Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Martin Oliver Grosz was born on February 28, 1930 in Berlin, Germany, the son of artist George Grosz. He became resident in the United States by the age of three growing up in New York he began playing ukulele at the age of eight. A few years later he heard a record that highlighted guitarist Bernard Addison’s shuffle-beat behind Roy Eldridge’s trumpet and out went the uke and in came the banjo and guitar. He attended Columbia University and in 1950, recorded his first record with a band that included a young pianist Dick Wellstood and veteran New Orleans bassist, Pops Foster.
Settling in Chicago, Illinois in the Fifties for nearly 20 years, Marty played with among others, Albert Ammons, Floyd O’Brien, Art Hodes, and Jim Lannigan. He recorded with Dave Remington, Albert Nicholas and Hodes in the 1950s. He led sessions of his own in 1957 and 1959 for Riverside and Audio Fidelity. He gave his best effort to coax Jabbo Smith out of retirement but was pretty obscure.
Returning to New York City in 1979 he joined Bob Wilber and Kenny Davern’s Soprano Summit as a vocalist and guitarist. A round of touring ensued along with recording with Dick Wellstood’s Friends of Fats, Yank Lawson and Bob Haggar, and the New York Jazz repertory Orchestra.
In the 1980s he was a member of the Classic Jazz Quartet with Dick Wellstood. He played, sang, and wrote most of the group’s arrangements. He has also performed at concerts with Joe Pass, Herb Ellis, and Charlie Byrd.
Guitarist, banjoist, vocalist, and composer Marty Grosz has recorded thirty-one albums as a leader and thirty-four as a sideman. At 95 he still plays occasionally.
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The Jazz Voyager
The nation’s capital is this week’s destination as the Jazz Voyager departs the warm climes of South Florida for a more frigid weather experience ranging in the thirties. But jazz only knows two temperatures — cool and hot and the latter will be warming up the room at Blues Alley this Thursday with two shows at 7:00 and 9:30pm.
Wife and husband team Jean and Marcus comprise The Baylor Project which hail out of New York City are taking the stage this week. They have been nominated for four Grammy awards and continually pay homage to their wide-ranging musical influences. In doing so they generate an eclectic sound whose overall effect is spiritual, buoyant, and feel good music.
Tickets: $35 + $7 fee
Food and Beverage: $15 Minimum Per Person
Blues Alley’s address is 1073 Wisconsin Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20007. For more information visit bluesalley.com.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
John Joseph Kelson Jr. , known professionally as Jackie Kelso, was born in Los Angeles, California on February 27, 1922. He began taking clarinet lessons at age eight, studying with Caughey Roberts. When he was fifteen his Jefferson High School classmate Chico Hamilton urged him to take up the alto saxophone, making his professional debut with Jerome Myart that same year. By the time he graduated from Jefferson, he was playing with Hamilton, Buddy Collette, and Charles Mingus at Central Avenue clubs.
The 1940s saw Jackie playing with Barney Bigard, Marshal Royal, Lucky Thompson, Kid Ory, Benny Carter, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, and Roy Milton. He enlisted in the Navy in 1942 with Marshal and Ernie Royal, and, after training at Camp Robert Smalls, he was stationed with the Royals with St. Mary’s College Pre-Flight School band.
After the war he continued playing and by the 1950s he was performing with Johnny Otis, Billy Vaughan, Nelson Riddle, Bill Berry, Ray Anthony, the Capp-Pierce Juggernaut, Bob Crosby, C.L. Burke, and Duke Ellington. Joining Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps in 1958 he was featured on several recordings from that period such as Ac-centu-ate the Positive.
Working as a studio musician between 1964 and 1984, in addition Kelso recorded with Mercer Ellington and Mink DeVille, toured worldwide with Hampton, Ellington, and Vaughan, and appeared in The Concert for Bangladesh. Semi-retiring from music in 1984, he returned to perform in 1995 with the Count Basie Orchestra, where he became a regular in 1998.
