Bud Shank

Wikipedia:

Clifford Everett "Bud" Shank, Jr. (May 27, 1926 – April 2, 2009) was an American alto saxophonist and flautist. He rose to prominence in the early 1950s playing lead alto and flute in Stan Kenton's Innovations in Modern Music Orchestra and throughout the decade worked in various small jazz combos. He spent the 1960s as a first call studio musician in Hollywood. In the 1970s he performed regularly with the L. A. Four and ultimately abandoned the flute to focus exclusively on playing jazz on the alto saxophone. He also recorded on tenor and baritone sax. He is also well known for the alto flute solo on the Mamas & Papas song California Dreamin' recorded in 1965.

Biography

Bud Shank was born in Dayton, Ohio. He began with clarinet in Vandalia, Ohio, but had switched to saxophone before attending the University of North Carolina. While at UNC, Shank was initiated into the Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity. In 1946 he worked with Charlie Barnet before moving on to Kenton and the West coast jazz scene. He also had a strong interest in what might now be termed world music, playing bossa nova in the early 1950s (years before it became a craze), and in 1962 fusing jazz with Indian traditions in collaboration with Indian composer and sitar-player Ravi Shankar.

In the first decades of his career Shank played the flute as a second instrument, but during the 1980s dropped it and became purely an alto saxophonist. In 2005 he formed the Bud Shank Big Band in Los Angeles to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Stan Kenton's Neophonic Orchestra.

A documentary film about Bud Shank, Bud Shank "Against the Tide" Portrait of a Jazz Legend, was produced and directed by Graham Carter of Jazzed Media and released by Jazzed Media as a DVD (with a companion CD) in 2008. To date the documentary film has been awarded 4 indie film awards including an Aurora Awards Gold.

Shank died on April 2, 2009, of a pulmonary embolism at his home in Tucson, AZ, one day after returning from San Diego, CA where he was recording a new album.