank Crawford, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Duke Ellington, Billy Taylor, and the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Band, among others. As a result, his musical and personal recollections are unique. He can share personal recollections of being a sideman in some of the most exciting bands in the history of Jazz music. His anecdotes are priceless: playing with Cootie Williams, Sweets Edison, Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie in an historic concert at Yale where Eubie Blake and Paul Robeson were in the audience; sitting in with Miles Davis at the age of fifteen, and many others.

Throughout his long career, Jimmy has consistently emphasized in both his performances and recordings a deep understanding of the blues as well as beautiful and articulate emotional projection on ballads. As a reviewer stated in All About Jazz regarding Jimmy’s performance on One More: The Summary – Music of Thad Jones, Vol 2 (2006), an all-star recording on which Jimmy appeared – “Jimmy Owens … proves that he’s better than ever, whether employing a breathy, vocal quality (Little Pixie), a smooth flugelhorn sound (Three in One), or brilliant and elliptical Jones-like melodic ideas (Rejoice).”

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