Daily Dose Of Jazz…

James Andrew Rushing was born on August 26, 1901 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma into a musical family. His father, Andrew was a trumpeter, and his mother, Cora, and her brother were singers. He studied music theory with Zelia N. Breaux at Frederick A. Douglass High School in Oklahoma City and was unusual among his musical contemporaries for having attended college at Wilberforce University.

Encouraged to play violin by his father, Rushing was inspired to pursue music and sing blues by his uncle Wesley Manning and George “Fathead” Thomas of McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. He toured the Midwest and California as an itinerant blues singer in the early 1920s before moving to Los Angeles, where he played piano and sang with Jelly Roll Morton, then Billy King before moving on to Walter Page’s Blue Devils in 1927. He and other members of the Blue Devils defected to the Bennie Moten band in 1929.

With Moten dying in 1935, Jimmy joined Count Basie for what would be a 13-year job. A proponent of the Kansas City, Missouri jump blues tradition, it could be heard in his performances of Sent for You Yesterday and Boogie Woogie for the Count Basie Orchestra. After leaving Basie, his recording career soared as a solo musician and a singer with other bands.

In 1950 he retired briefly but then formed his own group that would appear in the 1957 television special Sound of Jazz, and made a guest appearance with Duke Ellington on the 1959 album Jazz Party. In 1960, he recorded an album with the Dave Brubeck Quartet, was among the musicians included in an Esquire magazine photo by Art Kane, A Great Day In Harlem, and toured the UK with Humphrey Lyttelton and his band.

In 1969 Rushing appeared in The Learning Tree, the first major studio feature film directed by an African-American, Gordon Parks. Vocalist Jimmy Rushing,  who was singing on weekends at the Half Note Club in Manhattan until weeks before his death, passed away on June 8, 1972 at Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital in New York City. Rushing was one of eight jazz and blues legends honored in a set of United States Postal Service stamps issued in 1994.

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