Don Alias

Charles " Don " Alias ​​( born December 25, 1939 in New York City; † March 28, 2006 ) was an American jazz drummer and percussionist.

Life

Don Alias ​​grew up in Harlem / New York City. He attended the Cannon College in Erie and studied at the Carnegie Institute for Biochemistry in Boston. There he played with Tony Williams, Chick Corea and Bill Fitch. He had 1957 Big Dizzy Gillespie's band His first professional engagement. He was with Gene Perla member of the salsa band Los Muchachos and moved with it to Nina Simone's band. 1969/70 he worked with Miles Davis on the album Bitches Brew and 1989 Amandla, then played in groups such as Weather Report and Blood, Sweat & Tears, and with musicians such as Jeremy Steig, Mongo Santamaría, Joni Mitchell, Herbie Hancock, Sting and Jaco Pastorius, since the 1980s with David Sanborn. As part of the Charles Mingus project Weird Nightmare: Meditations on Mingus, he worked in 1992 with Bill Frisell, Greg Cohen, Art Baron and Don Byron together. One of the last albums on which he excelled, is the Mike Stern production " These Times ".

In addition, he led his own bands Stone Alliance, which he had founded with Gene Perla and Steve Grossman in the 1960s, and Kebekwa, which he had founded in the 1980s in Québec, Canada. With Stone Alliance, he joined last on in Amsterdam in 2004 and 2005 in Bremen.