Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Tony Kinsey was born Cyril Anthony Kinsey on October 11, 1927 in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham, England. Holding down jobs on trans-Atlantic ships during his youth, he studied while at port with Bill West in New York City and Birmingham with Tommy Webster. He had a close association with Ronnie Ball early in his life.

Kinsey led his own ensemble at the Flamingo Club in London, England through the 1950s, and recorded on more than 80 sessions between 1950 and 1977, including with Tubby Hayes, Bill Le Sage, Ronnie Scott, Johnny Dankworth, Tommy Whittle, Joe Harriott, Lena Horne, Frank Holder, Ella Fitzgerald, Ben Webster, Clark Terry, Harry Edison, Buddy DeFranco, Billie Holiday, Oscar Peterson, and Sarah Vaughan.

He performed at European jazz festivals both as a drummer and as a poet. He did some work as a session musician in the 1950s and 1960s, playing on records by Eddie Calvert, Cliff Richard, and Ronnie Aldrich. Kinsey was also a founder member of the group, The John Dankworth Seven in 1950.

He was a resident at the Florida Club, Leicester Square, in the 1950s and had his own trio in the mid~Sixties. By the mid 1980s Tony performed regularly with vibraphone player Lennie Best at venues in the London area including the South Hill Park Cellar Bar in Bracknell.

Kinsey also branched into composition; a string quartet composition of his is used in the short film On the Bridge, and he wrote arrangements for big bands in addition to music for over 100 commercials. Later in his life he wrote music for a musical based on the life of George Eliot.

In 2012, he appeared in the documentary film, No One But Me, discussing jazz vocalist Annie Ross. Drummer and composer Tony Kinsey continues to remain active as  drummer.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Roy Kral was born on October 10, 1921 in Cicero, Illinois. His sister was the renowned vocalist Irene Kral. Urged by his mother, he took classical piano lessons as a young boy but by the 1930s abandoned them to teach himself to play jazz piano by mimicking what he heard while listening to the radio under his blanket after bedtime.

During World War II, Kral served in the Army as an arranger for the Army band. After service he moved to Chicago, Illinois and joined the George Davis Quartet. As a pianist and singer for Charlie Ventura’s band, Bop for the People, in 1948 ç Kral agreed to write a new arrangement of the 1919 pop song I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles. He added a bebop sensibility and scat singing to a rather insipid pop standard, transforming it into a cool, jazzy tune and their first hit.

Meeting Jackie Cain at eighteen and just out of high school and his initial impression was not her singing until he heard her. Their voices were an octave apart and their partnership was cemented when they married in 1949 and became the duo Jackie and Roy, recording nearly 40 albums in 56 years. Coming to prominence during the bebop era they combined bebop singing with cabaret creating a very polished sound of pop, jazz and Latin music, all inflected with a jazz sensibility. The duo produced hits like Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most, You Inspire Me, and It’s A Lovely Day Today.

Pianist and vocalist Roy Kral, one half of one of the most important vocal groups in jazz, passed away at 80 of congestive heart failure on August 2, 2002 in Montclair, New Jersey. 

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Lee Wiley was born in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma on October 9, 1908. At fifteen, she left home to pursue a singing career, moving to New York City to perform on radio stations. However, her career was interrupted by a horseback riding fall that temporarily sidelined her due to blindness but recovered. At 19 she became a member of the Leo Reisman Orchestra, with whom in 1931 she recorded three songs: Take It From Me, Time On My Hands, and her composition Got The South In My Soul.

Lee began her radio career at KVOO in Tulsa, Oklahoma on the Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt program on NBC in 1932, and was featured on Victor Young’s radio show in 1933. Throughout the summer of 1936, she had her own show, Lee Wiley, on CBS.

In 1939 she recorded eight Gershwin songs on 78s with a small group for Liberty Music Shop Records. The set sold well and was followed the next year by the music of Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart, Harold Arlen, and the music of Vincent Youmans and Irving Berlin.

She sang with Paul Whiteman, and the Casa Loma Orchestra. A collaboration with composer Victor Young resulted in several songs for which Wiley wrote the lyrics, including Got The South In My Soul and Anytime, Anyday, Anywhere. In 1963, Bob Hope Theater on NBC-TV presented “Something About Lee Wiley, where Piper Laurie portrayed her in the episode, which was produced by Revue Studios.

Vocalist Lee Wiley, active from the 1930 through the 1950s, passed away on December 11, 1975.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Gerald Asher Moore was born in London, England on October 8, 1903. He spent the years between 1922-1939 working freelance in London, playing at movie palaces and nightclubs.

Among the clubs he worked in the Twenties and Thirties were Sherry’s, the Empress Rooms, Chez Rex Evans, Bag o’ Nails, 43 Club, and Mema’s. His first live appearance on BBC radio in 1936 was heralded in The Radio Times with a listing as Britain’s King of Swing.At the end of the decade he worked with Buddy Featherstonhaugh, and inthe Forties with Adelaide Hall and with Vic Lewis.

Working in Europe late in the 1940s, he played in Germany with Max Geldray, at the Paris Jazz Fair with Carlo Krahmer, and at the Palm Beach Hotel in Cannes, France. Moore played with Harry Gold and Laurie Gold in 1954-57 and worked as a pianist on the Queen Mary and Caronia into the 1960s.

From the mid-1960s pianist Gerry Moore played in London clubs until he passed away on January 29, 1993 in Twickenham, southwest London.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

George Girard was born October 7, 1930 in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana and in  high school he studied music under Johnny Wiggs and  immediately after graduating in 1946 he became a professional musician. He played and toured with the bands of Johnny Archer and Phil Zito before co~founding the band The Basin Street Six, made up mostly of friends he had grown up with, including clarinetist Pete Fountain.

The band got a regular gig at L’Enfant’s Restaurant in New Orleans, as well as regular television broadcasts over WWL. The band started receiving favorable national attention, but being dissatisfied with it, broke up the band in 1954 and founded his own band, George Girard & the New Orleans Five. Landing a residency at the Famous Door in the French Quarter, he recorded for several labels, and got a weekly broadcast on CBS’s affiliated local radio station WWL.

His ambitions to make a national name for himself were thwarted when he became ill and had to give up playing in 1956. Trumpeter George Girard, known for his great technical ability, passed away from colon cancer in New Orleans, Louisiana on January 18, 1957. He was twenty-six.

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