![]() ![]() In 1962, his band entered the Notre Dame Collegiate Jazz Festival, where the judges included Henry Mancini and Quincy Jones. While in college at Michigan, James played free jazz with musicians in Ann Arbor and Detroit. He recalls that "during the day we had free time and I became a proficient water skier that summer!" At age 16, a solo engagement followed in the summer when James traveled with good friend Ben Swinger to Colorado and ended up with a job in the piano bar at the Steads Ranch resort in Estes Park. During this time, he penned his first dance band arrangement.ĭuring the summer of 1955, at Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, James played for dancing and occasional jam sessions with the Bob Falkenhainer Quartet on the Governor McClurg Excursion Boat in the evenings. 1952–55) which played various engagements around the Marshall area. Early jobs included being a member of the Earle Parsons Dance Band (c. During his adolescence, James's music career proliferated. His first professional music job was when he was eight years old, playing for a tap dance class at Mercy Academy. At Berklee his roommate was saxophonist Nick Brignola. James attended the University of Michigan, but during his second year transferred to Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. From 1950 to 1956, he competed in the Missouri State Fair piano competitions and received several blue ribbons. Apart from the piano, James learned to play trumpet, timpani, and percussion. At age 15, James continued his studies with Franklin Launer, a teacher at Christian College in Columbia, Missouri, with more music instruction during high school from Harold Lickey, conductor of the Marshall High School Band and Orchestra. Dufford, a teacher at Missouri Valley College. At age seven, James began to study with R. His first piano teacher, Sister Mary Elizabeth, who taught at Mercy Academy, discovered that he had perfect pitch. He started playing the piano at age four. James was born on Christmas Day of 1939 in Marshall, Missouri, United States. Among his most well known recordings are "Nautilus", "Westchester Lady", "Tappan Zee", and his version of "Take Me to The Mardi Gras". According to VICE (magazine), music from his first seven albums has often been sampled and believed to have contributed to the formation of hip hop. He founded the band Fourplay and wrote "Angela", the theme song for the TV show Taxi. Robert McElhiney James (born December 25, 1939) is an American jazz keyboardist, arranger, and record producer. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to. If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations). ![]()
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