Randy Sandke
| Randy Sandke | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Jay Randall Sandke |
| Born |
May 29, 1949 Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Genres | Jazz |
| Occupation(s) | Musician |
| Instruments | Trumpet, guitar |
| Years active | 1968–present |
| Labels | Stash, Jazzology, Concord Jazz, Nagel Heyer, Arbors |
| Associated acts | Michael Brecker, Widespread Depression Jazz Orchestra, Nighthawks Orchestra, Bob Wilber, Benny Goodman |
| Website | www |
Jay Randall Sandke (born May 5, 1949 in Chicago, Illinois) is a jazz trumpeter and guitarist.
In an interview with Larry Kart, he said: "I got into jazz kind of chronologically, beginning with Bix and Louis, then Dizzy, Clifford Brown, Miles, and Freddie Hubbard. I also studied at Roosevelt University with Renold Schilke, a legendary teacher and maker of trumpets who was with the Chicago Symphony for years".
While a student at Indiana University in 1968, he and Michael Brecker started a jazz-rock band that performed at the Notre Dame Collegiate Jazz Festival. He was invited to be a member of the backing band for rock singer Janis Joplin, but a throat problem kept him from performing. Despite a successful operation on his throat, he gave up the trumpet, moved to New York City, and played guitar for the next ten years. When he returned to the trumpet, he became a member of the Nighthawks Orchestra led by Vince Giordano, followed by membership in Bechet's Legacy led by Bob Wilber. From 1984–1985, he was part of Benny Goodman's last band.
In the Kart interview he states, "...if you grow up playing nothing but modern jazz and shift to a more traditional style, you have to dispense with a lot of your favorite harmonic and rhythmic tricks. Instead the interest has to come from somewhere else – from melody, phrasing, the sheer sound of your instrument. But I believe that those are virtues that can be applied to any style – traditional or modern – and that when you do it, you end up with better music."
Sandke remarks in the liner notes to The Subway Ballet: "Okay – I worked with Benny Goodman, but so did Fats Navarro and Herbie Hancock and nobody refers to them as 'swing musicians.' ... Being thus labeled is somewhat akin to being called a child molester in that the tag never seems to go away, and both can be equally deleterious to one's career." He has recorded over twenty albums as a leader, ranging from revisitings of music from the 1920s and 1930s to explorations of contemporary idioms in the company Michael Brecker, Kenny Barron, Marty Ehrlich, Bill Charlap, and Uri Caine. He became interested in exploring dissonant, nonstandard harmonies that lie outside of conventional triadic harmony, creating a musical theory of what he calls "metatonality", a harmonic system outlined in his book Harmony for a New Millennium.
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Wikipedia