The Jazz Voyager
The Jazz Voyager is flying out west to make another visit to Canada for a little jazz and will be settling down on the Sea Island in Richmond, British Columbia at the Vancouver International Airport. I’ll have three options to get downtown and I’m not sure whether to take the SkyTrain, float plane or helicopter into Vancouver.
This week’s destination for jazz sits in the heart of the entertainment district at Beatty and Robson streets. It is the dimly lit, warm and intimate atmosphere within the four walls of Frankie’s Jazz Club. Inside the club we’ll be privileged to hear the singular sound of Oregon trumpeter Cyrus Nabipoor on his West Coast Known Entity tour.
Tickets range from $18.00~$23.00 and Frankie’s is located at 755 Beatty Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6B 2M4 Canada. For more information visit https://www.frankiesjazzclub.ca.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Benny Strickler was born in Fayetteville, Arkansas on January 9, 1917 and took music lessons as a pre-teen and later played in a town band. After graduating high school, he became a professional musician and played with several territory bands in Arkansas and the Southwest. In 1935, with wife Frances in tow, he joined the migration from the Dust Bowl to the Golden State.
Benny established himself as one of the top trumpeters in Los Angeles, California. He played with bands led by Ben Pollack, Joe Venuti, Vido Musso and boxing champ/string bassist Max Baer. He even got an invitation from Artie Shaw, which he turned down.
He recorded his first recordings in 1937 with the Choir of Brass led by vocalist/pianist Seger Ellis. In 1941 he went to work with Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys and along with Danny Alguire and Alex Brashear and reedman Woodie Woods they shaped the swinging sound of the band between 1941-42. World War II broke them up with some enlisting, others drafted, however, Benny was exempted due to tuberculosis.
His illness worsened and was ultimately forced to quit playing. He returned to Arkansas, checking into a Booneville sanitarium. Trumpeter Benny Strickler, who played with the top Western Swing and Traditional bands, played sporadically until he succumbed to the tuberulosis and died on December 8, 1946.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Pamela Wise was born on January 8, 1956 in Steubenville, Ohio. She began composing and playing piano by ear at age five and started lessosn at nine. After studying the basics she began playing for her church choir, directed by her bassist father. While in high school she formed Ohio Movement, a r&b group performing throughout the Midwest and East Coast. Eight years later she left the band and moved to Cleveland, Ohio with her brother and entered Cuyahoga Community College to further study music.
A move to Detroit, Michigan with her brother led her to play with several r&b groups in the Detroit area, meeting her future husband Wendell Harrison and eventually composing and performing for Freddie Hubbard, Woody Shaw, Leon Thomas and Eddie Harris. In 1989 she formed a group that enlisted James Carter, Dwight Adams, Jaribu Shahid, Ali Muhammad and Andrew Daniels.
Pamela has collaborated with Regina Carter, Akua Dixon Turre, and with Jerry Gonzalez produced her cd Songo Festividad. She went on to release A New Message From The Tribe, Kindred Spirits, Negre Con Leche, and Pamela’s Club projects.
Composer, pianist and music director Pamela Wise continues to perform, record, collaborate and educate.
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Jazz Poems
IN PRAISE OF BUDDY BOLDEN
- You have shown me dissipation, the tome, the rhythm, and cool sonorous blue…
- The right consciousness is always dream, it wakes in us ideology and topos.
- Not only the blues like melic, like persimmon and soda.
- Not anything, just blonde sorrow.
- I can’t wait to choose my own fall, the bass and pica.
- Did you taste the drug, the white words of sound…
- Nothing will prepare me, not even drums and delusion. I wander in their halls, their tantrums. But mine was apparatus and rebellion. The plumb edifice of transgression.
- When we play, nothing else matters, not the placards on the train, not the yet and the how. We find plums and pendulums.
- I told them that this was not enough. No horses, no shoulders, no fields to drown, only blankcotton testimony and confession.
- When we leave, we leave the pipe and parts of the body. You whistle like a factory. Me, like an empty room.
- I would like to test myself, and remove these old tunings and feathers, these tulips.
- Do it then. Leave for the salty tincture of the city, the North.
- The leaves were all cankered when I returned. Like a salvo I burned. Not for them. Not for this place. But for this rotten reflection. The only true rejection of process.
- You meant to leave the phonetic terror of the moon, the New Orleans horn of sand and distraction.
- Leave me to fall. For this is all that I know. I accept, I accept this black stone of mine, mine own three lives, my crime.
LUCIEN QUINCY
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jon Larsen was born on January 7, 1959 in Bærum, Norway and when he was in his early teens he learned rock and soul songs on an acoustic steel-string guitar. Through friends, he learned about blues, jazz, flamenco, and classical guitar. After he heard Tears by Django Reinhardt on the radio, he decided that this is how he wanted his guitar to sound. At seventeen he formed a string trio and had his first professional job.
The 1970s Jon worked mainly as a painter until 1980 when he started the Hot Club de Norvege with guitarists Per Frydenlund and bassist Svein Aarbostad. They had a hit record when they performed with pop singer Lillebjørn Nilsen. He has worked with Chet Baker, Philip Catherine, Stéphane Grappelli, Warne Marsh, Biréli Lagrène, Babik Reinhardt and Jimmy Rosenberg. He has produced more than 450 jazz records for the label he founded, Hot Club Records.
He has led a group of musicians who played with Zappa and started the label Zonic Entertainment to record musicians who played with him .including Arthur Barrow, Jimmy Carl Black, Bruce Fowler, Bunk Gardner, Tommy Mars, and Don Preston.
A documentary Symphonic Django was released in 2008 about Larsen and guitar virtuoso Jimmy Rosenberg titled Jon & Jimmy, and appeared in the documentary film Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds In 2012.
Gypsy jazz guitarist, record producer, painter, and amateur scientific researcher Jon Larsen, who founded the group Hot Club de Norvège and received the Buddy Award for his lifelong contribution to jazz, continues to perform, record and produce.
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