Early Career: 1970s and 1980s
When Kendrick was eighteen, he turned professional, touring and playing keyboards with R&B and funk acts. He traveled internationally with Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes, James Brown and George Clinton.
At twenty-one, Kendrick began a primary focus on jazz, moving to New York in 1981. He played keyboards for artists such as Freddie Hubbard, Terence Blanchard, Stanley Turrentine, Clark Terry, J. J. Johnson, and others. He studied with pianist Barry Harris, who remained his teacher and mentor for over 20 years. Kendrick cites Randy Weston and Sun Ra as influences. In the early 1990s he served as Abbey Lincoln’s musical leader for seven years.
Read more about this topic: Rodney Kendrick
Famous quotes containing the word early:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)