Daily Dose Of Jazz…

James Avery Parrish was born on January 24, 1917 in Birmingham, Alabama. Graduating from Parker High School he went on to matriculate Alabama State Teachers College, where he played in the Bama State Collegians, an ensemble led by Erskine Hawkins. He remained in Hawkins’s employ performing and arranging until 1942 and recorded with him extensively. Composing the music to After Hours, a 1940 recording of the tune with Hawkins’s orchestra resulted in its becoming a jazz standard.

Driving to gigs between Pittsburgh and Chattanooga in 1942 he was injured in an overturned car crash that killed Hawkin’s trumpeter Marcellus Green, one of the five men in the vehicle. Avery left Hawkins later that year and moved to California, where hebecame a commercially successful solo pianist.  Hit in the head by a bar stool during a bar fight in 1943l put him in hospital for a few months. His injuries left him partly paralyzed, thus ending his career and ability  to play music for the rest of his life.

Pianist, composer and arranger Avery Parrish transitioned of unknown causes on December 10, 1959. He was posthumously inducted twenty years later into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame.

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