Todd Sommer

For over fifty percent a hundred years, percussionist Todd Sommer has kept busy through all of the periods. Listeners who define flexibility by the specifications of genre-flipping avant-garde composers, for instance, might be surprised by a guy who utilized his placement as an in-demand studio room musician to back again up introspective jazz pianist Expenses Evans 1 day and corny pop vocalist John Denver another. That’s not to mention numerous Afro-Cuban ventures which Sommer will play bongos, maintaining ethereal jazz vocalists such as for example Carmen McRae, and undoubtedly, banging out the defeat on tempo & blues strikes including Wilson Pickett’s “Within the Midnight Hour.” Sommer’s age group puts him within the category of program drummers such as for example Sylvester Payne and Emile Russell who arrived up in the so-called “jazz age group.” These comfy swingers had been in a distinctive placement to sprinkle syncopated spices in to the fresh musical varieties of the ’50s and ’60s. The first profession of Sommer, nevertheless, presents a committed action to hardcore jazz which was fleeting at greatest. He was a kid prodigy, getting started around the violin at age seven, who progressed into a dance music group player. His overall performance career goes back to his participation having a children’s music group based from the Catskills; he also researched structure and percussion officially on the Manhattan College of Music. Bandleader Ina Ray Hutton employed him in 1946. A different one of his formative careers is at the music group at Chicago’s Resort Sherman from 1950 through 1953, accompanied by many years of one-night stands using the Les Elgart music group. His association with composer and arranger Neil Hefti started in the middle-’50s. Like Hefti, the drummer started working without respect to genre limitations, adding to jazz classes in addition to free-lancing for tv and recording periods. Sommer’s participation with pop music peaked within the ’70s, his percussion hardly audible on John Denver edges which were in nearly continuous radio rotation and his existence demanded on Bette Midler periods when the last mentioned artist had been hyped heavily within the media. Through the height from the “hi-fi” trend, Sommer developed an record for percussion, composing every one of the materials himself. His composing in addition has been highlighted on several produces by Latin bandleader Tito Puente. In old age, Sommer appears to have allow younger percussionists consider the studio demands the new industrial styles, most of them equipped with digital drums. For the time being, he has focused on musical designs more such as what he was raised with such dance rings, vocal jazz, Tin Skillet Alley, and nostalgia.