Fred Hess
Fred Hess ( born September 3, 1944 in Abington, Pennsylvania) is an American tenor saxophonist and composer of avant-garde jazz.
Work
Born in Abington, Pennsylvania, Fred Hess grew up in New Jersey and attended Trenton State College; In 1979 he studied at Karl Berger's Creative Music Studio in Woodstock (New York). Then he moved to Colorado, where in 1982 he founded the Boulder Creative Music Ensemble. In 1991 he completed his studies with a doctorate in composition at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He also studied the saxophone with Phil Woods, Music worked with the band leader Fred Waring and composed music for a play by Sam Shepard. As a composer, he handles the influences of the avant-garde jazz, such as Anthony Braxton and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. He is coordinator of jazz studies at Metropolitan State College in Denver.
In addition to his projects as a conductor ( BCME and The Fred Hess Group), he was the founder and director of the Creative Music Works Orchestra in Denver and a member of Ginger Baker's Denver Jazz Quintet ( listen to his album from 1998, Coward of the Country at Atlantic ), also of ensembles led by trumpeter Ron Miles. Currently Hess works with his own quartet and the Fred Hess / Marc Sabatella Duo.
Hess took under his own name on eleven albums. His style on tenor is strongly influenced by Lester Young.
Prizes and awards
In 2000 he received the Julius Hemphill Award for Jazz - awarded composition of the Jazz Composers Alliance. In 2006 he won first prize at the International Jazz Composers Symposium in Tampa, Florida.