The Jazz Voyager
Rest’Ô Jazz: 8, rue Amélie, Toulouse, France. Telephone: +33 5 61 57 96 95 Fax: +33 5 61 57 96 95 Contact: Yannick Orthlieb. The Rest’Ô Jazz is open from Tuesday to Saturday with live jazz every night.
Since 2004, the Rest’Ô Jazz has presented the tradition of New Orleans Jazz Clubs distilling a unique atmosphere in Toulouse. All year long, jazz influences adapt to any purpose. From Louis Armstrong to The Mississippi Jazz Band, from Django Reinhardt to Gadjo Zaz Trio, from Count Basie to The Philippe Laudet Jazz Odyssée.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Marlena Shaw was born Marlina Burgess on September 22, 1942 in New Rochelle, New York and was first introduced to music by her jazz trumpet player uncle Jimmy Burgess. She cites Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Al Hibbler and lots of gospel as her teaching tools.
In 1952, Burgess brought her on stage at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre to sing with him and his band. Shaw’s mother did not want her daughter to go on tour with her uncle at such a young age. Instead, she enrolled Shaw into the New York State Teachers College in Potsdam to study music. She later dropped out, got married, had five children but never gave up on her singing career.
Shaw began making appearances in jazz clubs whenever she could spare the time. This most notable of these appearances was in 1963 when she worked with jazz trumpeter Howard McGhee. That same year, she had an unsuccessful audition due to nervousness with Columbia Records but continued to play at small clubs in 1964 until 1966 when her career took off after landing a gig with the Playboy Club chain in Chicago. It was through this gig that she met with Chess Records, inked a deal, released her first two albums on their subsidiary Cadet and moved to Blue Note by 1972.
With the onset of disco in the 70s, she reinvented herself and recorded “Go Away Little Boy” and one of the era’s biggest hits remaking “Touch Me In The Morning” for Columbia. Her career has touched all forms of music even being sampled by hip-hop artists and commercials. Vocalist Marlena Shaw has continued to record, toured and consistently performing at club dates and festivals like the North Sea Jazz Festival in the Netherlands.
From Broadway To 52nd Street
House Of Flowers opened at the Alvin Theatre on December 12, 1954 with music by Harold Arlen and lyrics and book by Truman Capote. This was his only Broadway musical based on his own short story, which was first published as one of three extra pieces in the Breakfast At Tiffany’s novella. Pearl Bailey, Diahann Carroll, Juanita Hall, Alvin Ailey, Geoffrey Holder, Ray Walston and Carmen de Lavallade starred for 165 performances. The composition that emerged from this musical to become a jazz standard was “A Sleepin’ Bee”.
The Story: During a trade war between two Haitian brothel keepers, Madame Tango and Madame Fleur, the latter sells one of her girls, Ottilia, to a rich lord. Ottilia turns him down preferring young, handsome but poor mountain boy Royal. and despite Fleur’s machinations to seal Royal in a barrel and toss him into the ocean, he escapes his watery grave on the back of a turtle. The lovers eventually marry and live happily ever after.
Jazz History: Hard bop, an extension of bebop (or “bop”) music that incorporates influences from rhythm and blues, gospel, and blues especially in the saxophone and piano playing, developed in the mid-1950s, partly in response to the vogue for cool jazz in the early 1950s. The hard bop style coalesced in 1953 and 1954, paralleling the rise of rhythm and blues. Miles Davis’ performance of “Walkin'”, the title track of his album of the same year, at the very first Newport Jazz Festival in 1954, announced the style to the jazz world. The quintet, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers featuring pianist Horace Silver and trumpeter Clifford Brown were leaders in the hard bop movement along with Davis.
Modal jazz recordings, such as Davis’ Kind of Blue became popular in the late 1950s. Popular modal standards include Davis’s “All Blues All” and “So What”, John Coltrane’s “Impressions” and Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage”. These recordings would eventually lead to the formation of Davis’ second great quintet, which included saxophonist Wayne Shorter and pianist Herbie Hancock, recorded a series of highly acclaimed albums in the mid-to-late 1960s.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Henry Butler was born September 21, 1949 in New Orleans, Louisiana and was blinded by glaucoma in infancy.His musical training began at the Louisiana State School for the Blind where he learned to play valve trombone, baritone horn and drums before focusing his talents on singing and piano. Mentored at Southern University by clarinetist and educator Alvin Batiste. He later earned a masters degree in music at Michigan State University in 1974, and received the MSU Distinguished Alumni Award in 2009.
He is known for his technique and his ability to play in many styles of music. He has been said to revel in fluency and facility, splashing chords all over the keyboard and streaking through solos with machine-gun articulation.Henry has recorded for Impulse, Windham Hill and Basin Street Records putting together a catalogue of eight albums to date.
With his home and vintage Mason & Hamlin piano destroyed by Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters, Butler left New Orleans and briefly relocated to Boulder, and then Denver, Colorado before a final relocation to New York in 2009.
Butler’s pursuit of photography as a hobby since 1984, has culminated in his methods and photos being featured in an HBO2 documentary, Dark Light: The Art of Blind Photographers, airing in 2010 and has had his Butler’s photographs shown in galleries in New Orleans. The talented pianist and vocalist continues to perform, record and represent his generation of New Orleans pianists.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Chico Hamilton was born Foreststorn Hamilton on September 20, 1921 in Los Angeles, California and was on a drumming fast track musical education in a band with his schoolmates Charles Mingus, Illinois Jacquet, Ernie Royal, Dexter Gordon, Buddy Collette and Jack Kelso. Subsequent engagements with Lionel Hampton, Slim & Slam, T-Bone Walker, Lester Young, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Charlie Barnet, Billy Eckstine, Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., Billie Holiday, Gerry Mulligan and six years with Lena Horne established this young West Coast prodigy as a jazz drummer on the rise, before striking out on his own as a bandleader in 1955.
He recorded his first LP as leader in 1955 on Pacific Jazz with George Duvivier and Howard Roberts and in the same year formed an unusual quintet in L.A. featuring cello, flute, guitar, bass and drums that has been described as one of the last important West Coast jazz bands. The original personnel: Buddy Collette, Jim Hall, Fred Katz and Jim Aton. Hamilton continued to tour using different personnel, from 1957 to 1960, Paul Horn and John Pisano that are featured in the film “Sweet Smell Of Success in 1957 and Jazz On A Summer’s Day with Nate Gershman and Eric Dolphy in 1960. Dolphy was enlisted to record on Hamilton’s first three albums, however by 1961 the group was revamped with Charles Lloyd, Gabor Szabo, George Bohannon and Albert Stinson.
Over the course of his career Chico changed personnel keeping his sound fresh and innovative. Subsequently he recorded for Columbia, Reprise and Impulse, scored for television, commercials and radio. He has worked with countless musicians and vocalists, received the New School Jazz and Contemporary Music Programs Beacons in Jazz Award and was awarded the WLIU-FM Radio Lifetime Achievement Award. He has been given a NEA Jazz Master Fellowship, was confirmed by Congress with the President’s nomination to the Presidents Council on the Arts, received a Living Legend Jazz Award as part of The Kennedy Center Jazz in Our Time Festival, as well as receiving a Doctor of Fine Arts from the New School where he currently teaches. Drummer Chico Hamilton continued to perform and record until his passing on November 25, 2013.
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