Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Albert Edwin Condon was born November 16, 1905 in Goodland, Indiana and started playing music on the ukulele before switching to guitar. By the time he was sixteen he was in Chicago playing professionally with Bix Beiderbecke, Jack Teagarden and Frank Teschmacher.

In 1928 Condon moved to New York City frequently arranging jazz sessions for various labels, sometimes playing with the artists he brought like Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller. He organized racially integrated recording sessions – when these were still rare – with Waller, Armstrong and Henry “Red” Allen. He played with the Red Nichols band, later forming a long association with Milt Gabler’s Commodore Records in 1938.

From the late 1930s on Eddie was a regular at Nick’s in Manhattan with Pee Wee Russell, Wild Bill Davison and Bobby Hackett. He went on to appear in a short film with Hackett, produced a series of jazz broadcasts from Town Hall during the last years of WWII that gave him national popularity.

From 1945 through 1967 he ran his own New York jazz club, Eddie Condon’s. In the 50s he recorded a sequence of classic albums for Columbia Records, toured Britain, Australia, Japan, the U. S. and performed at jazz festivals throughout the world until 1971. Two years later, Eddie Condon, jazz banjoist, guitarist, bandleader and arranger passed away on August 4, 1973 in New York City.

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