Category: Mosaic Artistry

I just finished my mosaic of the jazz saxophone genius Charlie Parker. I will be showing it, as a vendor along with my other mosaics, at the Chicago Jazz Festival, this Labor Day weekend. Charlie along with Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, and others created a style of music called Bebop. This style of music was created in the early 1940’s by African American musicians who wanted more freedom of expression and a more individual sound than the Big Band sound of the time could provide.

Continue reading “Charlie Parker”

I started listening to Nancy Wilson when I was in college over 50 years ago. She made an album with Cannon Ball Adderley in 1961, that I listened to and became a Nancy Wilson fan for life. Continue reading “Nancy Wilson”

Thelonious Sphere Monk was a jazz pianist and composer.  Monk was one of five jazz musicians featured on the cover of Time magazine. Continue reading “Thelonious Monk”

I have been a Tony Bennett fan since the sixties. I did some research on Tony and I found out he marched with Harry Belafonte and Martin Luther King in Selma Alabama. He has been a civil rights advocate for years. He has performed over six decades. He is 91 and still performing concerts.

Tony Bennett is one of the most successful legendary jazz and popular musicians of our time. He has sold over 50 million records worldwide, is a published author, and a successful painter. Mr. Bennett has been inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame, and in 2002 received a lifetime achievement award from ASCAP.

He has won fifteen Grammy Awards, two Emmy Awards, and the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Award.

I did this mosaic of Ray Charles because he was such a dynamic
singer and inspiration for a lot of people. The fact that he was blind
never seemed to matter to him. I liked the fact that he seemed to
really love what he did. And he played and sang with such energy
and passion.

Etta James was best known for her incomparable song “At Last”. But in her career she did much more than sing one song. She also sang “Something got a Hold on me”, “A Sunday Kind of Love”, and Trust in Me. (My personal favorite) And many more memorable songs.

 

I just finished a new mosaic of Nat King Cole. I always liked Nat’s singing, but I did not know about his other accomplishments until I started on his mosaic and started looking up information about him. He started off  as a jazz pianist in the 1940’s.

He then started singing and became a very popular singer who crossed racial lines. Straighten Up and Fly Right, Mona Lisa, and Nature Boy were some of his signature tunes in the late 40’s and early 50’s. Nat had a lot of other talents, he was a  film actor, TV actor and he was first African American to have a national variety show in 1956.

He had 5 children, two were adopted, his daughter Natalie Cole was a great singer and performer in her own right. What made his accomplishments even more incredible was he did all these things before his untimely death at the age of 46.

John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie was a legendary jazz trumpeter. He influenced numerous modern jazz trumpeters.
His beret, horned rimmed glasses, bent horn and pouched cheeks and his light hearted personality, helped
popularize the bebop jazz style in the 1940’s and 50’s.