Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Alphonse Floristan Picou was born on October 19, 1878 in New Orleans, Louisiana into a prosperous middle-class Creole of Color family in downtown NOLA. Taking to music early by 16, he was working as a professional musician on both the guitar and clarinet, concentrating on the latter. To appease his family’s frown on music he trained and worked as a tinsmith, but in demand as a clarinetist, he made most of his living from music.
He played classical music with the Creole section’s Lyre Club Symphony Orchestra and played with various dance bands and brass bands including those of Bouboul Fortunea Augustat, Bouboul Valentin, Oscar DuConge, Manuel Perez, Freddie Keppard, Bunk Johnson, the Excelsior Brass Band, the Olympia Brass Band among others.
Due to his light-skin Picou sometimes worked with white bands as well in his youth. He was one of the early musicians playing in the new style that was developing in the city, not yet known as “jazz”. He sometimes played with Buddy Bolden, perhaps the most important force in the musical change. He was an influence for many of the up and coming younger clarinetists. His subtle variations are usually more melodic embellishments than what would later be called improvisation.
At least once he went north to Chicago, Illinois around 1917 and briefly to New York City in the early 1920s. Not liking life up North, he spent most of his career in his home city, writing tunes for King Oliver that included Alligator Hop and Olympia Rag.
Clarinetist and arranger Alphonse Picou, perhaps best known for originating the clarinet part on the standard High Society, passed away on February 4, 1961 in New Orleans.
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The Quarantined Jazz Voyager
Stone Flower is the sixth studio album by Antônio Carlos Jobim. Recorded over a period of seven sessions in 1970 on March 16, April 23, 24, 29, and May 8, 20, and 22nd by Rudy Van Gelder at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. The album was produced by Creed Taylor, the album was released on July 7, 1970 on CTI Records. The album peaked at #18 on the Jazz Albums chart in 1971 and #196 on the Billboard 200.
Track Listing | 33:47 All tracks composed by Antônio Carlos Jobim, except where noted- Tereza My Love ~ 4:24
- Children’s Games ~ 3:30
- Choro ~ 2:10
- Brazil (Ary Barroso) ~ 7:25
- Stone Flower ~ 3:21
- Amparo ~ 3:41
- Andorinha ~ 3:32
- God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun ~ 2:23
- Sabiá ~ 3:58
- Antônio Carlos Jobim – piano, electric piano, guitar, vocals
- Harry Lookofsky – violin
- Joe Farrell – soprano saxophone
- Urbie Green – trombone
- Hubert Laws – flute
- Ron Carter – double bass
- João Palma – drums
- Airto Moreira – percussion
- Everaldo Ferreira – percussion
- Eumir Deodato – guitar, arranger
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Emanuel Perez was born on December 28, 1871 in New Orleans, Louisiana into a Creole of Color family of Spanish, French and African descent. At the turn of the century, he became a member of the Onward Brass Band, leading it from 1903 to 1930. The Onward Brass Band was one of the most respected of its day that included King Oliver, Peter Bocage, Henry Kimball, Lorenzo Tio, Luis Tio, George Baquet, Isidore Barbarin, and Benny Williams. The Perez and Oliver two cornet, or “trumpet” team, was one of the most renowned in New Orleans.
Manuel started his own brass band, called the Imperial Orchestra, which operated from 1901 to 1908. A move north to Chicago, Illinois in 1915 saw him playing with Charles Elgar’s Creole Orchestra at the Arsonia Cafe and also with the Arthur Sims Band. Returning to the Crescent City in the Twenties, he played in Storyville, on steamboat excursions with Fate Marable and in parades with the Maple Leaf Orchestra.
Suffering a stroke in 1930, he left music during this period to work with his brother, who owned a moving company, while he ran the used furniture store. Cornetist Manuel Perez, who was a sight-reader and highly technical musician, He would go on to suffer a series of strokes that left him disabled and eventually caused his death in 1946 in New York City.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
William Christopher Handy was born on November 16, 1873 in a log cabin built by his grandfather in Florence, Alabama. Because his father believed musical instruments were tools of the devil, he purchased his first guitar without his parents’ permission, that he secretly saved for by picking berries and nuts and making lye soap. Upon seeing the guitar his father ordered him to return it, but also arranged short-lived organ lessons, moving on to learn to play the cornet. Secretly he joined a local band, purchased a cornet from a fellow band member and spent every free minute practicing it.
