Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Raymond Ventura was born on April 16, 1908 into a Jewish family in Paris, France and learned to play the piano as a child. By the time he turned 17 in 1925 he was the pianist for the Collegiate Five, which recorded as the Collegians for Columbia Records beginning in 1928 and then for Decca in the 1930s.

Later he led the Collegians and it became a dance orchestra resembling a big band. His sidemen included Alix Combelle, Philippe Brun, and Guy Paquinet. In the early Forties, Ray led a big band in South America and in France during the rest of the decade.

One of his band’s popular songs from 1936 was Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise in which the Marquise is told by her servants that everything is fine at home except for a series of escalating calamities. It was seen as a metaphor for France’s obliviousness to the approaching war.

Between 1931 and 1953 he appeared with his big band in four films, American Love, Beautiful Star, Women of Paris, and A Hundred Francs A Second. Pianist and bandleader Ray Ventura, who helped popularize jazz in France in the 1930s, March 29, 1979 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Sy Johnson was born on April 15, 1930 in New Haven, Connecticut and learned to play the piano in his youth. He first performed in New York City with Charles Mingus at the jazz club Showplace, with Booker Ervin on tenor, Ted Curson on trumpet, Dannie Richmond on drums, and Mingus on bass. and on his first night with Mingus, Eric Dolphy performed on alto, bass clarinet, and flute.

In 1971, eleven years later, Mingus gave Johnson Let My Children Hear Music to arrange, which featured two Mingus pieces, Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife (Are Some Jiveass Slippers) and Don’t Be Afraid, the Clowns Afraid Too. The album’s emergence was heralded with a live concert, Mingus And Friends At Philharmonic Hall, also arranged by Johnson and released as an album.

Performing We Did It on Soul Train in 1973 and continued to work with Mingus until his death from Lou Gehrig’s disease in 1979. Mingus recorded two of Johnson’s compositions, Wee and For Harry Carney, and nominated Johnson for a Guggenheim award following his own in Jazz Composition.

Johnson continues to work with Sue Mingus arranging charts for all the Mingus repertory ensembles—the Mingus Big Band, the Mingus Orchestra and the Mingus Dynasty. He would go on to collaborate with arrangements for Joe Williams, Frank Sinatra, Wes Montgomery, Roy Eldridge, Ben Webster, Quincy Jones, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Mel Torme, Terry Gibbs, Lee Konitz and Sarah Vaughan, among others.

He has also worked on Broadway and in films such as the1984 movie The Cotton Club. Arranger Sy Johnson is also a jazz photographer, writer, pianist, singer, and teacher.

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Three Wishes

When the Baroness asked Art Davis what he would have as his three wishes he said: 

1. 1. “Tho be successful and to help people.”

   2. “To have anything and everything I want.”

   3. “To be loved and admired by everyone.”

*Excerpt from Three Wishes: An Intimate Look at Jazz Greats ~ Compiled and Photographed by Pannonica de Koenigswarter

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Bill Harris was born on April 14, 1925 in Nashville, North Carolina He studied guitar in Washington, D.C. at the Columbia School of Music and in 1950 began playing with the R&B vocal group The Clovers. He remained with the group through 1958, playing on many of their most successful hit records.

During this time he also recorded as a jazz musician, including two LPs for EmArcy Records, his 1956 self-titled Bill Harris and The Harris Touch In 1957. Through the Sixties, he played in the DC area and in the 1970s taught music, and published several books on guitar technique.

He was awarded a compositional fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1972. Moving to France he performed there for much of 1972-1973, and after returning to the States, Harris began managing his own jazz club, Pigfoot, in the DC, but by 1981 the club was repossessed by the Internal Revenue Service due to back taxes.

Guitarist Bill Harris worked as an impresario late in life, organizing and presenting concerts in a variety of genres until passing away on December 6, 1988, Washington, D.C.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Del Porter was born Delmar Smith Porter on April 13, 1902 in Newberg, Oregon. He first began singing in 1928 as a member of the Foursome, which came to prominence in the Ethel Merman Broadway hit shows, Girl Crazy in 1930 and 1934’s Anything Goes. With the Foursome’s arranger and Porter’s lifelong friend, Raymond M. Johnson, he reorganized the quartet around 1946 as the Sweet Potato Tooters, one of the hottest bands in the country at the time. He would go on to record as a leader, toured with Glenn Miller, and recorded with Bing Crosby, Dick Powell, and Red Nichols.

They recorded extensively for Decca, but a long dry spell followed the quartet’s appearance in the Eleanor Powell movie Born to Dance which resulted in the creation of a six-piece group the Feather Merchants, patterned after the cockeyed musical humor of Frank & Milt Britton and Freddie Fisher’s Schnickelfritz Band. This band evolved into City Slickers, a band he co-founded with Spike Jones about the time the group split up.

The zany band that revolutionized the field of comedy music during World War II, from their earliest days, as lead vocalist, clarinetist, composer, and arranger. He wrote two songs Siam and Pass the Biscuits, Mirandy which became staples of the band’s repertoire. But he was all talent and no ambition, and soon took a back seat to Jones.

After leaving the Slickers in 1945, he returned to lend his melodious voice on Spike Jones Plays the Charleston and their Bottoms Up album. In addition to his music publishing business, Tune Town Tunes, with fellow City Slicker and songwriting partner Carl Hoefle. Porter later wrote jingles for Paper Mate pens, recorded with his Sweet Potato Tooters for Capitol transcriptions, as well as Mickey Katz and Spade Cooley. He continued to dabble in songwriting in his later years.

Vocalist, saxophonist, and clarinetist Del Porter, who in the 1940s, led his own big band, passed away on October 4, 1977 in Los Angeles, California.

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