Gail Thompson

b. Gail Alison Thompson, 15 June 1958, London, Britain. After leaving college in the middle-70s, Thompson started attracting interest with her impressive saxophone playing, specifically her focus on baritone. She used the National Youngsters Jazz Orchestra and was co-founder with Courtney Pine from the Jazz Warriors. She also used Charlie Watt’s big music group and led her very own group, Gail Power. Her future being a performer made an appearance guaranteed when she performed baritone with Artwork Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, hence becoming the very first and only feminine Messenger. However, within a couple of hours of the gig, Thompson was struck by way of a spasm of her cosmetic muscle tissues and was thereafter struggling to play. While this devastation might well have got destroyed a much less motivated and resourceful specific, Thompson rallied and changed her passion for music in various other directions. Since that time she’s been a movie director of Mick Jagger’s music firm and founded Musicworks, a center and workshop for music artists. Starting out in a single area at her home, the company grew to take up a three-storey warehouse using 20 personnel and, by hundred years’s end, portion the requirements of 3, 000 learners. Additionally, Thompson provides operate workshops in Africa, Belgium, Canada, Germany and Russia. The African knowledge, within the 80s, where she travelled by pickup truck from Morocco to Kenya, was the motivation for Jazz Africa, a large band mixing jazz and African music, and for a number of compositions which attract upon the music and ethnicities of the locations she visited. With the 90s she led big rings, a lot of whose repertoire pulls upon her compositions. Past due within the 90s, Thompson could continue playing, right now on flute.