Daily Dose of Jazz…

George Warren Barnes was born on July 17, 1921 in South Chicago Heights, Illinois. His father being a guitarist taught him to play the acoustic guitar at the age of nine. A year later, in 1931, Barnes’s brother made a pickup and amplifier for him. Barnes said he was the first person to play electric guitar.

From 1935~1937 he led a band that performed in the Midwest, 1938 he recorded the songs Sweetheart Land and It’s a Lowdown Dirty Shame with blues guitarist Big Bill Broonzy.

In doing so, it has been claimed that he became the first person to make a record on electric guitar, fifteen days before Eddie Durham recorded on electric guitar with the Kansas City Five, though the claim has been contested. In 1938, when he was seventeen, Barnes was hired as a staff guitarist for the NBC Orchestra, staff guitarist and arranger for Decca and recorded with Blind John Davis, Jazz Gillum, Merline Johnson, Curtis Jones, and Washboard Sam.

In 1940, Barnes released his first solo recording, I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles and I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love with Me on Okeh Records. Drafted in 1942 and serving in the Pentagon, after his discharge in 1946, he formed the George Barnes Octet and was given a fifteen-minute radio program on the ABC network.

In 1951, he was signed to Decca by Milt Gabler and moved from Chicago to New York City. In 1953, he joined the television orchestra on the show Your Hit Parade that was conducted by Raymond Scott and featured Barnes as a featured soloist. Working as a studio musician in New York City, playing on hundreds of albums and jingles from the early 1950s through the late 1960s. He played guitar on Patsy Cline’s New York sessions in April 1957.

In the Sixties, he recorded three albums for Mercury: Movin’ Easy (1960) with his Jazz Renaissance Quintet, Guitar Galaxies (1960), and Guitars Galore (1961). The latter two contained his orchestrations for ten guitars, known as his guitar choir, which used guitars in place of a horn section. The two albums employed a recording technique known as Perfect Presence Sound.

Barnes received the most attention as a jazz guitarist when he recorded as a duo with Carl Kress from 1961–1965. In 1969 Barnes formed a duo with jazz guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli that lasted until 1972. In 1973, he and cornetist Ruby Braff formed the Ruby Braff–George Barnes Quartet and recorded several albums.

He recorded seventeen albums as a leader and as a sideman, Barnes recorded another thirty-nine not limited to Louis Armstrong, Steve Allen, Tony Bennett, Jackie Cooper, Bob Dylan, Bud Freeman, Johnny Guarnieri, Dick Hyman, Betty Madigan, Wingy Manone, Carmen McRae, Jimmy McPartland, Sy Oliver, Don Redman, Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa, Jimmy Scott, Cootie Williams, and Joe Venuti.

As a studio musician, he also participated in hundreds of pop, rock, and R&B recording sessions. He played on many hit songs by the Coasters, on This Magic Moment by the Drifters, and on Jackie Wilson’s Lonely Teardrops. His electric guitar can be heard in the movie A Face in the Crowd.

He left New York City after his last European tour in 1975 to live and work in the San Francisco Bay area. Guitarist George Barnes, who was primarily a swing guitarist, passed away from a heart attack in Concord, California on September 5, 1977 at the age of 56.

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The Quarantined Jazz Voyager

The Quarantined Jazz Voyager’s next selection from his library is the 1962 album release Lena Horne titled Lena On The Blue Side. This studio album, released by RCA Victor in stereo and monaural. The recording took place in New York City in the summer of 1961.

The album features mainly blues-inspired songs, a departure for Horne from her usual standards, and recordings from the Great American Songbook. The recordings were arranged and conducted by Marty Gold.

The album was received well by the music press and Billboard Music Week of February 1962 rated it with a four star. Charting in the Billboard 200 album chart at #102. The complete album has only been reissued on CD in Japan in 1991.

Paradise ~ 3:40; The Rules Of The Road ~ 3:36; Darn That Dream ~ 2:41; I Wanna Be Loved ~ 3:02; I Hadn’t Anyone Till You ~ 2:45; Someone To Watch Over Me ~ 3:41; It’s A Lonesome Old Town ~ 2:32; I’m Through With Love ~ 2:58; What’ll I Do ~ 1:57; It Might As Well Be Spring ~ 3:30; They Didn’t Believe Me ~ 2:15; and As You Desire Me ~ 3:02.

• Lena Horne – Vocals
• Andy Ackers – Piano
• George Duvivier – Bass
• Al Caiola – Guitar
• Osie Johnson – Drums
• Bernie Glow, Mel Davis – Trumpet
• Sy Berger, Tony Studd – Trombone
• Strings

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Annie Whitehead was born on July 16, 1955 in Oldham, Lancashire, England and learned the trombone in high school and participated in rock and jazz bands. At 16, she left school and became a member of a female big band led by Ivy Benson, playing with the band for two years before moving to Jersey.

