Mike Longo -

Mike Longo (March 19, 1937 — March 22, 2020) was an American jazz pianist, composer, arranger, and bandleader from Cincinnati. He served as pianist and musical director for Dizzy Gillespie from 1966 through 1975, with appearances on Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac, The Dizzy Gillespie Reunion Big Band, The Real Thing, and Portrait of Jenny. Longo expanded his leader catalog into jazz-funk with Matrix, The Awakening, Funkia, and 900 Shares of the Blues, then continued with trio, small-group, and big-band recordings.

Background

Michael Joseph Longo was born March 19, 1937, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Michael Anthony Longo and Elvira Margaret Vitello Longo. His father played bass and led dance bands alongside a produce business, while his mother sang and played piano and church organ. Longo began piano study with his mother at age three and entered formal lessons at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music a year later. His family moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, while he was in grade school, and he won a local talent contest at age twelve.

Longo heard Oscar Peterson at a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert in ninth grade and soon entered the South Florida jazz circuit. Alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, then a Fort Lauderdale school band director, heard the teenage pianist at a jam session and became an early mentor. Longo joined his father’s club-date band at age fifteen, where Michael Longo Sr. also employed Adderley for engagements around Miami and Fort Lauderdale. Adderley secured further work for the pianist with an R&B band on Florida dates and employed him for church performances and a club engagement at Porky’s Hideaway.

Longo studied classical piano at Western Kentucky State College and graduated with a music degree in 1959. College summers included road work with saxophonist Hal McIntyre and Nashville engagements with guitarist Hank Garland in Printers Alley. A fellow student submitted a recording of Longo to DownBeat in his senior year, which brought a Hall of Fame Scholarship to Berklee School of Music. Longo declined the scholarship and joined the Dixieland sextet Salt City Six for two years of touring.

The Salt City Six brought Longo to the Metropole Cafe in New York, where he remained as a house pianist after the group left the engagement. He accompanied trumpeter Henry “Red” Allen and worked Metropole dates with Coleman Hawkins, George Wettling, and Gene Krupa. Trumpeter Jimmy McPartland subsequently hired Longo for a Chicago engagement at Bourbon Street, where the pianist met Peterson through a nearby London House booking. Peterson invited Longo to the Advanced School of Contemporary Music in Toronto, and Longo spent six months there in 1961 under Peterson and bassist Ray Brown. He returned to New York and recorded his first album as leader with bassist Herman Wright and drummer Roy Brooks, the 1962 trio set A Jazz Portrait of Funny Girl.

Discography: