Frank Morgan born 23 December 1933

Frank Morgan (December 23, 1933 – December 14, 2007) was a jazz saxophonist with a career spanning more than 50 years. He mainly played alto saxophone but also played soprano saxophone. He was known as a Charlie Parker successor who primarily played bebop and ballads. It is a real rarity for a jazz musician to have his career interrupted for a 30-year period and then be able to make a complete comeback. 

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Franklin Delano Morgan spent his early years in Milwaukee, Wisconsin living with his paternal grandmother. His father, Stanley Morgan, was a guitarist and leader of a version of the Ink Spots vocal group who settled in Los Angeles when Frank was a teenager and introduced him to jazz and its practitioners at his Casablanca Club. Frank’s first instrument was guitar, but after hearing Charlie Parker, he switched to saxophone. He attended Jefferson High School where, along with many other musical luminaries to be, he was taught by the legendary Samuel Rodney Browne. By the time he was 15, Frank’s prodigious musical skills were becoming apparent. 

Morgan moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1947 and won a talent contest, leading to him record a solo with Freddy Martin. In 1952, Morgan earned a spot in Lionel Hampton's band, but his first arrest in 1953 prevented him from joining the Clifford Brown and Max Roach quintet (that role went instead to Harold Land, and later, Sonny Rollins). He made his recording debut on February 20, 1953, with Teddy Charles and his West Coasters in a session for Prestige Records. On November 1, 1954, Morgan cut five tracks with the Kenny Clarke Sextet for Savoy Records, four of which were released with Clarke billed as the leader, with "I've Lost Your Love" credited to writer Milt Jackson as leader. Morgan also lead his own album for GNP in 1955. But then 30 years of darkness intruded. 

                                    

Following in the footsteps of Parker, Morgan had started taking heroin at 17, subsequently became addicted, and spent much of his adult life in and out of prison. Morgan supported his drug habit through check forgery and fencing stolen property. His first drug arrest came in 1955, the same year his debut album was released, and Morgan landed in San Quentin State Prison in 1962, where he formed a small ensemble with another addict and sax player, Art Pepper. 

Fresh out of prison in April, 1985, Morgan started recording again, releasing Easy Living on Contemporary Records that June. Morgan performed at the Monterey Jazz Festival on September 21, 1986, and turned down an offer to play Charlie Parker in Clint Eastwood's film Bird (Forest Whitaker took his place). He made his New York debut in December 1986 at the Village Vanguard, and collaborated with George W.S. Trow on Prison-Made Tuxedos, a semi-autobiographical Off-Broadway play which included live music by the Frank Morgan Quartet. After an initial period, during which he sounded very close to Charlie Parker, he developed his own bop-based style. Frank Morgan has recorded a string of excellent sets for Contemporary, Antilles, and Telarc, and has become an inspiring figure in the jazz world. His 1990 album Mood Indigo went to number four on the Billboard jazz chart. 

Morgan suffered a stroke in 1998, but subsequently recovered recording and performing during the last nine years of his life. HighNote Records eventually released three albums worth of material from a three-night stand at the Jazz Standard in New York City in November, 2003. Morgan also participated in the 2004 Charlie Parker Jazz Festival in Tompkins Square Park. In 2000, Morgan traveled to Taos, New Mexico for a two-night engagement. He fell in love with Taos and made it his home for the next five years. Whenever asked, he proudly proudly proclaimed, "My hometown is Taos, New Mexico". 

His most recent albums include Tribute to Charlie Parker(2003), City Nights: Live at the Jazz Standard (2004), Raising the Standard (2005), and Night in the Life: Live at the Jazz Station (2007). After moving to Minneapolis in the fall of 2005, Morgan headlined the 2006 Twin Cities Hot Summer Jazz Festival and played duets with Ronnie Mathews at the Dakota Jazz Club in Minneapolis and George Cables at the Artists' Quarter in St. Paul. Morgan also performed at the 2006 East Coast Jazz Festival in Washington, D.C., and on the West Coast at Yoshi's and Catalina's. His last gig in Minneapolis featured Grace Kelly, Irv Williams, and Peter Schimke at the Dakota on July 1, 2007. 

For one of Morgan's final recordings, he composed and recorded music for the audiobook adaptation of Michael Connelly's crime novel The Overlook (2007), providing brief unaccompanied sax solos at the beginning and end of the book, and between chapters. Morgan is mentioned in the book by lead character Harry Bosch, a jazz enthusiast. Shortly before his death, Morgan completed his first tour of Europe. He died in Minneapolis on Friday, December 14, 2007, from complications due to colorectal cancer, nine days before his 74th birthday. 