Unhappy with the life of a musician, she quit music for almost six years, only to return in 1979 and start a ska band. Taking an interest in jazz again after moving to London two years later, Whitehead began performing in pubs. During the 1980s she toured with Brotherhood of Breath, a big band led by South African pianist Chris McGregor.

Over the course of her career, Annie has worked with …And the Native Hipsters, Blur, Carla Bley, Charlie Watts Orchestra, Jah Wobble, Jamiroquai, John Stevens, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Smiley Culture, Spice Girls, and Working Week. She was a member of The Zappatistas, a Frank Zappa tribute band led by guitarist John Etheridge.

Trombonist Annie Whitehead, who has recorded five albums, her first, Mix Up in 1984 to The Gathering, her last in 2000, continues to compose and perform.

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Conversations About Jazz & Other Distractions

WABE’s City Lights With Lois Reitzes Interviews Carl Anthony

The Hammonds House Museum in Atlanta’s West End continues to offer rich content through its virtual programming. The latest addition to the museum’s arts and culture programming is “Conversations about Jazz and Other Distractions” with former jazz radio host and founder of Notorious Jazz, Carl Anthony.

This virtual, bi-monthly series is free and open to the public every other Thursday evening through December. Anthony will discuss the history of jazz, its involvement with protesting and racial justice, among other topics. He will also offer artist talks, workshops, and listening sessions. “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes spoke via Zoom with Hammonds House director Leatrice Ellzy and with Anthony about the upcoming conversations.

Anthony’s July 9 show looked at the tradition of protest in jazz and how contemporary jazz continues this practice.

When asked what Anthony believed was the future of jazz, he said, “The future is actually now. The streets have always been important to the sound of jazz. I think what is going on right now is going to be a platform for what’s to come. There’s a social consciousness right now that a lot of the musicians are taking into account as they perform because of what’s going on in regards to police violence, and Black Lives Matter, and the protester movements. A lot of the music that’s going to be created is going to have some element of social consciousness to it.”

Ellzy continued, “Jazz has always been a unifier. It provides us with a space that we can all come in and speak a common language and then from that space of commonality we’re able to branch off into our issues and talk about our issues and deal with our issues in a different kind of way.”

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Joseph Arthurlin Harriott was born in Kingston, Jamaica on July 15, 1928. Harriott was educated at Alpha Boys School, an orphanage in the city where he learned to play the clarinet, the instrument that was assigned to him shortly before his tenth birthday. He took up the baritone and tenor saxophone while performing with local dance bands before settling on the alto saxophone.

Moving to London, England as a working musician in the summer of 1951 at the age of 23 as a member of Ossie Da Costa’s band, he initially began as a bebopper, and also became a pioneer of free-form jazz. Harriott was part of a wave of Caribbean jazz musicians who arrived in Britain during the 1950s, including Dizzy Reece, Harold McNair, Harry Beckett and Wilton Gaynair.

Deeply influenced by Charlie Parker, he developed a style that fused Parker with his own Jamaican musical sensibility, most notably the mento and calypso music he grew up with. During the 1950s, he had two long spells with drummer Tony Kinsey’s band, punctuated by the membership of Ronnie Scott’s short-lived big band, occasional spells leading his own quartet and working in the quartets of drummers Phil Seamen and Allan Ganley.

Harriott began recording under his own name in 1954, releasing a handful of E.P. records for Columbia, Pye/Nixa and Melodisc throughout the 1950s. However, the majority of his 1950s recordings were as a sideman with the musicians previously mentioned, also backing a diverse array of performers, from mainstream vocalist Lita Roza to traditional trombonist George Chisholm to the West African sounds of Buddy Pipp’s Highlifers. Harriott also appeared alongside visiting American musicians during this period, including a “guest artist” slot on the Modern Jazz Quartet’s 1959 UK tour.

Forming his own quintet in 1958, Joe’s hard-swinging bebop was noticed in the United States, leading to the release of the Southern Horizons and Free Form albums on the Jazzland label. By now firmly established as a bebop soloist, in 1960 Harriott turned to what he termed “abstract” or “free-form” music. During the late 1960s he and violinist John Mayer developed Indo-Jazz Fusion – an early attempt at building on music from diverse traditions. His work in 1969 was to be the last substantial performance of his career.

While he continued to play around Britain wherever he was welcome, no further recording opportunities arose. He was virtually destitute in his last years and ravaged by illness. Alto saxophonist and composer Joe Harriott passed away from cancer on January 2, 1973.

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