Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Lurlean Hunter was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi on December 1, 1919 and  was taken to Chicago, Illinois when she was two months old. She attended Englewood High School in Chicago.

Her first paid singing performance came when she appeared with Red Saunders and his orchestra at Club DeLisa on Chicago’s South Side. Hunter was signed by Discovery Records in 1950 and subsequently was a featured performer with George Shearing and his quintet at Birdland in New York City.

In 1951 Lurlean was among a group of rising young stars of jazz, that were presented at the Streamliner night club in Chicago. She performed at the Cloister Inn, where an initial four-week booking turned into a 2.5-year stay. She went on to work in New York and Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Leaving Discovery, she began recording for Atlantic Records in 1961, with Blue and Sentimental as her first album for that label. She later recorded for RCA Victor. By 1963, Hunter became the first Black performer hired by WBBM radio in Chicago. After a successful on-air audition, she became a member of the staff of the all-live Music Wagon Show. Five years later the National Educational Television jazz broadcast featured her, accompanied by the Vernel Fournier Trio.

In 1958, she sued RCA Record Division after it used her image and her name on the cover of its, not her Lonesome Gal record album. The suit alleged “unfair competition, infringement of trade name, unfair business practices, unjust enrichment and invasion of the right of privacy.” Though the court acknowledged that the album contained the song “Lonesome Gal”, and that the use of one song’s title for an album’s title was common practice in the recording industry, it  ruled in Hunter’s favor on the basis that she was the first person to “adopt and establish the name Lonesome Gal as a personality” and that name was exclusively associated with her. Damages of $22,500 were awarded to Hunter, and the company was ordered to destroy all material containing Hunter’s likeness in conjunction with “Lonesome Gal”.

Vocalist Lurlean Hunter, who was a contralto and made commercials for products such as peas and telephone directories, transitioned on March 11, 1983 in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

More Posts: bandleader,history,instrumental,jazz,music,vocal

Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Bill Reichenbach was born William Frank Reichenbach Jr. on November 30, 1949 in Takoma Park, Maryland. He began playing in high school for bands in the Washington, D.C. area and also sat in with his father’s group, playing with Milt Jackson, Zoot Sims, and others.

He went to Rochester, New York to study at the Eastman School of Music with the legendary teacher Emory Remington and after graduating joined the Buddy Rich band. He would go on to work in the Toshiko Akiyoshi – Lew Tabackin Big Band in Los Angeles, California in the mid/late 1970s. After that move he became known for music for television and film.^[2]

He played trombone on The Wiz and, with the Seawind Horns including Jerry Hey on Michael Jackson’s albums Off the Wall, Thriller, and HIStory. He was a composer for Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue. 

He recorded a solo album, Special Edition, where he is featured on bass trombone as well as tenor. Trombonist, euphoniumist, composer and session musician  Bill Reichenbach, who has collaborated on eighty-six albums with artists from Al Jarreau and George Benson to Barbra Streisand, Patti Austin and Bette Midler to Christopher Cross and Selena, continues his career in television, films, cartoons, and commercials.

More Posts: bandleader,composer,euphonium,history,instrumental,jazz,music,trombone

Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Albennie Jones was born on November 29, 1914 in Errata, Mississippi. She grew up in Gulfport, Mississippi where she sang in the Mount Holy Baptist Church, before moving to New York City in 1932. Her first professional engagement was at Elk’s Rendezvous Club, where she was so successful that she was retained for nine months. She also sang in other clubs, including Club Harlem, Village Vanguard and Murrains Café.

She first recorded, as Albinia Jones, for National Records in late 1944, with a band that included electric guitarist Leonard Ware and pianist Cliff Jackson. The following year, her accompanists also included jazz greats, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, saxophonist Don Byas and pianist Sammy Price. She was promoted at the time as the “New Queen of the Blues”, and toured widely with Blanche Calloway, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, Tiny Bradshaw and the Erskine Hawkins Orchestra.

