Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Joseph Paul Locke was born on March 18, 1959 in Palo Alto, California but grew up in Rochester, New York. A self-taught improviser, he benefited from his early studies in classical percussion and composition at the Eastman School of Music and played with Mongo Santamaria, Pepper Adams, and Dizzy Gillespie before graduating from high school.
Since moving to New York City in 1981, Locke has performed with Grover Washington, Jr., Kenny Barron, Dianne Reeves, Eddie Daniels, Jerry Gonzales’ Fort Apache Band, Rod Stewart, Beastie Boys, Eddie Henderson, Hiram Bullock, Bob Berg, Ron Carter, Jimmie Scott, Geoffrey Keezer, The Mingus Big Band and Randy Brecker among many others.
Joe has toured extensively throughout the world, both as leader and guest soloist. In 2006, 2008 and 2009 Joe Locke received the “Mallet Instrumentalist of the Year” Award, presented by the Jazz Journalist Association. His ability to play cool and funky, heady and relaxed has had him voted the #1 vibist in Down Beat Magazine’s Critic’s Poll and Brazil’s International Jazz Poll.
Locke has recorded nearly 36 projects as a bandleader, including a tribute to the music of Henry Mancini and since 2012 has released a symphonic album, an orchestra project Wishing On A Star, and Lay Down My Heart: Blues & Ballads, Vol. 1. As a producer and sideman, Joe appears on more than 65 recordings and continues to compose, perform and record.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Paul Horn was born March 17, 1930 in New York City and began playing piano at the age of 4 and the saxophone at 12. He studied the flute in 1952 at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio and then earned a master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music.
Moving to Los Angeles in 1956 Paul played with Chico Hamilton’s Quintet till 1958 and two years later recorded his debut album “Something Blue”. By now an established West Coast session player he played on the Duke
Ellington Orchestra’s Suite Thursday and during this period worked with Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett and others. In 1970, he moved Vancouver Island, formed his own and has recorded film scores for the National Film Board of Canada.
Widely known for his innovations on both metal and traditional wood flutes, Horn has recorded some truly exotic albums. Perhaps most famous of these are his “Inside” recordings, which feature airy, echoing sounds created in places of spiritual importance. While he is undoubtedly a jazz musician, many of his works defy categorization. As well as the Inside series, he has recorded other albums of jazz with musicians from a range of cultures and backgrounds including China and Africa. He continues to perform and record.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Reuben “Ruby” Braff was born on March 16, 1927 in Boston, Massachusetts He began playing in local clubs in the 1940s and in 1949, and he was hired to play with the Edmond Hall Orchestra at Boston’s Savoy Cafe. Ruby teamed up with Pee Wee Russell when the clarinet was making a comeback and they recorded several sessions for Savoy Records.
Relocating to New York in 1953 Braff easily fit into a variety of Dixieland and mainstream settings becoming in demand for band dates and recordings. He recorded as both leader and sideman working with such names as Vic Dickinson, Buck Clayton, Urbie Green, Ellis Larkins and Benny Goodman.
In the Sixties he was a member of George Wein’s Newport All-Stars but for a number of years work was hard to come by for the Dixieland player until the 70s when he formed a quartet in 1973. Following this he freelanced in different small combos and duets ultimately recording with Scott Hamilton’s quintet and sparring with guitarist Howard Alden.
Ruby Braff, cornetist and trumpeter who played in the genres of Dixieland, mainstream jazz and swing passed away on February 10, 2003 in Chatham, Massachusetts.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
James Dugald McPartland was born on March 15, 1907 in Chicago, Illinois and due to family problems caused Jimmy and his siblings to be partly raised in orphanages. After being kicked out of one orphanage for fighting, he got in further trouble with the law. Fortunately, he had started violin at age 5, then took up the cornet at 15 and credits music with turning him around.
A member of the legendary Austin High Gang in the 920s, they would study and attempt duplication of recordings by The New Orleans Rhythm Kings and visit with Louis Armstrong and King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band at Lincoln Gardens. After playing through high school, their first musical job was under the name The Blue Friars. In 1924, at age 17, McPartland was then called to New York to take Bix Beiderbecke’s place in the Wolverine Orchestra and who gave him a cornet he would play throughout his career.
From 1926 to the end of the decade, Jimmy worked with Art Kassel, the McKenzie-Condon Chicagoans, Ben Pollack and Benny Goodman, moonlighted in Broadway pit bands and played in a number of small combos. By the thirties he was back in Chicago working with his brother at the Three Deuces and working with other bands around the city. He spent time in South America, returned and led his own bands until drafted into WWII.
Upon his return McPartland worked with Willie “The Lion” Smith’s band that won a Grammy for the soundtrack to the 1954 film After Hours. He soon met and married Marian, encouraged her to form her own group and subsequently landed a long residency at the Hickory House. Jimmy went on to try his hand at acting resulting in a featured role in a Sal Mineo and Ralph Meeker episode “The Magic Horn” on The Alcoa Hour in 1956.
Over the course of his career James McPartland has played with Gene Krupa, Jack Teagarden, Eddie Condon, Pee Wee Russell, Bud Freeman, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Lil Armstrong and George “Pops” Foster to name a few while also guest starring with many bands and at festivals around the world. Although he and Marian divorced in 1970, they remained friends, worked together and remarried shortly before his death of lung cancer on March 13, 1991 in Port Washington, New York, two days shy of his 84th birthday.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Quincy Delight Jones, Jr. was born on March 14, 1933 in Chicago, Illinois. When he was ten, his family moved to Bremerton, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. He first fell in love with music when he was in elementary school, and tried nearly all the instruments in his school band before settling on the trumpet. While barely in his teens attending Garfield High, Quincy befriended then-local singer-pianist Ray Charles and the two youths formed a combo, eventually landing small club and wedding gigs.
At 18, the young trumpeter won a scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts but dropped out abruptly when he received an offer to go on the road with bandleader Lionel Hampton. The stint with Hampton led to work as a freelance arranger and settling in New York, throughout the 1950s he wrote charts for Tommy Dorsey, Gene Krupa, Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Dinah Washington, Cannonball Adderley and Ray Charles.
In 1964 Quincy won his first Grammy for Best Instrumental Arrangement of “I Can’t Stop Loving You”, in 1968 he won his second Grammy for Best Instrumental Performance with “Walking In Space” and that same year along with his songwriting partner Bob Russell became the first African Americans to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song for “The Eyes Of Love” and he became the first African American to be nominated twice within the same year when for Best Original Score for the 1967 film In Cold Blood.
His firsts would continue in 1971 when named musical director/conductor of the Academy Awards ceremony, being first to win the Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, and He is tied at 7 with sound designer Willie D. Burton as the most Oscar-nominated African American.
His musical achievements are too numerous to list as they span the gambit from film scores such as The Pawnbroker, In The Heat of the Night, The Italian Job, MacKenna’s Gold, The Getaway and The Color Purple to his jazz works “Body Heat” and “Big Band Bossa Nova” from which Soul Bossa Nova was used in the Austin Powers movies to his crowning glories with Miles Davis last release “Live at the Monteux Jazz Festival”, his work with Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and the charity song “We Are The World”. He continues to produce, conduct, arrange and compose.
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