Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Alfred “Fred” Böhler was born July 26, 1912 in Zurich, Switzerland.  He started on violin as a child but later switched to piano. He led his own ensemble starting in 1936, which featured Eddie Brunner and Hazy Osterwald, among others, as sidemen. This group made several tours of Switzerland during World War II and recorded copiously for Columbia Records.

In 1943, Böhler conducted an orchestral ensemble that played symphonic jazz. While he recorded most often on piano, he also used Hammond organ early in a jazz context. He would eventually play with Marcel Bianchi, Edith Piaf, Josephine Baker, and Pierre Cavall among others.

Pianist, Hammond organist and bandleader Fred Böhler transitioned on January 10, 1995 in  Zumikon, Switzerland.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Günter Lenz was born July 25, 1938 in Frankfurt am Main. He first taught himself guitar and studied with Carlo Bohländer, playing jazz in the clubs of the U.S. Army from 1954 onwards. During national service in 1959/1960 he switched to the bass.

In 1961 Albert Mangelsdorff picked him up as a member of the Albert Mangelsdorff Quintet. Since then Lenz has also become a member of the hr-jazz ensemble, for which he arranged and composed. 1965 saw him working in the Krzysztof Komeda Quintet, recording the album Astigmatic. Three years later he was playing with Joachim Kühn and Aldo Romano in a band led by Barney Wilen at the Berlin Jazz Days. With The German All Stars he toured internationally in 1969 and 1971.

He played with the George Russell Sextet, and with a band led by Leon Thomas. This allowed him to collect big band experience. During the 1970s he was a member of the Kurt Edelhagen Big Band and with Peter Herbolzheimer Rhythm Combination & Brass. He would go on to be engaged for their concert tours and record productions by Chet Baker, Coleman Hawkins, Oliver Nelson and Benny Bailey, as well as German musicians such as Eugen Cicero, Horst Jankowski and Volker Kriegel.

Dipping into the blues field in 1972 Günter played with Lightning Hopkins. The mid-1970s saw Lenz joining drummer Peter Giger in Clarinet Contrast, an avant garde band around the clarinetists Perry Robinson, Theo Jörgensmann, Bernd Konrad and Michel Pilz. As a member of the Manfred Schoof Quintet he recorded for ECM/Japo.

In the late 1970s Günter founded his combo, Günter Lenz Springtime, an international jazz-fusion band with members as Bob Degen, Claus Stötter, Frank St. Peter, Johannes Faber, Leszek Zadlo and Joe Nay. He recorded as part of the Berlin Contemporary Jazz Orchestra. In 1991 he recorded “Life at the Montreux Music Festival” in trio-formation with Uli Lenz and Allen Blairman

Lenz created orchestral arrangements for Plácido Domingo, and from 2001 to 2006 as a professor  he taught bass at the Musikhochschule Stuttgart. During that period of education he received the Hesse state Jazz prize awarded by the State Minister for Higher Education, Research and the Arts Udo Corts.

Bassist Günter Lenz continues to perform, compose, arrange and educate.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Robert Eberly was born Robert Eberle on July 24, 1916 in Mechanicville, New York. He changed the spelling of his surname slightly to the homonymous Eberly. His father was a policeman, sign-painter, and tavern-keeper.

He was hired by the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra in 1935 shortly after winning an amateur hour contest on Fred Allen’s radio show.  He stayed with Jimmy Dorsey after Tommy left to form his own band and would be a fixture with the orchestra until drafted into the service late in 1943. In the early 1940s the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra scored a string of hits featuring Bob and Helen O’Connell, with Eberly singing a slow, romantic baritone version of songs such as Amapola and Tangerine, followed by a lighter, up-tempo reprise by O’Connell. He recorded the original version of I’m Glad There Is You in 1942 for Dorsey’s orchestra on Decca Records. The song has become a jazz and pop standard.

In 1953, Eberly and Helen O’Connell headlined a summer replacement program for Perry Como’s CBS television show. The program also featured Ray Anthony and his orchestra.

In 1980, he had one lung removed but still continued to sing. Vocalist Bob Eberly transitioned from cancer on November 17, 1981 in Glen Burnie, Maryland, at the age of 65.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Khan Jamal was born Warren Robert Cheeseboro in Jacksonville, Florida on July 23, 1946. His father worked as an entrepreneur, his mother a stride pianist. Raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and began playing the vibraphone during the later part of his teenage years in the mid Sixties. He went on to attend the Granoff School of Music and the Combs College of Music.

Jamal first played for a group called Cosmic Forces during the later part of the 1960s. He played with the Sun Ra Arkestra. After leaving the group, he teamed up with several of its former members to play with Sunny Murray’s group Untouchable Factor.

He later co-founded Sounds of Liberation with Byard Lancaster in 1970. The band released its only album titled New Horizons, two years later on its own record label Dogtown. However, it gained little impact outside Philadelphia at the time. In addition to leading his own groups, Jamal performed with Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society in the 1980s, Joe Bonner, Billy Bang, Charles Tyler and others. His first solo album was Drum Dance to the Motherland, a live recording that was held in a small café in his hometown and first released in 1973.

His style connected the two contrasting forms of free jazz and jazz fusion. He was also known for his skill of shifting modes and moods. Vibraphone and marimba player Khan Jamal suffered from kidney failure prior to his transition on January 10, 2022, at the Chestnut Hill Hospital in Philadelphia. He was 75.

Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Gorni Kramer was born Francesco Kramer Gorni on July 22, 1913 in Rivarolo Mantovano, Lombardy, Italy. Learning music at a very young age, thanks to his musician father. The first instrument he learned how to play was the accordion, with which he performed as a child in his father’s band.

He studied double bass at the Conservatory in Parma, Italy and obtained his diploma in 1930. He started working as a musician for dance bands and in 1933 at 20, he formed his own jazz group. This new American musical genre was forbidden by the Italian fascist regime, but Gorni got to know it thanks to some fellow musicians who worked on board the liners connecting Europe and North America.

In the middle of the Thirties he became a successful songwriter, composing hit songs through the Thirties. In spite of his songs’ popularity, Gorni and his orchestra were still ignored by the Italian state radio EIAR, who boycotted them because they played jazz.

During World War II he worked with Natalino Otto, a singer also banned by EIAR because of swing and wrote one of her greatest hits. In 1949 he started working for Garinei and Giovannini, a very famous duo of impresarios who authored and produced musical comedies, an association that lasted ten years.

Kramer debuted on television in 1957 with Il Musichiere music show, composing the show’s theme song with other shows ensued. In the mid-1960s he gradually reduced his public performances, but he continued to work as a music publisher and a TV author.

Songwriter, bassist and bandleader Gorni Kramer transitioned from a heart attack on October 26, 1995 in Milan, Italy.

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