(Edited from Wikipedia, AllMusic & Noal Cohen's Jazz History Website)

Mo Foster born 22 December 1944

Michael Ralph "Mo" Foster (22 December 1944 – 3 July 2023) was an English multi-instrumentalist, record producer, composer, solo artist, author, and public speaker. 

Born in Woking, Surrey, to Ethel (nee Billings), a housewife, and her husband, Charles Foster, a senior manager at Goodyear Tyres, Mo was educated at Brewood grammar school in Staffordshire. Although not having any music in the home, he picked up the recorder at school when he was about nine years old and taught himself. He then went to Sussex University, where he studied physics before leaving early to follow his musical interests. 

Jet Harris

In 1959, Mo and a group of schoolfriends formed the Tradewinds, a band whose repertoire consisted of American guitar instrumentals, skiffle songs and excerpts from The Goon Show. At Sussex he played drums for the university’s jazz trio, who served as the support act to visiting musicians such as Cream, the Who and Jimi Hendrix. Soon after that, Foster had become a fan of the bass playing of Jet Harris of The Shadows, but had not seen the actual instrument until 1961, when Jet was revealed casually caressing the iconic headstock of a Fender Precision Bass on the cover of The Shadows LP. Foster wanted one, but had to settle for a Dallas Tuxedo Bass, the solitary bass guitar hanging in the window of the local music shop, the Band Box. 

US Jazz Trio. Mo on drums

In the early 1960s, there were no college music courses available for electric instruments, so Foster followed a scientific path, electing to study physics and mathematics at the University of Sussex. The university's pop band, The Baskervilles, and later the University of Sussex Jazz Trio (known as the US Jazz Trio), needed a drummer. So Foster set aside his bass, and for the next three years he played drums at university dances and balls. Mo moved to London and, after living in various locations, settled in Belsize Park. His first professional success came in 1968 when the jazz trio morphed into the progressive jazz/rock band Affinity with the singer Linda Hoyle, and attracted the attention of the jazz club impresario Ronnie Scott, who became their manager. An album was released in 1970, but did not sell well, leaving Mo to seek employment as a session bass guitarist. 

Affinity

After placing a classified ad in Melody Maker he was unexpectedly offered a job with the former Manfred Mann singer Mike d’Abo’s group, and on his first studio session he worked with Clem Cattini on drums, Ray Cooper on percussion, Mike Moran on keyboards and Ray Fenwick on guitar. He also established a close working relationship with the jazz/rock guitarist Ray Russell, with whom he played his final gig at Pizza Express, Soho, in 2023.

                             

During the mid 70’s Mo was part of the funk band Fancy with Ray Fenwick, Annie Kavanagh, and Les Binks who toured the entire U.S., resulting in some albums and a couple of singles which have recently been issued as a box set. Over the years he played on a number of hit singles including Don’t Cry for Me Argentina by Julie Covington (1976), I Could Be So Good for You by Dennis Waterman (1979) and No One is to Blame by Howard Jones (1986), as well as on many albums, including Beck’s There and Back (1980) and Collins’s Hello, I Must Be Going! (1982). Between 1982-85, Mo was one-third of the jazz-rock trio RMS with Ray Russell and Simon Phillips. 

As a session musician Foster played on over 400 commercially released recordings and soundtracks.. At the latter end of the 1980s Foster decided that he would like the freedom to perform, produce and record his own music rather than that of someone else. He was able to call on some of his many friends who happened to be some of the UK's foremost session musicians to help him. Since 1987 he has released eight studio and live albums. 

Mo with Phil Collins

Mo was also the author of Seventeen Watts?: The First 20 Years of British Rock Guitar (1997), which contained anecdotes from rock musicians about their escapades, with a foreword by Hank Marvin of the Shadows, and a follow-up, British Rock Guitar: The First 50 Years (2011). Foster worked as an archivist/interviewer on the UK Channel 4 series Live From Abbey Road, which involved interviewing musicians and bands who were performing live sets at EMI's world-famous Abbey Road Studios. In 2014 Mo was honoured with a Gold Badge award from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors in recognition of his contribution to music. 

