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George Duke George (*1946) was a keyboardist, singer, and arranger. During his bachelor's degree (trombone, composition, double bass), he played with Al Jarreau in the house band of the Half Note Club in San Francisco, which accompanied guest soloists such as Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon and Letta Mbulu. From 1967 he completed his composition studies at San Francisco State University. During this time he led a trio with which he accompanied the vocal group Third Wave or soloists such as Dizzy Gillespie, Bobby Hutcherson and Jean-Luc Ponty and appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1969. In 1970 he was a member of Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention and also worked as a keyboardist on Ponty's album King Kong: Jean-Luc Ponty Plays the Music of Frank Zappa. In 1971 and 1972 Cannonball Adderley brought him into his quintet, in which he also appeared on a few LPs. From 1973 he played again with Frank Zappa until 1975 (with short interruptions). He also recorded a few albums for MPS. He then led a fusion band with Billy Cobham. He also worked with Stanley Clarke in the disco business.   He has been working as a music producer since the second half of the 1970s. He got his start as a producer with Raul de Souza's 1977 album Sweet Lucy, on which he plays keyboards on three tracks under the pseudonym Dawilli Gonga. Among others, he worked for his cousin Dianne Reeves, the fusion drummer Billy Cobham and the singer Al Jarreau. Since 2004 he has been running his own record label BPM Records. BPM stands for Big Piano Music. Duke saw the label's job as giving control of the music where it belonged: back into the hands of the musicians. Also in 2004 he wrote the soundtrack for Ernest R. Dickerson's crime film Never Die Alone. George died in 2013.   from Wikipedia

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