Danny Spencer, drums, with his colleagues in the Contemporary Jazz Quintet, Detroit, 1970 (L-R): Kenny Cox, Leon Henderson, Ron Brooks, Charles Moore, Danny Spencer.

A jazz legend, the drummer Danny Spencer leads a quintet featuring Noel Jewkes on sax, David Udolf on piano and Carla Kaufman on bass, with vocalist Sherri Roberts singing some favorites.

Danny came out of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to Detroit in 1964 and had already acquired a huge reputation and vast experience when he came out to San Francisco in 1975. Besides gigging internationally from his San Francisco base, including national and European tours with Joe Henderson, he drove the fantastic Contemporary Jazz Orchestra at Pearls in North Beach, a vital organization holding the stage long before the days of the Bay Area Composer’s Big Band and the Electric Squeezebox Orchestra…

But before the CJO, back in Detroit, he had the Contemporary Jazz Quintet, with lps on Blue Note in 1968 and 1969. Along the way he was a monstrously powerful drummer behind major artists including Art Farmer, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Stitt, Blue Mitchel,  Dizzy Gilespie, Harold Land, Sal Nestico, Grachen Moncur III, Memphis Slim, Stanley Cowell, Donald Byrd and Marcus Belgrave.

Want to know more? Check this link, and take time especially to watch the 28 minute documentary you’ll find there. It’ll tell you a lot about crucial jazz history through the 1960s and ’70s as well as about Danny himself.

His colleagues on the date at Bird & Beckett this Saturday are jazz masters themselves and long-time friends and collaborators. If you missed Danny’s days at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge in Detroit, you surely don’t want to miss him here now! And if you caught back then and along the way, come out for an old friend who has what it takes.