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A longtime fixture of the New York City jazz landscape, pianist John Hicks was an artist of uncommon versatility, moving effortlessly from pop standards to the avant-garde while retaining the dense physicality and intense energy that were the hallmarks of his approach. Born December 12, 1941, in Atlanta, Hicks was still an infant when his preacher father relocated the family to Los Angeles. He spent the better part of his teen years in St. Louis, and counted among his classmates there the young Lester Bowie. Hicks' mother was his first piano teacher, and after a stint at Lincoln University in Missouri he attended the Berklee School of Music and the Juilliard School; he later cited influences spanning from Fats Waller to Thelonious Monk to Methodist church hymns, and his catholic listening tastes were instrumental in shaping his far-ranging skills as a player. After touring in support of bluesman Albert King and hard bop tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin, Hicks backed singer Della Reese during a 1963 New York club residency, and the city remained his home for the rest of his life. In the wake of stints with Kenny Dorham and Joe Henderson, Hicks joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in 1964, collaborating alongside the likes of trumpeters Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard. Two years later, he signed on with singer Betty Carter, like Blakey a keen judge of emerging talent. Upon exiting Carter's band in 1968, Hicks spent the remainder of the decade with Woody Herman and entered the decade to follow as a first-call sideman. He also moonlighted as an educator, and during the early '70s taught jazz and improvisation at Southern Illinois University.
After backing Carter on her 1976 date Now It's My Turn, Hicks returned to her backing group full-time. The exposure vaulted him to new renown, and in 1979 he finally led his own studio effort, After the Morning. With 1981's Some Other Time, cut with bassist Walter Booker and drummer Idris Muhammad, Hicks also emerged as a gifted composer, writing his best-known effort, "Naima's Love Song," in honor of his young daughter. He recorded prolifically in the years to follow, concentrating on solo and small ensemble work including stints as member of the Power Trio and the Keystone Trio. He also served as the regular pianist with the Mingus Dynasty Band and for a time led his own big band. Hicks enjoyed his greatest commercial success with a series of tribute LPs celebrating the music of his mentors and influences, highlighted by 1998's Something to Live For (a collection of Billy Strayhorn compositions), 2000's Impressions of Mary Lou (Williams, of course), and 2003's Fatha's Day (honoring Earl Hines). Hicks' longest and most rewarding collaboration was his partnership with flutist Elise Wood, which launched in 1983 and after several studio sessions and tours culminated in marriage in 2001, around the time of the release of their duo recording Beautiful Friendship. Hicks died suddenly on May 10, 2006. Just three days earlier, he delivered his final performance at Harlem's St. Mark's United Methodist Church, where his father served as a minister prior to his own death. Hicks was 64 years old.
from Wikipedia:
Sir John Richard Hicks (8 April 1904 – 20 May 1989) was a British economist and one of the most important and influential economists of the twentieth century. The most familiar of his many contributions in the field of economics were his statement of consumer demand theory in microeconomics, and the IS/LM model (1937), which summarised a Keynesian view of macroeconomics. His book Value and Capital (1939) significantly extended general-equilibrium and value theory. The compensated demand function is named the Hicksian demand function in memory of him.
In 1972 he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (jointly) for his pioneering contribution to general equilibrium theory and welfare theory.
Biography
Early life
Hicks was born in 1904 at Warwick, England. His father was a journalist at a local newspaper.
He was educated at Clifton College (1917–22) and at Balliol College, Oxford (1922–26), financed by mathematical scholarships. During his school days, and in his first year at Oxford, he specialised in mathematics but also had interests in literature and history. In 1923, he moved to Philosophy, Politics and Economics, the "new school" just being started at Oxford, graduating with second-class honors and, so he states, "no adequate qualification in any of the subjects" that he had studied.
Career, influences, and honors
Hicks secured a temporary lectureship at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1930. He started as a labour economist and did descriptive work on industrial relations but gradually he moved over to the analytical side, where his mathematics background returned to the fore. Influence included Lionel Robbins and such associates as Friedrich von Hayek, R.G.D. Allen, Nicholas Kaldor, and Abba Lerner - and Ursula Webb, who, in 1935, became his wife.
From 1935 to 1938, he lectured at Cambridge where he was also a fellow of Gonville & Caius College. He was mainly occupied in writing Value and Capital, which was based on the work he had done in London. From 1938 to 1946, he was Professor at the University of Manchester. It was there that he did his main work on welfare economics, with its application to social accounting.
In 1946 he returned to Oxford, first as a research fellow of Nuffield College (1946–52), then as Drummond Professor of Political Economy (1952–65), and finally as a research fellow of All Souls College (1965–71) where he continued writing after retirement. He was also an honorary fellow of Linacre College, Oxford . He died in 1989.
Hicks was knighted in 1964 and was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (with Kenneth J. Arrow) in 1972. He donated the Nobel Prize to the London School of Economics and Political Science's Library Appeal in 1973.
Contributions to economic analysis
Hicks's early work as a labor economist culminated in The Theory of Wages (1932, 2nd ed. 1963), still considered standard in the field. He collaborated with R.G.D. Allen in two seminal papers on value theory published in 1934.
His magnum opus is Value and Capital published in 1939. The book built on ordinal utility and mainstreamed the now-standard distinction between the substitution effect and the income effect for an individual in demand theory for the 2-good case. It generalised the analysis to the case of one good and a composite good, that is, all other goods. It aggregated individuals and businesses through demand and supply across the economy. It anticipated the aggregation problem, most acutely for the stock of capital goods. It introduced general equilibrium theory to an English-speaking audience, refined the theory for dynamic analysis, and for the first time attempted a rigorous statement of stability conditions for general equilibrium. In the course of analysis Hicks formalised comparative statics. In the same year, he also developed the famous "compensation" criterion called Kaldor-Hicks efficiency for welfare comparisons of alternative public policies or economic states.
Hicks's most familiar contribution in macroeconomics was the Hicks-Hansen IS-LM model, which formalised an interpretation of the theory of John Maynard Keynes (see Keynesianism). The model describes the economy as a balance between three commodities: money, consumption and investment. Hicks himself did not embrace the theory as he interpreted it; and, in a paper published in 1980, Hicks asserted that it had omitted some crucial components of Keynes's arguments, especially those related to uncertainty.
