Randy Weston (April 6, 1926 – September 1, 2018) was an American jazz pianist and composer.
Weston's piano style owes much to Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk. Beginning in the 1950s, he worked often with trombonist and arranger Melba Liston.
Described as "America's African Musical Ambassador", he has said, "What I do I do because it's about teaching and informing everyone about our most natural cultural phenomenon. It's really about Africa and her music.
Randolph Edward Weston was born in 1926 to Vivian (née Moore) and Frank Weston and was raised in Brooklyn, New York, where his father owned a restaurant. His mother was from Virginia and his father was of Jamaican-Panamanian descent, a staunch Garveyite, who passed on the Pan-Africanist leader's Afrocentric, self-reliant values to his son. Weston studied classical piano as a child and took dance lessons. He graduated from Boys High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant; his father sent him there because it had a reputation for high standards. He took piano lessons from Atwell, because unlike his former piano teachers, Atwell allowed him to play songs outside the classical music repertoire.
After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, Weston ran a restaurant that was frequented by many jazz musicians. Among his piano heroes are Count Basie, Nat King Cole, Art Tatum , Duke Ellington, and his cousin Wynton Kelly. But Thelonious Monk made the biggest impact.
In the late 1940s Weston began performing with Bullmoose Jackson, Frank Culley and Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson. He worked with Kenny Dorham in 1953 and in 1954 with Cecil Payne, before forming his own trio and quartet and releasing his debut recording as a leader in 1954, Cole Porter in a Modern Mood. He was voted New Star Pianist in Down Beat magazine's International Critics' Poll of 1955. Several fine albums followed, with the best being Little Niles near the end of that decade. Melba Liston provided excellent arrangements for a sextet playing several of Weston's best compositions: the title track, "Earth Birth", "Babe's Blues", and others.
In the 1960s, Weston's music prominently incorporated African elements, as shown on the large-scale suite Uhuru Afrika (1960, with the participation of poet Langston Hughes) and Highlife (full title: Music from the New African Nations featuring the Highlife), the latter recorded in 1963, two years after Weston traveled for the first time to Africa, as part of a U.S. cultural delegation to Lagos, Nigeria. On both these albums he teamed up with the arranger Melba Liston. Uhuru Afrika, or Freedom Africa, is considered a historic landmark album that celebrates several new African countries obtaining their Independence.
In addition, during these years his band often featured the tenor saxophonist Booker Ervin. Weston covered the Nigerian Bobby Benson's piece "Niger Mambo", which included Caribbean and jazz elements within a Highlife style, and has recorded this number many times throughout his career.
In 1967 Weston traveled throughout Africa with a U.S. cultural delegation. The last stop of the tour was Morocco, where he decided to settle, running his African Rhythms Club in Tangier for five years, from 1967 to 1972. He has said, "We had everything in there from Chicago blues singers to singers from the Congo.... The whole idea was to trace African people wherever we are and what we do with music."
In 1972 he produced Blue Moses for the CTI Records, a best-selling record on which he plays electric keyboard. As he explained in a July 2018 interview, "We were still living in Tangier, so my son and I came from Tangier to do the recording, but when I got there, Creed Taylor said his formula is electric piano. I was not happy with that, but it was my only hit record. People loved it." In the summer of 1975, he played at the Festival of Tabarka in Tunisia, North Africa (later known as the Tabarka Jazz Festival), accompanied by his son Azzedin Weston on percussion, with other notable acts including Dizzy Gillespie.
For a long stretch Weston recorded infrequently on smaller record labels. He also made a two-CD recording The Spirits of Our Ancestors (recorded 1991; released 1992), which featured arrangements by his long-time collaborator Melba Liston. The album contained new, expanded versions of many of his well-known pieces and featured an ensemble including some African musicians, with guests such as Dizzy Gillespie and Pharoah Sanders also contributing. The music director was saxophonist Talib Kibwe (also known as T. K. Blue), who continues in that role to the present day. The Spirits of Our Ancestors has been described as "one of the most imaginative explorations of 'world jazz' ever recorded."
Weston produced a series of albums in a variety of formats: solo, trio, mid-sized groups, and collaborations with the Gnawa musicians of Morocco. His most popular compositions include "Hi-Fly", which he has said was inspired by his experience of being 6' 8" and looking down at