Saxophonist, flautist, and clarinetist Jackie Kelso, who reverted to his birth name Kelson. died on April 28, 2012 in Beverly Hills, California, aged 90.
Get a dose of the musicians and vocalists who were members of a global society integral in the making and preservation of jazz for over a hundred and twenty-five years…
Jackie Kelso: 1922~2012 | Saxophone, Flute, Clarinet
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Harry Gold, born Hyman Goldberg on February 26, 1907 in Leytonstone, London, England the eldest of six children to a Romanian/Polish heritage. Raised in the East End of London, he decided on a career in music after his father took him to see the Original Dixieland Jazz Band during their famous visit to Britain in 1919–1920.
He studied saxophone, clarinet, oboe and music theory under Louis Kimmel, a professor at the London College of Music. Harry began working professionally as a musician in the early 1920s playing with the Metronomes, Vic Filmer, Geraldo, Ambrose and many other bands. It was, however, his tenure as the star tenor saxophonist with the nationally popular dance band of Roy Fox from 1932 to 1937 that brought him to wide public attention.
In 1937, while working with Oscar Rabin, he formed a band within the Rabin orchestra, performing break sets as “The Pieces of Eight”. This band continued to perform throughout World War II, dodging bombs during the London Blitz and across the country. After the war Harry Gold and his Pieces of Eight became household names in Britain through the late 1940s and 1950s. During this time his Pieces of Eight accompanied the singer and composer Hoagy Carmichael on a well-received tour of the UK.
Gold carried on working into his late 80s and early 90s, playing occasionally. He left an extensive back catalogue of recordings on 78 rpm discs, Formally trained in composition and orchestration, Gold also wrote and arranged music outside of the jazz genre, and most of his career was spent actively in union duties and in efforts to promote the welfare of other musicians.
Dixieland jazz saxophonist and bandleader Harry Gold, whose career spanned almost the whole history of jazz in Britain in the 20th century, died on November 13, 2005.
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Jazz Poems
ALMOST BLUE
Chet Baker, 1929-1988
If Hart Crane played trumpet
he’d sound like you, your horn’s dark city
miraculous and broken over and over,
scale-shimmered, every harbor-flung hour
and salt-span of cabled longing,
every waterfront, the night-lovers’ rendezvous
This is the entrance
to the city of you, sleep’s hellgate,
and two weeks before the casual relinquishment
of your hold—light needling
on the canal’s gleaming haze
and the buds blaming like horns—
two weeks before the end, Chet,
and you’re playing like anything,
singing stay little valentine
stay
and taking so long there are worlds sinking
between the notes, this exhalation
no longer a voice but a rush of air,
brutal, from the tunnels under the river,
the barges’ late whistles you only hear
when the traffic’s stilled
by snow, a city hushed and
distilled into one rush of breath,
your, into the microphone
and the ear of that girl
in the leopard-print scarf,
one long kiss begun on the highway
and carried on dangerously,
the Thunderbird veering
on the coast road glamor
of a perfectly splayed fender,
dazzling lipstick, a little pearl of junk,
some stretch of road breathless
and traveled into… Whoever she is
she’s the other coast of you,
and just beyond the bridge the city’s
long amalgam of ardor and indifference
is lit like a votive
then blown out. Too many rooms unrented
in this residential hotel,
and you don’t want to know
why they’re making that noise in the hall;
you’re going to wake up in any one of the
how many ten thousand
locations of trouble and longing
going out of business forever everything must go
wake up and start wanting.
It’s so much better when you don’t want:
nothing falls then, nothing lost
but sleep and who wanted that
in the pearl this suspended world is,
in the warm suspension and glaze
of this song everything stays up
almost forever the long
glide sung into the vein,
one note held almost impossibly
almost blue and the lyric takes so long
to open, a little blood
blooming: there’s no love song finer
but how strange the change
from major to minor
everytime
we say goodbye
and you leaning into that warm
haze from the window, Amsterdam,
late afternoon glimmer
a blur of buds
breathing in the lindens
and you let go and why not
MARK DOTY
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
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