As Albennie Jones, she recorded again with Price for Decca Records in 1947 and 1949. One of her last recordings with Price in 1949 was a rocking R&B number, Hole in the Wall, co-written by record producer Milt Gabler and featuring the line “we’re going to rock and roll at the Hole in the Wall tonight”, a notably early use of the phrase.

Following an onstage fall in the early 1950s, she had to use a crutch at her club performances, and shortly afterwards retired from the music business. Albennie Jones, also credited as Albinia, after suffering from leukemia, transitioned on June 24, 1989 in the Bronx at the age of 74.

More Posts: bandleader,history,instrumental,jazz,music,vocal

Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Jesper Thilo was born on November 28, 1941 in Copenhagen, Denmark to a pianist-actress mother and architect father. He started to play clarinet at age 11 and from 1955 to 1960 he played clarinet and trombone in various amateur Dixieland jazz bands with the occasional paid jobs as a musician. Early he knew that he wanted to become a professional jazz musician but to get an education he chose to study classical clarinet at the Royal Danish Academy of Music.

While at the Academy, Thilo joined Arnved Meyer’s orchestra from 1960 to 1964 and again from 1967 to 1974 and it was Meyer who convinced him to shift to saxophone. He would go on to play with Ben Webster, Benny Carter, Harry Edison, Roy Eldridge and Coleman Hawkins. During this part of his career his virile swing style was chiefly inspired by Webster and Hawkins and his own quintet which he put together in 1965 and co-lead with Torolf Mølgaard and Bjarne Rostvold.

From 1966 to 1989, he was a member of the DR Big Band under bandleaders Palle Mikkelborg and Thad Jones. He mainly played alto saxophone but occasionally also tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone, baritone saxophone, concert flute, clarinet or bass clarinet. Through the Eighties, Jesper played in Ernie Wilkins’ Almost Big Band. Other collaborators have included Wild Bill Davison and Niels Jørgen Steen.

By 1989, leaving the DR Big Band and Ernie Wilkins’s orchestra he led his own bands with Søren Kristiansen, Olivier Antunes, Hugo Rasmussen og Svend-Erik Nørregaard. He first recorded as a leader for Storyville Records in 1973 and in the 1980s on Storyville his sidemen at various times included Kenny Drew, Clark Terry and Harry “Sweets” Edison, and appeared on the Miles Davis album Aura.

Considered to be one of the top European straight-ahead jazz musicians of the post-1970 period, tenor saxophonist, alto saxophonist, clarinetist and flutist Jesper Thilo continues to perform and record.

More Posts: bandleader,clarinet,flute,history,instrumental,jazz,music,saxophone

Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Joe Bishop was born November 27, 1907 in Monticello, Arkansas and learned piano, trumpet, and tuba when he was young. He also played flugelhorn and mellophone. He attended Hendrix College and played professionally with the Louisiana Ramblers in 1927, including in Mexico.

Bishop played with Mart Britt, Al Katz, and Austin Wylie before joining the Isham Jones band for five years. He was a founding member of Woody Herman’s band in the 1930s, but he contracted tuberculosis in 1940 and had to leave the group. He was rehired by Herman as a staff arranger later in the 1940s, and his arrangements and compositions were recorded frequently by Herman, appearing on some 50 of Herman’s albums.

As a performer, Joe played with Cow Cow Davenport and Jimmy Gordon’s Vip Vop Band, but retired from studio work due to his health in the 1950s. Joe quit music and opened a store in Saranac Lake, New York, and later retired to Texas. His compositions include Midnight Blue, Woodchopper’s Ball, and Blue Prelude with Gordon Jenkins.

Tubist, pianist and composer Joe Bishop, whose work has been covered by musicians as diverse as Ten Years After and Lawrence Welk,  transitioned on May 12, 1976.

More Posts: composer,history,instrumental,jazz,music,piano,tuba