In his later years he mainly recorded jazz albums, the most recent of which was Mo Foster & Friends in Concert (2021). His last sessions were in August 2022 for Music on the Bones, an album and US film project. The first two tracks from it were released after he died from liver and bile duct cancer on 3 July 2023, at the age of 78. He is survived by his wife, Kay (nee Morgan), a New Zealander whom he met at Stringfellows nightclub in 1986 and married the following year.

(Edited from the David Stark obit @ The Guardian, Wikipedia & Guitar World) 

Carl Wilson born 21 December 1946

Carl Wilson (December 21, 1946 – February 6, 1998) was an American musician who co-founded the Beach Boys. He was their lead guitarist, the youngest sibling of bandmates Brian and Dennis, and the group's de facto leader in the early to mid-1970s. He was also the band's musical director on stage from 1965 until his death. 

Carl Dean Wilson was the third and youngest son of Murry and Audree Wilson, following his brothers Brian and Dennis Wilson. He showed an early interest in music when he became a fan of country & western fiddler Spade Cooley, whom he saw on television. At age 12, he asked his parents to buy him a guitar, and he briefly took lessons but soon began teaching himself to play rock & roll. Brian was a far more advanced musician, however, and in 1961, when Carl was 14, Brian organized a singing group consisting of the three brothers plus their first cousin, Mike Love, and Brian's school friend Alan Jardine. The group auditioned for a small record label and recorded "Surfin'," which reached the national charts in February 1962, leading the band, dubbed the Beach Boys, to sign a contract with Capitol Records. 

Carl became the lead guitarist, Jardine played rhythm guitar, Dennis was the drummer, Love sang, and Brian, who had primarily been a keyboard player, was instructed in the rudiments of the bass guitar by Carl. The Beach Boys went on to massive popular success in the early '60s. Though Brian dominated the band's songwriting early on, Carl had his first composition on a Beach Boys album with "Surf Jam," featured on the 1963 LP Surfin' Safari, and thereafter regularly contributed songs. He and Brian were co-credited as songwriters on the 1964 single "Dance, Dance, Dance," which became a Top Ten hit. 

In early 1965, Brian announced to the group that he would no longer tour, restricting his activities to writing, producing, and performing on their records. Bruce Johnston was hired as his on-stage replacement, and Carl took over as the band's musical director on the road. He performed his first lead vocal on a Beach Boys track, "Girl Don't Tell Me," on the album Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!!) A far more memorable lead vocal assignment came the following year when he sang on the Top 40 hit "God Only Knows" from the Beach Boys' celebrated album Pet Sounds. He followed it later in 1966 by singing the verses in the group's chart-topping hit "Good Vibrations." 

                                     

Brian receded further from leadership of the Beach Boys after 1966, and Carl increasingly took over the reins of the band in the studio as well as on the road. He sang lead vocals on several of the group's Top 40 singles of the late '60s, "Wild Honey," "Darlin'," and "I Can Hear Music"; he also produced "I Can Hear Music" and co-produced the Top 20 hit "Do It Again" with Brian. In the early '70s, he produced the bulk of the albums Carl and the Passions: So Tough and Holland. The Beach Boys enjoyed a commercial comeback in the mid-'70s with their chart-topping compilation Endless Summer and in the late '70s, they signed a lucrative deal with CBS Records' Caribou label. 

But Carl became dissatisfied with the group's musical retrenchment, and he left the band in 1980 to work on his first solo album, Carl Wilson, released on Caribou in March 1981. He put together a backup band and toured in 1981 to support the release, but it was a marginal seller, barely making the charts. He cut a second album, Youngblood, but then decided to return to the Beach Boys in October 1982. Youngblood was released to minimal fanfare in April 1983, and though a single, "What You Do to Me," reached the charts, the LP did not. 

Carl threw himself into the next group album, 1985's The Beach Boys. It produced a Top 40 hit, "Getcha Back," and became the highest-charting album by the band in nine years. Three years later, the Beach Boys returned to number one with "Kokomo," sung by Carl and Love. This comeback hit renewed the band's popular status, and they spent the next decade touring extensively but not creating much new music. 

Francis Rossi, Brian & Carl Wilson

In his free time, Carl began working with Gerry Beckley of America and Robert Lamm of Chicago on an album that they recorded between 1992 and 1997. But just as they finished it, Carl became ill at his vacation home in Hawaii and was diagnosed with lung cancer, and was started on chemotherapy. He had been smoking cigarettes since his early teens. Despite his illness and treatments, he continued to play and sing with the Beach Boys throughout their entire summer tour till its completion in the autumn of 1997. Wilson died of lung cancer in Los Angeles, surrounded by his family, on February 6, 1998. 

