Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Wally Cirillo was born Wallace Joseph Cirillo on February 4, 1927 in Huntington, New York. He studied at the New York Conservatory of Modern Music and the Manhattan School of Music, and played with Chubby Jackson and Bill Harris in the early 1950s.

In 1954 he began working with John LaPorta, Teo Macero and Charles Mingus as part of the New York Jazz Composers Workshop. The following year, he led a session with Mingus, Macero, and Kenny Clarke, which was later reissued under Mingus’s name as Jazz Composers Workshop. The piece Transeason on this album was composed by Cirillo, makes use of serialism, one of the earliest manifestations of this compositional technique in jazz. He also recorded with LaPorta and with Johnny Mathis in the 1950s.

Cirillo relocated to Florida in 1961, where he led his own band and worked with Phil Napoleon, Flip Phillips, Ira Sullivan, and Joe Diorio. He recorded sparsely throughout his career.

Pianist and composer Wally Cirillo transitioned on May 5, 1977 in Boca Raton, Florida.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Bobby Durham was born on February 3, 1937 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and learned to play drums while a child. He played with The Orioles at age 16, and was in a military band between 1956 and 1959. After his discharge, he played with King James and Stan Hunter.

1960 saw Durham moving to New York City, where he played with Lloyd Price, Wild Bill Davis, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Slide Hampton, Grant Green, Sweets Edison, Tommy Flanagan, Jimmy Rowles, and the Duke Ellington Orchestra, in which he played for five months. While working with Basie, he met Al Grey, and was a member of several of Grey’s small ensembles.

He accompanied Ella Fitzgerald for more than a decade, and worked with Oscar Peterson in a trio setting. Bobby played in trios with organists such as Charles Earland and Shirley Scott, and there was a resurgence in interest in his work during the acid jazz upswing in the 1990s. Many of his projects, both as sideman and as leader, came about because of his association with producer Norman Granz, who used him in performances with Fitzgerald, Basie, Edison, Flanagan, and Joe Pass.

He led his own combos, is noted for scat singing along with his drum solos. He recorded with Monty Alexander, Shawn Monteiro, Red Holloway, Milt Jackson, Clifford Jordan, and Jay McShann. He also performed often with pop and soul musicians such as Frank Sinatra, James Brown, Ray Charles, and Marvin Gaye.

Drummer Bobby Durham, who recorded five albums as a leader and twenty~three as a sideman, transitioned from lung cancer in Genoa, Italy at 71 on July 6, 2008.

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The Jazz Voyager

The Jazz Voyager is jetting across the country once again, leaving Southern Cal for Southern Florida to check out for the very first time tomorrow, jazz vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. She will be performing selections from her latest album Ghost Song. Opening the evening is the Christian Sands Trio.

A child of Haitian/French heritage, Salvant returns home to wow the audience with her talents. She won the first prize in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition in 2010, released her first album, Cécile, shortly thereafter. Her sophomore album, WomanChild, was nominated for a Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album, and three of her albums For One to Love, Dreams and Daggers, and The Window have been awarded Grammy Awards for Best Jazz Vocal Album. She has received a Macarthur Genius Grant and the Jazz Journalists Association’s Jazz Award for Female Vocalist of the Year in 2022.

The performance will take place in the center’s Knight Concert Hall located at 1300 Biscayne Boulevard, Miami, 33132. If you have the time, inclination and opportunity to catch this Friday performance, I suggest you do not hesitate to grab a couple of tickets. This rare appearance by this international artist in her hometown is not to be missed.

The center’s number is 305-949-6722. If you want to get more information visit https://notoriousjazz.com/event/cecile-mclorin-salvant.

CALIFORNIA JAZZ FOUNDATION

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Johnny Hawksworth was born in London, England on February 2, 1924 and initially trained as a pianist, but also played double bass in the Ted Heath Orchestra during the early 1950s and through the 1960s. Becoming one of the most popular jazz bassists in the UK, he won numerous polls and was often featured as a soloist on Heath concerts and recordings.

As a composer Johnny wrote many television themes including Salute to Thames,  Thank Your Lucky Stars, Roobarb, Man About the House and George and Mildred. He contributed some of the incidental music used in the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon, and his composition, Er Indoors, was frequently used in SpongeBob SquarePants. While working on films, he scored The Naked World of Harrison Marks, The Penthouse, and Zeta One.

Hawksworth has also written many pieces of stock music for the De Wolfe Music library. He also provided the hypnotic musical soundtrack to Geoffrey Jones’s classic British Transport Films Snow and has composed American-style blues-based material under the name Bunny J. Browne and classically-based material under the name John Steinway.

Bassist and composer Johnny Hawksworth transitioned on February 13, 2009 in Sydney, Australia at the age of 85.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

James Norbert Black was born on February 1, 1940 in New Orleans, Louisiana. He played piano and trumpet during his youth and studied music at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He first started working in R&B ensembles as a drummer in the late 1950s, but took a job drumming with Ellis Marsalis in the New Orleans Playboy Club, leading to further work in jazz idioms.

A move to New York City in the mid-Sixties and worked in jazz idioms during the decade with Nat Perrilliat, Roy Montrell, Ellis Marsalis, Nat Adderley and Cannonball Adderley, Joe Jones, Horace Silver, Lionel Hampton, Yusef Lateef, Freddie Hubbard, and Eric Gale.

Returning to New Orleans near the end of the 1960s, playing there with Dr. John, James Booker, Fats Domino, Professor Longhair, Charles Neville, James Rivers, Earl Turbinton and the Dukes of Dixieland. Scram Records brought James on as a session musician, and can be heard on Eddie Bo’s single Hook and Sling. In the 1980s he worked with Cassandra Wilson, Wynton Marsalis, and Germaine Bazzle.

Black was a composer and received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Among his works are Monkey Puzzle and Dee Wee, both of which were recorded by Ellis Marsalis’s ensemble in the early 1960s. Recordings under his name were compiled by Night Train Records and released on CD as I Need Altitude: Rare and Unreleased New Orleans Jazz and Funk, 1968-1978.

Drummer James Black, closely associated with the New Orleans jazz scene, transitioned on August 30, 1988.

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