Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Louis Hayes was born May 31, 1937 in Detroit, Michigan. His father played drums and piano and his mother the piano. His early jazz influence was big bands on the radio, drummer Philly Joe Jones and was mentored by Papa Jo Jones.
As a teenager Hayes led a band in Detroit and worked with Yusef Lateef and Curtis Fuller from 1955 to 1956. Louis often teamed up with Sam Jones, in freelance settings, led a group at clubs in Detroit before he was 16. He moved to New York in August 1956 to replace Art Taylor in Horace Silver’s Quintet from 1956–1959, then joined the Cannonball Adderley Quintet from 1959–1965 followed by succeeding Ed Thigpen in the Oscar Peterson Trio from 1965–1967.
Leaving Peterson he formed a series of groups, which he led alone or with others; among his sidemen were Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson, Kenny Barron and James Spaulding. He rejoined Peterson in 1971. Forming the Louis Hayes Sextet in 1972, it evolved into the Louis Hayes-Junior Cook Quintet and the Woody Shaw-Louis Hayes Quintet with Rene McLean. After Shaw left the group in 1977, Hayes continued to lead it as a hard-bop quintet.
From the 1970s onward Louis recorded and performed with John Coltrane, Kenny Burrell, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Zawinul, Nat Adderley, Gene Ammons, Bobby Timmons, Hank Mobley, Booker Little, Al Cohn, Kenny Drew, James Clay, Dexter Gordon, Terry Gibbs, Bennie Green, Grant Green, Barry Harris, Johnny Hodges, Sam Jones, Clifford Jordan, Johnny lytle, Phineas Newborn Jr., Tommy Flanagan, Cecil Taylor, McCoy Tyner, Ray Brown, Gary Bartz, Tony Williams and the list goes on.
He has led recording sessions for Vee-Jay, Timeless, Muse, Candid, Steeplechase and TCB record labels. Drummer Louis Hayes mentors young jazz artists, continues to perform with a variety of other musicians both old and young, leads his own band and since 1989 with Vincent Herring formed the Cannonball Legacy Band.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Dave McKenna was born May 30, 1930 in Woonsocket, Rhode Island and started out at the age of 15 playing with Boots Mussulli in 1947. He then worked with Charlie Ventura and Woody Herman’s Orchestra three years later. He went on to spend two years in the military, and re-joined Ventura in 1953.
He worked with a variety of swing and Dixieland musicians including Gene Krupa, Joe Venuti, Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, Bob Wilbur, Eddie Condon, and Bobby Hackett but became primarily a soloist after 1967 operating nearly exclusively in the Northeast United States. McKenna performed with Louis Armstrong at the 1970 Newport Jazz Festival. He was an accompanist, recording with singers such as Rosemary Clooney, Teddi King, Donna Byrne and Tony Bennett.
During the 1970s his star rose but chose to play in his local area rather than travel extensively playing in clubs and hotels over center stage in major venues. He retired around the turn of the millennium due to increasing mobility problems brought on by his long battle with diabetes. Pianist Dave McKenna passed away in Pennsylvania on October 18, 2008 from lung cancer.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Freddie Redd was born on May 29, 1928 and grew up in New York City and after losing his father when he was a one year old, he was raised by his mother, who moved around Harlem, Brooklyn and other neighborhoods. An autodidact, he began playing the piano at a young age and took to studying jazz seriously upon hearing Charlie Parker during his military service in Korea.
Upon discharge from the Army in 1949 he worked with drummer Johnny Mills, and then in New York played with Tiny Grimes, Cootie Williams, Oscar Pettiford and the Jive Bombers. In 1954 he was playing with Art Blakey, followed with a tour of Sweden in 1956 with Ernestine Anderson and Rolf Ericson. Freddie’s greatest success came in the late 1950s when he was invited to compose the music and perform as actor and musician in both The Living Theatre’s New York stage production of The Connection, which was also used in the subsequent 1961 film. Redd led a Blue Note album featuring his music for the play. which featured Jackie McLean on alto sax. However, his success in the theater production did not advance his career in the United States, and shortly afterwards he moved to Europe living in Denmark and France.