Wilson was married twice: first to Annie Hinsche, sister of Beach Boys sideman Billy Hinsche, then in 1987 to Dean Martin's daughter Gina, who accompanied him during all subsequent tours and the marriage lasted until his death.  (Edited from AllMusic & Wikipedia)

Pat Hare born 20 December 1930

Auburn "Pat" Hare (December 20, 1930 – September 26, 1980) was an American electric blues guitarist and singer. His heavily distorted, power chord–driven electric guitar performances in the early 1950s are considered an important precursor of heavy metal music. His guitar work with Little Junior's Blue Flames had a major influence on the rockabilly style, and his guitar playing on blues records by artists such as Muddy Waters was influential among 1960s British Invasion blues rock bands such as the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds. 

Auburn Hare, who was African-American, was born in Cherry Valley, Arkansas. When he was 10 his family moved onto a farm near Parkin, Arkansas, where his grandmother nicknamed him Pat. Hare learned his early guitar licks from Joe Willie Wilkins and by 1948 was playing in Howlin’ Wolf‘s band, making the scene around Beale Street in Memphis. He made his recording debut backing Walter Bradford at Sam Phillips‘ Sun Studios in February 1952, and Sam was quick to recognise Pat’s mastery of tone and his coherent solo technique. Sam used him on records by Lillian Mae Harrison and many sessions with Rosco Gordon and Junior Parker‘s Blue Flames. 

Top L-R: Junior Parker, Hamp Simmons, Jimmy Johnson, Eugene Ballow, Pat Hare
Kneeling: Bobby Bland and Joe Frit,. On Tour 1952  

One record Pat cut with Junior in 1953 was ‘Love My Baby’, which has a solo that inspired many rockabilly players with its melodic reverb, and it has been imitated so often so often it seems like a natural phenomenon. His guitar solo on James Cotton's electric blues record "Cotton Crop Blues" (1954) was the first recorded use of heavily distorted power chords, later an element of heavy metal music. According to Robert Palmer, "Rarely has a grittier, nastier, more ferocious electric guitar sound been captured on record, before or since, and Hare's repeated use of a rapid series of two downward-modulating power chords, the second of which is allowed to hang menacingly in the air, is a kind of hook or structural glue. 

                                   

The other side of the single was "Hold Me in Your Arms"; both songs "featured a guitar sound so overdriven that with the historical distance of several decades, it now sounds like a direct line to the coarse, distorted tones favored by modern rock players." According to Allmusic, "what is now easily attainable by 16-year-old kids on modern-day effects pedals just by stomping on a switch, Hare was accomplishing with his fingers and turning the volume knob on his Sears & Roebuck cereal-box-sized amp all the way to the right until the speaker was screaming." 

Pat Hare with Muddy Waters

In May 1954, Pat made some solo recordings for Sun that remained unissued for decades, and one of these, ‘Gonna Murder My Baby’, was to prove prophetic. According to Robert Palmer, this song is "as heavy metal as it gets." Later that year, Pat relocated to Houston and became a first-call session man for Don Robey‘s Duke label, cutting many records with his old friends Rosco and Junior, as well as Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland and Big Mama Thornton. Then Pat was called to Chicago by Muddy Waters, who had already recruited James Cotton to his band. Pat’s first cut at Chess was ‘Forty Days and Forty Nights’ in early 1956, and he played on the classic ‘Got My Mojo Working’, adding his spectacular guitar breaks to Muddy’s performances for almost five years. 

The band played at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960, and the subsequent live album made Muddy’s name around the world, but Pat was credited as ‘Tat Harris’ on the album cover! Shortly afterwards, Pat was fired for drunken behaviour. A mild mannered and affable man when sober, Pat turned nasty when he had a drink, and when he started turning up drunk most of the time, he was unmanageable. Pat in separate respective incidents, punched and shot at Howlin' Wolf with a handgun, and threatened to kill Muddy Waters' harmonica player, George Buford. 

Pat moved to Minneapolis to work with another ex-Muddy sideman Mojo Buford, but on December 15, 1963, in nearby St. Paul, Pat’s tragedy played out. He shot his girlfriend dead, and when the police came to investigate, he shot an officer too. The officer died in an ambulance en route to a hospital, but the woman lingered for nearly a month, succumbing to her injuries the following January. The suspect, though injured in the gunfire, lived to stand trial and was hastily convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment that February. Pat spent the last 16 years of his life in Stillwater prison, in Bayport, near St.Paul, Minnesota, where he formed a band named Sounds Incarcerated. He developed lung cancer in prison and died there on September 26, 1980 just before he was due to be paroled. 

