Charles Tolliver
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Charles Tolliver is an American jazz trumpeter and composer.
Self-taught, he was first influenced by Clifford Brown and Freddie Hubbard. After graduating from Howard University (in pharmacy) he came to prominence in 1964, playing and recording with Jackie McLean. He performed on many important hard bop records of the 1960s, recording with, among others, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Booker Ervin, Roy Haynes, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Horace Silver, John Hicks and McCoy Tyner. In 1969 he founded the group Music Inc..
He was born in 1942 in Jacksonville, Florida, where as a child he received his first trumpet as a gift from his grandmother. He attended Howard University in the early 1960's as a pharmacy student, where he decided to pursue music as a career and moved to New York City. He would later describe his experience, "There was so much going on with the music. Like with bebop, we had a long period of just salivating on. There were all these different idioms within a genre, the avant-garde and free music, bebop still, and of course the music of John Coltrane and Miles. It was just a hell of a period. And then there was also the political scene going on..." (interview, Laurence Donohue-Greene, All About Jazz Online)
In 1968, Tolliver won the Downbeat Magazine Critics Choice for trumpet, and formed the quartet Music Inc, for which he is probably best known, with Jimmy Hopps, Cecil McBee, and Stanley Cowell.
In 1971, Tolliver and Music Inc co-founder Stanley Cowell started Strata East records, one of the pioneer artist-owned recording companies.
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