Returning to the West Coast in 1974 he became a regular on the San Francisco scene and recorded intermittently up until 1990. His creative lines, particular voicings and innovative compositions have led him to work with Jackie McLean, Tina Brooks, Paul Chambers, Howard McGhee, Milt Hinton, Lou Donaldson, Benny Bailey, Charles Mingus, Louis Hayes, Al McKibbon, Billy Higgins, Osie Johnson, Gene Ammons, Tommy Potter, Joe Chambers and many more. He contributed organ to James Taylor’s original 1968 recording of Carolina In My Mind.
Over the course of his career hard-bop pianist and composer Freddie Redd, who passed away in New York City on March 17, 2021, aged 92, recorded fourteen albums as leader and was one of the last of the pioneers of the hard-bop golden age.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Dave Barbour was born May 28, 1912 in Long Island, New York and started off as a banjoist with Adrian Rollini in 1933 and then Wingy Manone in 1934. He switched to guitar in the middle of the decade and began playing with Red Norvo in 1935-1936.
Through the rest of the decade and the Forties he found a sizable amount of work as a studio musician and played in ensembles with Teddy Wilson and Billie Holiday, Artie Shaw, Lennie Hayton, Charlie Barnet, Raymond Scott, Glenn Miller, Lou Holden, Woody Herman, André Previn and Benny Goodman.
While performing with Goodman’s ensemble, he fell in love with lead singer Peggy Lee, and they quit the group to marry and moved to Los Angeles, California where Johnny Mercer put them to work as a songwriting team, writing a number of Lee’s hits, such as Mañana (Is Soon Enough for Me) and It’s a Good Day. Unfortunately Dave’s alcoholic and domestic troubles with Lee eventually split apart their marriage.
His orchestra had the best-selling US version of the peppy song Mambo Jambo and though his remaining career was far less successful thanhis ex-wife’s, his songwriting royalties sustained him, as the tunes he co-wrote with Lee were covered by many hitmakers of the 1950s. He acted in the films The Secret Fury and Mr. Music, and occasionally performed, including with Benny Carter in 1962. Guitarist Dave Barbour passed away on December 11, 1965 of a hemorrhaged ulcer in Malibu Beach, California, aged 53.
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Bud Shank was born Clifford Everett Shank, Jr. on May 27, 1926 in Dayton, Ohio. He began with clarinet in Vandalia, Ohio, but had switched to saxophone before attending the University of North Carolina. While at UNC he was initiated into the Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity.
In 1946 he worked with Charlie Barnet before working with Stan Kenton and the West Coast jazz scene. He also had a strong interest world music, playing Brazilian-influenced jazz with Laurindo Almeida in 1953–54, and in 1962 fusing jazz with Indian traditions in collaboration with Indian composer and sitar-player Ravi Shankar.
He spent the 1960s as a first-call studio musician in Hollywood and is also well known for the alto flute solo on the song California Dreamin’ recorded by The Mamas & the Papas in 1965. By 1974 Shank had joined with Ray Brown, Shelly Manne and Laurindo Almeida to form the group the L.A. Four, recording and touring extensively through 1982. He helped to popularize both Latin-flavored and chamber jazz music performing with orchestras as diverse as the Royal Philharmonic, the New American Orchestra, the Gerald Wilson Big Band, Stan Kenton’s Neophonic Orchestra, and Duke Ellington.
In 2005 he formed the Bud Shank Big Band in Los Angeles, California to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Stan Kenton’s Neophonic Orchestra.
A documentary film, Bud Shank “Against the Tide” Portrait of a Jazz Legend, was produced and directed by Graham Carter of Jazzed Media and released by Jazzed Media as a DVD and CD) in 2008. The film has been awarded 4 indie film awards including an Aurora Awards Gold.
Alto saxophonist Bud Shank, who also played tenor and baritone saxophone, passed away on April 2, 2009, of a pulmonary embolism at his home in Tucson, Arizona, one day after returning from San Diego, California, where he was recording a new album.
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