Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Gary Bruno was born in New Jersey on March 26, 1962. Showing an interest in music at the age of five he began learning drums and two yers later started studying guitar. Taking weekly lessons he showed prodigious technique and a hunger for learning music. His parents gave him a radio that he took everywhere as early as age three. It only took a short period of guitar lessons that he began to learn the songs of the day from the radio.
By age thirteen Gary had his first professional job with his band. Hired by a family friend he played a Christmas party, and that job was the first of what would become a livelihood. By his junior year in high school he was playing three to four nights a week as well as teaching. All four years of high school also found him playing first chair in the local jazz ensemble and winning outstanding soloist awards two of the four years.
After high school he began to get calls for recording sessions from unsigned local songwriters and local producers creating jingle ads for radio. Local club dates with bands served as his night job, and the days found him teaching, recording and studying guitar. The club dates kept Bruno within the New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania area with occasional outside tri-state travel.
Gary landed a seat in the Dave Mason Band, which took his playing to a national & international level. This led to playing Greenpeace concerts with John Denver. Moving to Las Vegas he got gigs playing the Las Vegas Strip as much as six nights a week. Leaving Las Vegas, he settled in Southern California where he currently resides.
Guitarist and educator Gary Bruno will continue composing, recording & performing.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Robert Philip Militello a.k.a. Bobby M. was born on March 25, 1950 in Buffalo, New York. He was groomed by the legendary Sam Scamacca at Buffalo’s iconic Lafayette High School in the 1960s.
During the Seventies, Militello went on tour with Maynard Ferguson and returned to Buffalo in the early 1980s to work as a freelance musician.
Moving to Los Angeles, California he spent the rest of the 1980s and early 1990s as a member of orchestras led by Bill Holman and Bob Florence. He toured and recorded with Dave Brubeck from 1982 to 2012.
Saxophonist and flautist Bobby Militello leads a quartet that performs concerts dedicated to Brubeck.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Hank Roberts was born on March 24, 1954 in Terre Haute, Indiana. By the early Eighties made a number of recordings for the defunct JMT label, was a featured member of the Bill Frisell Quartet, and was an important voice in many groups of saxophonist Tim Berne.
Roberts also recorded three discs with the Arcado String Trio, an improvisational chamber group featuring Mark Feldman, violin, and Mark Dresser, double bass.
The 1990s saw him leaving Frisell’s group and discontinued touring. He sporadically released records, including with the progressive folk group Ti Ti Chickapea. Leaving his hiatus in 2008, Hank began touring and performing regularly, releasing Green on the Winter & Winter label. Stefan F. Winter’s subsequent label to JMT. Three years later they released his Everything Is Alive, as well as re-releasing his entire JMT catalogue.
Cellist and vocalist Hank Roberts, who emerged with the downtown New York City jazz scene of the 1980s, continues to be associated with its post-modern tendencies.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Michael Nickolas was born on March 23, 1962 in Southington, Connecticut. A move to Boston, Massachusetts in 1980 had him attending the Berklee College of Music. After graduating Cum Laude in 1984, the guitarist became a founding member and leader of one of Boston’s most successful local acts, High Function. The group played extensively at clubs and colleges throughout New England and toured Switzerland, New York City, and recorded an eight song album in Chicago, Illinois.
After leaving High Function, he co-found and played guitar for the Boston Music Award winning R&B band, Universal Language. In addition to performing, Michael was teaching himself the art of recording, and built a home recording studio, worked as a freelance recording engineer, and has been published numerous times in the international periodical, Recording Magazine.
His home studio, Studio Nine Productions, has clients working on everything from voice over narration sessions to digital audio editing and CD creation. As a composer, Nickolas has licensed original music for NBC, ABC and CBS television’s daytime programming. In prime time, as well as Showtime.
Guitarist Michael Nickolas continues to perform, compose, record and engineer.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Sonny Burke was born Joseph Francis Burke on March 22, 1914 in Scranton, Pennsylvania and grew up in Detroit, Michigan. He attended St. Ambrose High School, where he was All-State fullback. After one year at the University of Detroit, he transferred to Duke University, where he formed and led the jazz big band known as the Duke Ambassadors.
During the Thirties Burke was a big band arranger in New York City, worked with Sam Donahue’s band, and in the 1940s and 1950s worked as an arranger for the Charlie Spivak and Jimmy Dorsey bands, among others. In 1955 he wrote, along with Peggy Lee, the songs to Disney’s Lady and the Tramp, and with John Elliot for Disney’s Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom, which won the 1953 Oscar for Best Short Subject – Cartoons.
He wrote the music for a number of popular songs, including Black Coffee and Midnight Sun, co-written with jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. The song’s lyrics were added later by Johnny Mercer. He was an active arranger, conductor and A&R man at major Hollywood record labels, especially Decca Records where he worked with Charles “Bud” Dant.
Sonny would go on to become musical director of Warner Bros. Records / Reprise Records, and was responsible for many of Frank Sinatra’s albums, producing Sinatra’s My Way, Petula Clark’s This Is My Song, written by Charles Chaplin for his movie, A Countess From Hong Kong.
Burke was the bandleader for recordings of leading singers that included Dinah Shore, Bing Crosby, The Andrews Sisters, The Mills Brothers, Ella Fitzgerald, Mel Tormé and Billy Eckstine.
Arranger, composer, big band leader and producer Sonny Burke died from cancer on May 31, 1980, in Santa Monica, California, aged 66.
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