Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Melba Doretta Liston was born on January 13, 1926. Growing up in Kansas City, MO the young trombonist studied with Alma Hightower and played in youth bands. At 17 the talented trombonist joined Gerald Wilson’s big band and by the mid-1940’s Melba began working with the emerging beboppers like Dexter Gordon, Dizzy Gillespie, Paul Gonsalves, John Coltrane and John Lewis. She toured with Count Basie and Billie Holiday in the late 40’s but was so profoundly affected by audience indifference and the rigors of the road she quit playing.
For the next few years she did clerical work and supplemented her income working as an extra in Hollywood appearing in The Prodigal and The Ten Commandments. By the mid 50’s Melba was back playing, touring with Dizzy Gillespie for the U.S. State Department and recording with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. In 1958 she formed her all-women quintet and with her show “Free and Easy” she toured Europe with Quincy Jones as her musical director.
The 60’s saw Melba collaborating with pianist Randy Weston, arranging primarily her own compositions for mid-size to large ensembles and are widely acknowledged as jazz classics. Melba worked with the likes of Milt Jackson, Clark Terry, and Johnny Griffin as well as arranging for various Motown records. In 1971 she became the musical director for Stax Records, working with Stevie Wonder, Joe Sample, Wilton Felder, Arthur Adams and jazz drummer Paul Humphrey whose uncharted album released in 1972 contains some of Melba’s finest works ever.
Melba Liston was a trombonist, composer and an important jazz arranger whose collaboration with pianist/composer Randy Weston continued until her death on April 23, 1999.
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From Broadway To 52nd Street
Roberta opened at the New Amsterdam Theater on November 11, 1933. It ran 295 performances with music by Jerome Kern, and lyrics and book by Otto Harbach. The show starred Tamara Drasin, Bob Hope, George Murphy, Ray Middleton, Fay Templeton and Fred MacMurray. The musical comedy was based on the novel Gowns by Roberta by Alice Duer Miller and is set in a fraternity house at Haverhill College. From the play came songs like Yesterdays, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes and The Touch Of Your Hand that have become jazz standards.
The Story: Set in a fraternity house at Haverhill College: A deposed Russian princess has become a famed Parisian couturier. Her partner passes away leaving her half of the business to American football player Randolph Scott–who of course knows next to nothing about the gown business, and couldn’t care less anyway. The former girlfriend of the bandleader poses as a phony Polish countess. Men are chasing women who are chasing men as flirtations involved all.
Jazz History: By the time Roberta premiered on Broadway, the nation was buckling under the devastation of The Great Depression. Twenty-five percent of the workforce was jobless, and up to 60 percent of African American men had no work. Cities became crowded with people searching for work after farms began to whither and rot. Black musicians were not allowed to do studio or radio work. However, jazz music was resilient. While businesses, including the record industry, were failing, dance halls were packed with people dancing the jitterbug to the music of big bands, which would come to be called swing music.
Swing bands attracted throngs with their intensity, playing fast and loud blues riffs and featuring virtuosic soloists. All of a sudden, thanks to musicians such as Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young and Ben Webster, the tenor saxophone became the instrument most strongly identified with jazz.
In Kansas City, pianist Count Basie began building an all-star big band after Benny Moten, a well-known bandleader died in 1935. Basie featured Lester Young, giving rise to the saxophonist’ career as an innovator, and also bringing exposure to an aggressive and bluesy vein of jazz that filled the clubs of the Midwest.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Trummy Young was born James Young in Savannah, GA on January 12, 1912 but grew up in Washington, DC. He originally started out as a trumpeter but by the time he debuted in 1928, he had switched to trombone and soon became one of the finest trombonists of the swing era. From 1933 to ’37 Young was a member of Earl Hines’ orchestra and later joined Jimmie Lunceford from ‘37 to 1943.
Although he was never really a star or bandleader, Trummy had one hit with his version of “Margie” and with Sy Oliver wrote the tune “Tain’t What You Do (It’s The Way You Do It)” that became a hit for both Lunceford and Ella Fitzgerald in 1939.
Young played with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie on a Clyde Hart led session in 1945 and with the Jazz At The Philharmonic. In 1952 he joined the Louis Armstrong All Stars and stayed a dozen years recording St. Louis Blues in ’54 and performing in the 1956 musical High Society. 1964 saw Young quitting the road to settle in Hawaii where on September 10, 1984 he succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Osie Johnson was born James Johnson in Washington, DC on January 11, 1923. He started his drumming career in 1941 in Boston with the Sabby Lewis band and then during the war years in the Navy Band. Upon discharge from the service he freelanced around Chicago until he joined the Earl Hines band from 51-53.
He played stints with Dorothy Donegan and Illinois Jacquet prior to becoming one of the most in-demand drummers in the 50’s and first half of the 60’s in New York. As a busy session musician working with the likes of Coleman Hawkins, Dinah Washington, Wes Montgomery and Sonny Stitt, Paul Gonsalves, Zoot Sims and Mose Allison among the many who’s who list of musicians he kept time for.
On February 10, 1966 drummer, composer, arranger and singer Osie Johnson, who made a countless recordings as a leader and studio musician, passed away in New York City at the age of 43.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Max Roach was born Maxwell Lemuel Roach into the musical family of Alphonse and Cressie Roach on January 10, 1924 in the township of Newland in Pasquotank County, North Carolina. At the age of 4 the family moved to Bedford–Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, New York and few years later he was playing bugle and by 10 he was drumming in gospel bands. Upon graduation from Boy’s High School in 1942, the eighteen year old was called up to the majors filling in for Sonny Greer in the Duke Ellington Orchestra.
Roach’s most significant innovations came in the 1940s, when he and jazz drummer Kenny Clarke devised a new concept of musical time. By playing the beat-by-beat pulse of standard 4/4 time on the “ride” cymbal instead of on the thudding bass drum, Roach and Clarke developed a flexible, flowing rhythmic pattern that allowed soloists to play freely. The new approach also left space for the drummer to insert dramatic accents on the snare drum, “crash” cymbal and other components of the trap set. By matching his rhythmic attack with a tune’s melody, Roach brought a newfound subtlety of expression to his instrument.
Max along with Kenny Clarke were the first drummers to play bebop and performed in the bands of Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Coleman Hawkins, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Clifford Brown, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. He played on many of Parker’s most important records including the Savoy 1945 session, a turning point in recorded jazz.
Roach went on to lead his own groups, and made numerous musical statements relating to the Black civil rights movement. He once observed, “In no other society do they have one person play with all four limbs.” Jazz percussionist, drummer, composer and innovator Max Roach left the jazz world on August 16, 2007.
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