From Broadway To 52nd Street
Flower Drum Song opens the curtains of the St. James Theatre on December 1, 1958 and runs for 600 performances. The music composed by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein for actors Pat Suzuki, Juanita Hall, Miyoshi Umeki, Larry Blyden, Jack Soo, Arabella Hong, Ed Kenney and Keye Luke leave the world with the jazz classic Love, Look Away.
The Story: Wang Chi-yang, a wealthy 63-year-old man Chinese refugee lives in San Francisco’s Chinatown with his two sons. He has a cough, which symbolizes his authority and his resistance to American culture and refusal to adopt Western ways. He is also at odds with his sister-in-law and his sons who are assimilating. Older son Wang Ta woos nightclub dancer Linda, but discovering she has many men dumps her. Linda’s seamstress friend Helen cannot find a man and gets Ta drunk, seduces him, has a short-lived affair. Ta eventually abandons her and then she commits suicide.
Impatient at Ta’s inability to find a wife, Wang arranges a marriage for his son. However, before she arrives, Ta meets a young woman, May Li, and with his father’s approval he and May Li fall in love. He vows to marry her after she is falsely accused of stealing a clock. Wang struggles to understand the conflicts that have torn his household apart; his hostility toward assimilation is isolating him from his family. In the end Wang decides to go to a Chinese-run Western clinic, symbolizing that he is beginning to accept American culture.
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. Hard bop was 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 fronted by Blakey featured pianist Horace Silver and trumpeter Clifford Brown, who were leaders in the hard bop movement along with Davis.
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Jack Sheldon was born November 30, 1931 in Jacksonville, Florida became a professional trumpet player at the age of thirteen. It was during his teen years he moved to Los Angeles and subsequently joined the air force playing in military bands in Texas and California. He first gained recognition as part of the West Coast jazz movement in the 1950s performing and recording with Art Pepper, Gerry Mulligan and Curtis Counce.
Sheldon played the trumpet, sang, performed and was the sidekick and comedic foil on the Merv Griffin show. During the sixties he ventured further into television as an actor on such shows as Dragnet, The Girl With Something Extra, the Cara Williams Show and Run Buddy Run. He was also the voice used for “Conjunction Junction” and “I’m Just A Bill” on Schoolhouse Rock. He voice later appeared on such sitcoms as The Simpsons and Family Guy.
He has played with Jimmy Guiffre, Herb Geller, Mel Torme, Wardell Gray, Helen Humes, Gary Burton, June Christy, Rosemary Clooney and the big bands of Stan Kenton, Bill Berry, Tom Kubis and Benny Goodman.
Jack performed the trumpet solo for the theme song “The Shadow Of Your Smile” on the soundtrack of the 1965 movie, The Sandpiper, appeared in the Oscar-nominated documentary “Let’s Get Lost” about the life of fellow jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, performed a trumpet solo in the Coppola film “One From The Heart”, appeared as an ill-fated trumpeter in Radioland Murders, and is the subject of an award winning feature documentary, “Trying to Get God: The Jazz Odyssey of Jack Sheldon”. The trumpeter continued to be an active performer of the bebop and cool jazz schools until his transition on December 27, 2019.
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William “Billy” Hart was born November 29, 1940 in Washington, D.C. is a drummer who worked first with soul groups Sam & Dave and Otis Redding then later with locals Buck Hill and Shirley Horn. This led to work as a sideman with the Montgomery Brothers, Jimmy Smith, and Wes Montgomery prior to his death in 1968.
Hart moved to New York and started playing with Eddie Harris, Pharoah Sanders, Marian McPartland and recording with McCoy Tyner, Wayne Shorter and Zawinul. In 1969 he became a member of Herbie Hancock’s sextet followed by another stint with McCoy Tyner, then Stan Getz, Quest and Miles Davis along with extensive freelancing. In the nineties he worked with Charles Lloyd, Joe Lovano, Tom Harrell and performed with the Three Tenors – Dave Liebman, Joe Lovano and Michael Brecker.
Billy Hart is one of the most in-demand jazz drummers and educators alive and has recorded more than 500 albums as a sideman. Since the early 1990s has spent considerable time at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, is an adjunct professor at the New England Conservatory of Music and at Western Michigan University. He conducts private lessons through The New School and New York University. He also often contributes to the Stokes Forest Music Camp and the Dworp Summer Jazz Clinic in Belgium, while leading a quartet Mark Turner, Ethan Iverson and Ben Street.
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Gigi Gryce was born George General Grice, Jr. on November 28, 1925 in Pensacola, Florida but grew up in Hartford Connecticut. He studied classical composition at the Boston Conservatory, studied with private teachers, then won a Fulbright scholarship and continued his studies in Paris.
His performing career was relatively short in comparison to other musicians of his generation, his work little known, however, several of his compositions have been covered extensively – “Minority,” “Social Call,” and “Nica’s Tempo” are frequently heard in mainstream jazz venues. Gigi’s compositional bent includes harmonic choices similar to those of Benny Golson, Tadd Dameron and Horace Silver in the contemporaneous period. Gryce’s playing, arranging, composing is consonant with the hard bop classic period was generally considered to be 1953-1965.
During the 1950s he achieved some renown for his innovative bebop playing, his primary instrument being the alto saxophone. Among the musicians with whom Gryce performed were Thelonious Monk, Tadd Dameron, Lionel Hampton, D, Howard McGhee, Clifford Brown, Art Farmer, Lee Morgan, Max Roach, Oscar Pettiford, Teddy Charles and Benny Golson. In 1955, Gryce formed the Jazz Lab Quintet, which included trumpeter Donald Byrd.
In the mid-1950s he converted to Islam and adopted the name Basheer Qusim. By the 60s he stopped using the name Gigi Gryce partly due to personal problems that took their toll on his financial and emotional state, withdrawing from performing. During this last period of his life he taught at a series of public schools in Long Island and New York City and the Community Elementary School 53 on 168th Street in the Bronx, the last school renamed the Basheer Qusim School in his honor.
Gigi Gryce, saxophonist, flautist, clarinetist, composer, arranger, educator, and big band leader died of an apparent epileptic seizure on March 14, 1983 in Pensacola, Florida.
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Wessell “Warmdaddy” Anderson was born on November 27, 1966 in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in the tough Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights neighborhoods. By 14 he was deeply immersed in jazz at the urging of his father, who was a drummer. He played alto saxophone in local clubs from his early teenage years, and studied at the Jazzmobile workshops with Frank Wess, Charles Davis and Frank Foster. He met Branford Marsalis who convinced him to study with clarinetist Alvin Batiste at Southern University in Louisiana.
Anderson began touring with the Wynton Marsalis Septet, collaborating with Marsalis through the middle of the 1990s helping to make some of the most defining music. He continued to sit in the first alto chair with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. In 1994, he signed and released his debut album, “Warmdaddy In The Garden of Swing” with Atlantic Records followed by his sophomore release “The Ways of Warmdaddy” and then “Live at the Village Vanguard”.
Over the years he develop his sound combining New Orleans jazz with the sweeping blues style of Cannonball Adderley. He has played with contemporaries Eric Reed, Irvin Mayfield, Steve Kirby, Xavier Davis, Jaz Sawyer and Ben Wolfe among others while maintaining an East Lansing, Michigan restaurant called “Gumbo & Jazz”.
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