Braden, Don
Braden, Don
Braden, Don, contemporary American jazz saxophonist; b. Cincinnati, Ohio, Nov. 20, 1963. Don Braden started playing contemporary jazz professionally at age 15 after two years of learning to play tenor sax in Louisville, Ky. After time at Harvard (during which he studied with Jerry Bergonzi and Bill Pierce), he moved to N.Y. in 1984 and began gigging with a variety of mainstream artists, starting with the Harper Brothers Quintet and Lonnie Smith. After one album for a Sony subsidiary, Braden was dropped, but caught a break when he was picked to provide the music for jazz-lover Bill Cosby’s TV show Cosby. In 1998, Braden began teaching at William Paterson Univ.
Discography
Time Is Now (1991); Wish List (1991); Landing Zone (1994); Organic (1995); The Voice of the Saxophone (1997).
—Steve Holtje