After working for a time on a “shovel brigade” at the McNabb furnace, in 1892 Handy travelled to Birmingham, Alabama, passed a teaching exam and began teaching. Finding the compensation too little, he quit, got a job in a pipe plant, put together a small string orchestra and taught musicians how to read music. He later organized the Lauzetta Quartet, ventured to St. Louis, Missouri and founding working conditions deplorable, so they disbanded.
Handy would go on to Evansville, Indiana, play the cornet in the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, join a successful band that performed throughout the neighboring cities and states and worked as a first tenor vocalist in a minstrel show, a band director, choral director, cornetist and trumpeter.
At the age of 23, he was the bandmaster of Mahara’s Colored Minstrels and over a three-year tour, they toured to Chicago, throughout Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Cuba and Alabama at the end. Weary of life on the road, he and his wife, Elizabeth, settled in his nearby hometown of Florence and he became a faculty member at Alabama and Mechanical University from 1900 to 1902.
W.C. traveled throughout Mississippi, listening to various styles of black popular music, and with his remarkable memory would recall and transcribe the music later. He rejoined the Mahara Minstrels, toured the Midwest and Pacific Northwest, and became the director of a black band in Clarksdale, Mississippi. By 1909 he and his band moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where the publication of his Memphis Blues sheet music introduced his style of 12-bar blues, credited as the inspiration for the foxtrot dance step. By the time he was 40, he had established his musical style, his popularity had greatly increased, he was a prolific composer and a successfully profitable music publisher.
He founded the Handy Record Company, gained widespread popularity with the Bessie Smith recording of his Saint Louis Blues with Louis Armstrong, published several books including an autobiography and went blind after a fall from a subway platform. He later suffered a stroke and on March 28, 1958, W. C. Handy, The Father of the Blues, passed away from bronchial pneumonia at Sydenham Hospital in New York City.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Scott Joplin was November 24, 1867 or 1868 in Northeast Texas into a musical family of railway laborers and developed his musical knowledge with the help of local teachers. Growing up in Texarkana, he formed a vocal quartet, and taught mandolin and guitar. During the late 1880s he left his job as a laborer with the railroad, and travelled around the Southern states as an itinerant musician.
By 1893 he was in Chicago, Illinois for the World’s Fair and played a major part in making ragtime a national craze by 1897. Joplin moved to Sedalia, Missouri in 1894, earned a living as a piano teacher and taught future ragtime composers Arthur Marshall, Scott Hayden and Brun Campbell. He began publishing music in 1895, and publication of his “Maple Leaf Rag” in 1899 brought him fame. This piece had a profound influence on subsequent writers of ragtime and brought the composer a steady income for life. Though he never reached this level of success again, he would frequently have financial problems, causing him to lose a be forever lost, the score to his first opera A Guest of Honor for non-payment of bills.
Joplin moved to St. Louis in 1901, continued composing and publishing music, and regularly performed in the St. Louis community. In 1907, a move to New York City had him searching for a producer for a new opera, Treemonisha, which, went beyond the limitations of his then famous music and was not well received when partially staged in 1915.
In 1916 he descended into dementia as a result of syphilis. He was admitted to a mental institution in January 1917, and died there three months later on April 1st at the age of 49. Scott Joplin death is widely considered to mark the end of ragtime as a mainstream music format, and in the next several years it evolved with other styles into stride, jazz and eventually big band swing. His music was rediscovered and returned to popularity in the early 1970s with the release of a million-selling album recorded by Joshua Rifkin. Several of his compositions including The Entertainer were featured in the Academy Award winning 1973 movie The Sting, and his opera Treemonisha was finally produced in full to wide acclaim in 1972. In 1976, Joplin was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize. During his lifetime her composed 44 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet and two operas.
Give The Gift Of Knowledge
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