Horace Tapscott

Jazz pianist and composer Horace Tapscott was born in Houston, Texas on April 6, 1934. In 1940, his mother began to teach him piano while he also studied trombone with an outside teacher. Tapscott’s family relocated to Los Angeles, California. He then began focusing on the trombone under the guidance of jazz band legend Harry Southland. By the age of 15 and still in high school, he began playing trombone with Gerald Wilson’s Big Band. He also worked with other various outfits up through his graduation from high school in 1952. He enlisted in the Air Force in 1953 and was transferred to Wyoming. He was a member of the Air Force band until he was honorably discharged in 1957 and moved back to Los Angeles. He restarted his music career and played with numerous artists including Lionel Hampton from 1959 to 1961. He then switched his focus from trombone to piano. In 1961, Tapscott formed the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra with the intention of preserving, developing and performing African-American music. He joined Lou Blackburn’s band and recorded two albums in 1963: Jazz Frontier and Two Note Samba. He recorded an album in 1969 with his own quintet entitled The Giant is Awakened but didn’t start his own recording career in earnest until 1978 with the release of Songs of the Unsung. That same year, he also released two albums with the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra: The Call and Flight 17. For the next three years, he was extremely prolific, recording a total of nine albums in two years (1979-1981). Tapscott continued to perform and record over the next two decades, releasing albums such as Dissent or Descent (1984), The Dark Tree (1991), Among Friends (1995), and Thoughts of Dar es Salaam. Horace Tapscott died on February 27, 1999 at the age of 64.

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