Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Hazy Osterwald was born Rolf Osterwald on February 18, 1922 in Bern, Switzerland. He began his career as a pianist, arranged for Fred Böhler in the late 1930s and joined him as a trumpeter in 1941. Around this time he also worked with Edmond Cohanier, Philippe Brun, Bob Huber, Eddie Brunner and Teddy Stauffer.

Hazy led his own ensemble starting in 1944, recording through the 1970s, with sidemen including Ernst Höllerhagen and Werner Dies. In the late 1940s he recorded with Gil Cuppini and played at the Paris Jazz Fair with Sidney Bechet and Charlie Parker. Trumpeter, vibraphonist, vocalist and bandleader Hazy Osterwald passed away on February 26, 2012 in Lucerne Switzerland.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Harry Dial was born on February 17, 1907 in Birmingham, Alabama who became one of the classic drummers of the early jazz world. His specialty was keeping time behind artists known for their fun and pep. In fact, a glance at Dial’s discography is something like a partial scan of the most entertaining albums of all time, because such a list would surely include sides by two guys named Louis, Armstrong and Jordan, as well as Fats Waller and Ella Fitzgerald.

Harry was a solid, energetic drummer who pushed the beat forward without cluttering the airspace. His use of the sock cymbal and his fat, marching band snare drum sound are often imitated. He was also one of the rare breeds of singing drummers, the vocal side of his talents usually only exposed when he was in charge of the band. He was allowed to make comments on records with Fats Waller, the best example of which is the introduction to the upbeat Don’t Let It Bother You.

Dial’s career as a bandleader included a series of sides for Vocalion beginning in 1930. The group, whose recordings included the deadly “Poison,” was known as Harry Dial’s Blusicians, and included players such as banjoist Eursten Woodfork, trumpeter Shirley Clay, and the fine alto saxophonist Lester Boone. Some of this material has been reissued on the compilation Chicago 1929-1930: That’s My Stuff.

He was already recording with Armstrong around this time and began cutting tracks with Waller as a member of Fats Waller’s Rhythm before the middle of that decade. It might have taken him an additional ten years to master the art of playing the maracas since he seemed to find a way to include the delicate shakers on just about every funny style of music he played with Jordan beginning in the mid-’40s when he joined the Tympany Five.

In the late ’40s, he took another crack at recording under his own name, producing “Prince’s Boogie” for Decca with one of the earliest versions of the catchy “Diddy Wah Diddy” on the flipside. Dial liked to write as well, beginning with a song entitled “Don’t Play Me Cheap,” recorded by the famous Armstrong. His songs were also recorded by the merely infamous, a category that would not exist if it didn’t include a singer named Bea Booze, who cut Dial’s “Catchin’ as Catch Can” for Decca in 1942.

Many years later, the drummer published his All This Jazz About Jazz: The Autobiography of Harry Dial. The dapper, suave musician would have felt it important that he is most certainly not the Harry Dial who made it into the Guinness Book of World Records by claiming to have gone 78 years without bathing. Drummer Harry Dial passed away on January 25, 1987 in New York City.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Howard Riley was born on John Howard Riley on February 16, 1943  in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England. He began learning the piano at the age of six and started playing jazz as early as the age of 13. He studied at the University of Wales from 1961 to 1966, then Indiana University, and finishing up at York University in 1970). While studying he played jazz professionally, with Evan Parker (1966) and then with his own trio (1967–76), with Barry Guy on bass and Alan Jackson, Jon Hiseman, and Tony Oxley for periods on drums.

He worked with John McLaughlin in the late Sixties, the London Jazz Composers Orchestra and Oxley’s ensemble through the Seventies to 1981. He and Guy worked in a trio with Phil Wachsmann from 1976 well into the 1980s and played solo piano throughout North America and Europe. He played in a quartet, with Guy, Trevor Watts, and John Stevens, did duo work with Keith Tippett, with Jaki Byard, and with Elton Dean. From 1985 he worked in a trio with Jeff Clyne and Tony Levin.

Pianist and composer Howard Riley who worked in jazz and experimental music idioms continues to teach at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and Goldsmiths, University of London, where he has taught since the 1970s.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Nathan Tate Davis was born on February 15, 1937 in Kansas City, Kansas and eventually would travel extensively around Europe after World War II. He moved to Paris in 1962 but would return to the U.S. by 1969, holding a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University and was a professor of music and director of jazz studies at the University of Pittsburgh, an academic program that he helped initiate.

He was the founder and director of the University of Pittsburgh Annual Jazz Seminar and Concert, the first academic jazz event of its kind in the United States. He also helped to found the university’s William Robinson Recording Studio as well as establish the International Academy of Jazz Hall of Fame located in the school’s William Pitt Union and the University of Pittsburgh-Sonny Rollins International Jazz Archives.

One of Davis’ best known musical associations was heading the Paris Reunion Band from 1985 to1989, which at different times included Nat Adderley, Kenny Drew, Johnny Griffin, Slide Hampton, Joe Henderson, Idris Muhammad, Dizzy Reece, Woody Shaw, and Jimmy Woode. He also toured and recorded with the post-bop ensemble leading Roots which he formed in 1991. He composed various pieces, including a 2004 opera entitled Just Above My Head.

He retired as director of the Jazz Studies Program at Pitt in 2013. Davis also served as the editor of the International Jazz Archives Journal. Over the course of his career, he recorded eighteen albums as a leader.

Multi-instrumentalist Nathan Davis, who played the tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, and flute, and was awarded the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation’s BNY Mellon Jazz Living Legacy Award at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, passed away in Palm Beach, Florida on  April 8, 2018 at the age of 81.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Dwike Mitchell was born Ivory Mitchell Jr. on February 14, 1930 and raised in Dunedin, Florida. He began playing piano around the age of three after his father, who had a job driving a garbage truck, brought home an old piano discarded by its owner. With the help of his mother, who made him play exercises and scales, and a cousin, who had been taking piano lessons herself, he soon displayed an exceptional aptitude for the instrument. He began performing in public at the age of five. His mother, a soloist in her church choir, needed an accompanist and gave the job to her young son. Before long he was playing for the entire Sunday morning service, a role he would continue to perform through the age of seventeen while attending Pinellas High School.

In 1946, Mitchell enlisted and was stationed at Lockbourne Air Force Base, at that time an all-black facility renowned for its excellent music program, where he was assigned to the band. It was here that he heard the music of Rachmaninoff that impacted his piano style development. Post-discharge from the Army, he went to the Philadelphia Musical Academy, where he studied under pianist Agi Jambor. After graduation, he joined Lionel Hampton and changed his name from Ivory to Dwike, at his mother’s suggestion, based on several family names.

By the mid-Fifties, he reunited with French horn player Willie Ruff, when he joined the Hampton orchestra. In 1955 the two men left the orchestra to form the Mitchell-Ruff jazz duo. The duo placed an emphasis on introducing American jazz music in parts of the world unfamiliar with the idiom. Among these, were visits to the Soviet Union in 1959 and to China in 1981. Throughout his duo and trio career they recorded fourteen albums, he also taught piano. In 2012, after becoming ill, he returned to his native South, spending his last months in Jacksonville, Florida. On April 7, 2013 pianist Dwike Mitchell passed away from pancreatic disease.

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