Shortly before his death, Hare was the subject of a PBS mini-documentary. The guitarist was allowed to continue playing behind bars, and even given permission to play occasional concerts outside prison walls. 

(Edited from Wikipedia, All About Blues Music, Guitar World, Bear Family & Jasmine notes)

 

Alvin Lee born 19 December 1944

Alvin Lee (19 December 1944 – 6 March 2013) was an English guitarist, singer and songwriter, who was best known as the lead vocalist and guitarist of the blues rock band Ten Years After. 

Born Graham Anthony Barnes in Nottingham, Lee enjoyed listening to his father's jazz and blues 78s, discovering material he would later adapt to the rock idiom. He eschewed his father's guitar and his mother's ukulele for the clarinet until skiffle made him switch to guitar. 

In 1960, he restyled himself Alvin Lee and formed the Jaybirds with the bassist Leo Lyons. Like the Beatles, they served their apprenticeship at the Star-Club in Hamburg, before returning to the UK and adding drummer Ric Lee and keyboard-player Chick Churchill. By 1966, they were gigging with three-hit wonders the Ivy League but their manager Chris Wright was much more taken with the blues repertoire they performed on their own. 

Having renamed themselves after a newspaper headline referring to the emergence of Presley, Ten Years After had secured an engagement at the Marquee and became such a word-of-mouth sensation that Wright moved to the capital to manage them. Wright was a former Manchester University entertainment officer who teamed up with Terry Ellis to form the Chrysalis agency and Chrysalis Records. Income from Ten Years After helped finance Chrysalis, while Wright ensured that the band reaped the rewards of a punishing schedule, including a dozen US tours in less than five years. 

Lee's performance at the Woodstock Festival in 1969 was captured on film in the documentary of the event, and his 'lightning-fast' playing helped catapult him to stardom. The film brought Lee's music to a worldwide audience, although he later lamented that he missed the lost freedom and spiritual dedication of earlier audiences. Lee was named "the fastest guitarist in the West" and considered a precursor to shred-style playing that would develop in the 1980s. 

                                   

Ten Years After had success, releasing ten albums together, but by 1973 Lee was feeling limited by the band's style. Moving to Columbia Records had resulted in a radio hit song, "I'd Love to Change the World" but Lee preferred blues-rock to the pop style the label preferred. He left the group after their second Columbia LP. With American Christian rock pioneer Mylon LeFevre, along with guests George Harrison, Steve Winwood, Ronnie Wood and Mick Fleetwood, he recorded and released On the Road to Freedom, an acclaimed album that was at the forefront of country rock. Also in 1973, he sat in on the Jerry Lee Lewis double album The Session...Recorded in London with Great Artists recorded in London, featuring many other guest stars including Albert Lee, Peter Frampton and Rory Gallagher. 

A year later, in response to a dare, Lee formed Alvin Lee & Company to play a show at the Rainbow Theatre in London and released it as a double live album, In Flight. Various members of the band continued on with Lee for his next two albums, Pump Iron! and Let It Rock. In late 1975, he played guitar for a couple of tracks on Bo Diddley's The 20th Anniversary of Rock 'n' Roll all-star album. He ended the 1970s with an outfit called Ten Years Later, with Tom Compton on drums and Mick Hawksworth on bass, which released two albums, Rocket Fuel (1978) and Ride On (1979), and toured extensively throughout Europe and the United States. 

The 1980s brought another change in Lee's direction, with two albums that were collaborations with Rare Bird's Steve Gould and a tour for which the former John Mayall and Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor joined his band. Lee's overall musical output includes more than 20 albums, including 1987's Detroit Diesel, 1989's About Time (the reunion album he did with Ten Years After) recorded in Memphis with producer Terry Manning and the back to back 1990s collections of Zoom and Nineteen Ninety-Four (US title I Hear You Rockin'). Guest artists on both albums included George Harrison. 

In Tennessee, recorded with Scotty Moore and D. J. Fontana, was released in 2004. Lee's last album, Still on the Road to Freedom, was released in September 2012. Lee died on 6 March 2013 in Spain. He died from "unforeseen complications following a routine surgical procedure" to correct an atrial arrhythmia. He was 68. 

