The Jazz Voyager
Porta Jazz: Sirok Sokak, Bitola, Macedonia / Telephone: ++38947236615 / Contact: Vlatko Hristovski-Dado / Situated on the main street called Sirok Sokak, simply translated as Wide Street, I will finally arrive at my destination, Porta Jazz. It is a really good jazz bar that has a nice atmosphere and superb music. Wanting to hear every note the musicians are offering I will arrive when the doors open at 9:00pm and take in a couple of sets before the 1:00am close. I will see if Porta Jazz really does provide their claim of a relaxed and friendly atmosphere for enjoying the best international and local jazz. Macedonia is old enough to be placed in the annals of antiquity around the year 356 BC that Philip II, father of Alexander The Great established.
Next Stop: Brazil! Jet-setting around the globe is taking me back below the equator to the country I love – Brazil. Having driven back to Skopje I jump on the plane at 3:50pm and three stops and nearly 22 hours later i arrive in Curitiba at 10:39am. Time to get to the hotel, relax for a while before heading out into the city and enjoying the people , the food and the music that’s always in the streets. I’ll have a leisurely dinner before heading out for some good music.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bunny Berigan was born Rowland Bernard Berigan on November 2, 1908 in Hilbert, Wisconsin. Raised in Fort Lake the child prodigy learned violin and trumpet at an early age and played in local orchestras by his late teens. He joined the Hal Kemp Orchestra in mid 1930 recording his first trumpet solos and touring England. Upon his return in ’31 he was a sought after studio musician and recorded his first vocal “At Your Command”, then worked with the bands of Paul Whiteman and Abe Lyman by 1934.
He continued freelancing in the recording and radio studios, most notably with the Dorsey Brothers and on Glenn Miller’s earliest recording date as a leader in 1935, an association that graduated him to fame in his own right when he joined Benny Goodman’s re-formed band that included drummer Gene Krupa. The band made the legendary tour that ended with their unexpectedly headline-making stand at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles, California, which has often been credited with the “formal” launch of the swing era.
Berigan went on to work with Tommy Dorsey recording one of his signature solos on the hit “Marie”, recorded under his own name his biggest hit “I Can’t Get Started”, led his own big band for three years that included Buddy Rich and Ray Conniff. He was a fixture on CBS Radio’s coast-to-coast broadcasts of Saturday Night Swing Club from 1937 to 1940, that helped further popularize jazz as the swing era climbed to its peak.
Already a heavy drinker and the band failing financially, Bunny drinking took a toll suffering pneumonia and then stricken with cirrhosis and ignoring his doctor’s advice, trumpeter, composer and bandleader Bunny Berigan, who modeled his playing in part on Louis Armstrong’s style lost his battle with alcoholism passing away of a massive hemorrhage on June 2, 1942 at age 33.
Dose A Day – Blues Away
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Hollywood On 52nd Street
As Time Goes By is a now a jazz classic song that was originally written by Herman Hupfeld in 1931. However, it didn’t become most famous until it appeared in the 1942 romantic drama film Casablanca. Based on the un-produced stage play “Everybody Comes To Rick’s”, it was sung by the character Sam played by Dooley Wilson. The song was voted No. 2 on the AFI’s 100 Years…100 Songs Special, commemorating the best songs in film. It was used as a fanfare for Warner Bros. Pictures since 1999 and was the title and theme song of the 1990s British comedy series As Time Goes By.
The movie starred Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid the film also featured Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Dooley Wilson.
The Story: Set during World War II, it focuses on a man torn between, in the words of one character, “love and virtue”. He must choose between his love for a woman and helping her Czech Resistance leader husband escape the Vichy-controlled Moroccan city of Casablanca to continue his fight against the Nazis.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Pucho was born Henry Lee Brown on November 1, 1938 in New York City. Living in Harlem he cultivated a love for jazz, rhythm and blues, and mambo and largely self-taught imitating his favorite musician, Tito Puente. He started playing timbales professionally in New York City at the age of sixteen in bands led by Joe Panama in Harlem and the Bronx.
He formed his own band, Pucho & His Latin Soul Brothers in 1959 as a Latin jazz, soul jazz and R&B group and appeared at Count Basie’s club and a Carnegie Hall festival. Over the course of the group’s tenure of thirteen years, of the many musicians that worked in his group, Chick Corea is listed among them.
From 1966 until ’74 he recorded a series of albums for Prestige Records, and due to their musical range recorded with George Benson, Lonnie Smith and Gene Ammons. Disbanding the group in the mid Seventies he concentrated on more traditional Latin music. During the late ‘70s and ‘80s he worked the Catskill Mountain resorts with a small trio until a resurgence of interest through the acid-jazz movement in the Nineties gave way for him to re-form the group and tour Britain and Japan.
Pucho, the timbales player who just may have been to eclectic for a wider jazz audience acceptance, has since released new material, had his early material reissued and continues to perform.
Give A Gift Of Jazz – Share
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Teo Macero was born Attilio Joseph Macero on October 30, 1925 in Glen Falls, New York. After serving in the Navy he moved to New York City in 1948, attended the Julliard School of Music, studied composition and graduated from with Bachelor and Master degrees.
In 1953, Macero co-founded Charles Mingus’ Jazz Composers Workshop, and became a major contributor to the New York City avant-garde jazz scene. As a composer, Macero wrote in an atonal style as well as in third Stream, a synthesis of jazz and classical music. He performed live, and recorded several albums with Mingus and the other Workshop members over the next three years, including Jazzical Moods in 1954 and Jazz Composers Workshop the next year.
Macero found greater fame as a producer joining Columbia Records in 1957 producing hundreds of records while at the label, working with dozens of artists including Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Johnny Mathis, Count Basie, Dave Brubeck, Tony Bennett, Dave Brubeck, Tony Bennett and Stan Getz, and was responsible for signing Mingus, Thelonious Monk and Charlie Byrd.
Over the course of his twenty-year tenure as a producer at Columbia he produced most of the Miles Davis catalogue including most notably Kind Of Blue and Bitches Brew along with Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, all three of which became three of the most influential jazz albums of all time. Beyond jazz, he produced a number of Broadway original cast recordings including A Chorus Line and Bye Bye Birdie as well as the soundtrack to the film The Graduate.
After his tenure at Columbia, Macero continued as a player and producer on other projects, working with Herbie Hancock, Michel Legrand, Wallace Roney, Shirley MacLaine, Vernon Reid, Robert Palmer and DJ Logic.
He recorded several albums as a leader and as a sideman with Mingus, contributed compositions to other albums, was included as an alternate soundtrack to the 1958 short experimental film Bridges-Go-Round. In the 1970s and 1980s, Macero again released a handful of his own albums, including Time Plus Seven, Impressions of Charles Mingus, and Acoustical Suspension, before founding his own label, Teorecords, in 1999. Subsequently, he released over a dozen albums of original compositions, and continued to produce reissues of Miles Davis and other artists for various record companies.
Teo Macero, saxophonist, composer and producer passed away on February 19, 2008.
Put A Dose In Your Pocket
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