Mike Longo born 19 March 1939

Michael Josef Longo (March 19, 1937 – March 22, 2020) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and author. 

Michael Josef Longo was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. In addition to his bassist father, his mother played organ and his sister tap-danced. As a three-year-old, he heard boogie-woogie pianist Sugar Chile Robinson on the radio and began picking out riffs on the piano. His parents reacted by enrolling him in lessons at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. 

When he was nine, Longo’s family moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he continued his studies. At 12, he won a talent contest. His career began in his father's band, but later Cannonball Adderley helped him get gigs of his own. Their working relationship pre-dated Adderley's emergence as a band leader. Adderley approached the teenaged Longo because he needed a pianist at his church. At this time the town was largely segregated, so the white Longo playing at a black church was unusual. When this led to recordings with Adderley in the mid-1950s, Longo was too young to go to clubs with him. Longo played at Porky's, which was later portrayed in the movie. He would go on to receive his Bachelor of Music degree from Western Kentucky University. 

Dizzy & Mike

Dizzy Gillespie heard Longo at the Metropole. "I was playing downstairs with Red Allen, and Dizzy was playing upstairs with his band. So every time he wanted to go outside for a break, he had to come down the stairs and pass us on the way out. There was a joint across the street called the Copper Rail, which was a soul food restaurant and a bar where the musicians from the Metropole would all hang out. Soon I learned Dizzy mentioned me in an interview in International Musician, the musician union's magazine, when he was asked about any promising young musicians he'd heard." 

He was a fan of Oscar Peterson from a young age and he studied with the pianist from 1961 to 1962. "In terms of technique, touch, I was playing with locked wrists and too much arm technique. The main thing I got from Peterson was how to play piano and how to be a jazz pianist- textures, voicings, touch, time, conception, tone on the instrument." 

In the 1960s, Longo began to lead the Mike Longo Trio, which would remain active for the next 42 years. Returning to New York in 1962, he found work as Nancy Wilson’s accompanist, moonlighting with several other vocalists and as the intermission pianist at The Embers nightclub—where Gillespie heard and hired him in 1966. Longo became musical director for the Dizzy Gillespie Quintet and later Gillespie chose him to be the pianist for the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Band. From 1966 onward, his music career would be linked to Gillespie. 

                             

While still working with Gillespie in the early 1970s, Longo signed a recording contract with Mainstream Records. Although he had previously recorded as a leader (on 1962’s A Jazz Portrait of “Funny Girl”), this started his solo career in earnest—and led to a commercial breakthrough with his 1974 album 900 Shares of the Blues. He formed his own label, Consolidated Artists Productions (CAP), in 1979. He also began a teaching career around that time, which culminated in his joining the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College. 

Gillespie remained a major force in Longo’s life and career. The trumpeter rehired Longo for his Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band, and in 1986 commissioned a symphonic piece from the pianist. Longo was with Dizzy on the night of his death in 1993.

A big part of Mike Longo's mission was to re-establish the apprenticeship relationship in teaching jazz. He said "I know jazz education is an important thing and I know that the field means well, but there seems to be a trend in that field to teach jazz where people are actually copying off recordings instead of actually learning to play jazz. The apprenticeship aspect of jazz has always been the way it has evolved."

Longo successfully lobbied for the Baha’i Center of New York City to name its performance hall the John Birks Gillespie Auditorium, and in 2004 began hosting and booking a weekly jazz series there. His own projects performed about once a month. As recently as 2017, Longo was leading three bands: the Mike Longo Trio, the 17-piece New York State of the Art Jazz Ensemble and a sextet called the Mike Longo Funk Band. In addition to many recordings he put out as a bandleader, Longo’s discography included work with Astrud Gilberto, Lee Konitz, James Moody and Buddy Rich. 

Longo died on March 23, 2020, in Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, three days after his 83rd birthday, from complications of COVID-19. He was 83 and lived in New York. In an interview with All About Jazz, Longo summed up his life lesson for aspiring musicians: “Swing hard and get to the people.”

(Edited from Wikipedia, Jazz Times & Downbeat)