His extensive career saw him tour the world multiple times, release 21 studio albums, record 4 live albums and earned him the title “the fastest guitar in the West”. Through all of that, he stayed true to himself, making the music he wanted without outside influence or expectations earning him fans across the globe. At the time of his death, he had a sold-out show booked in Paris for early April and talked about recording a blues album with top musicians in the U.S. 

(Edited from Wikipedia, alvinlee.com & The Independent) 

 

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WARNING!!!!!

It has been brought to my notice that all KRAKENFILE links are being re-directed to not so nice web sites. This website has been the subject of abuse by malware & riskware writers. 

Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson born 18 December 1917

Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson (born Edward L. Vinson Jr.; December 18, 1917 – July 2, 1988) was an American jump blues, jazz, bebop and R&B alto saxophonist and blues shouter. He was nicknamed "Cleanhead" after an incident in which his hair was accidentally destroyed by lye contained in a hair-straightening product, necessitating shaving it off; enamoured of the look, Vinson maintained a shaved head thereafter. Music critic Robert Christgau has called Vinson "one of the cleanest, and nastiest, blues voices you'll ever hear." 

Vinson was born in Houston, Texas. Taking up the alto saxophone as a child, his proficiency at the instrument attracted local bandleaders even while young Vinson was still at school, and he began touring with Chester Boone's territory band during school holidays. Upon his graduation in 1935, Vinson joined the band full-time, remaining when the outfit was taken over by Milton Larkins the following year. During his five-year tenure with the legendary Larkins band he met T-Bone Walker, Arnett Cobb, and Illinois Jacquet, who all played with Larkins in the late 30s. More importantly the band's touring schedule brought Vinson into contact with Big Bill Broonzy, who taught him how to shout the blues, and Jay "Hootie" McShann's Orchestra whose innovative young alto player, Charlie Parker, was "kidnapped" by Vinson for several days in 1941 in order to study his technique. 

After being discovered by Cootie Williams in late 1941, Vinson joined the trumpeter's new orchestra in New York City and made his recording debut for OKeh Records in April 1942, singing a solid blues vocal on "When My Baby Left Me,” with the Williams orchestra. Vinson also recorded for Hit Records (1944), Capitol Records, (1945) before leaving to form his own big band in late 1945 and recording for Mercury Records. At Mercury he recorded small-group bop and blasting band instrumentals, but his main output was the fine body of suggestive jump-blues sung in his unique wheezy Texas style. Hits such as "Juice Head Baby," "Kidney Stew Blues," and "Old Maid Boogie," were the exceptions, however, as most of Vinson's no-holds-barred songs, including "Some Women Do," "Oil Man Blues," and "Ever- Ready Blues", were simply too raunchy for airplay. 

                                   

 After the 1948 union ban, Vinson began recording for King Records in a largely unchanged style often with all-star jazz units. However, his records were not promoted as well as King's biggest R&B stars, such as Wynonie Harris and Roy Brown, and he left to return to Mercury in the early 50s, rejoining Cootie Williams' small band briefly in the mid-50s. In 1957 he toured with Count Basie's Orchestra and made some recordings with a small Basie unit for King's jazz subsidiary, Bethlehem Records, after which he retired to Houston. 

In 1961 he was rediscovered by fellow-alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, and a fine album “Cleanhead and Cannonball,” resulted on Riverside Records with the Adderley brothers" small band consisting also of Joe Zawinul, Louis Hayes, and Sam Jones. He remained active all throughout the ‘60’s and was able to capitalize on the Blues Revival of the decade, gaining a new and younger audience at home and overseas. He did revue style tours with the likes of Count Basie and Johnny Otis, and toured Europe with Jay McShann. A 1969 session for the French Black and Blue label “Wee Baby Blues,” with pianist McShann and tenor saxophonist Hal Singer, was another well timed recording. 

Being adept at both in the jazz and blues vernacular, Vinson found full-time employment at worldwide jazz and blues festivals, a steady international touring schedule and continued to produce dozens of credible albums on other jazz and blues labels such as Bluesway, Pablo, Muse and JSP. He continued to perform until his last days. Vinson recorded extensively during his fifty-odd year career and performed regularly in Europe and the U.S. He died aged 70 in 1988, from a heart attack while undergoing chemotherapy, in Los Angeles, California. 

(Edited from James Nadal bio @ All About Jazz & Wikipedia)