Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Cole Albert Porter was born into wealth on June 9, 1891 in Peru, Indiana. His musical training began at an early age, learning the violin at age six, the piano at eight and wrote his first operetta, with help from his mother at 10. His father, an amateur poet, may have influenced his son’s gifts for rhyme and meter. He matriculated through Yale writing student songs went on to Harvard law, switched to the music faculty, where he studied harmony and counterpoint.

 Classically trained, he was drawn towards musical theatre. After a slow start, he began to achieve success in the 1920s, and by the 1930s he was one of the major songwriters for the Broadway musical stage. Unlike most successful Broadway composers, Porter wrote both the lyrics and the music for his songs.

After a serious horseback riding accident in 1937, Cole was left disabled and in constant pain, but he continued to work. His shows of the early 1940s did not contain the lasting hits of his best work of the 1920s and 30s, but in 1947 he made a triumphant comeback with his most successful musical, Kiss Me Kate.

Porter wrote numerous songs that have come to be jazz standards such as Night and Day, Anything Goes, I Get A Kick Out Of You and I’ve Got You Under My Skin, It’s De-Lovely, Begin the Beguine, Just One of Those Things and In The Still of the Night. He also composed scores for films from the 1930s to the 1950s.

Cole Porter, composer and lyricist, noted for his sophisticated, suggestive lyrics, clever rhymes and complex forms, contributed to the great American songbook, passed away of kidney failure on October 15, 1964.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Lucille Bogan was born in Amory, Mississippi on April 1, 1897 but was raised in Birmingham, Alabama and at age five she was named Lucille Anderson. In 1916 she married railway man Nazareth Lee Bogan and she received her training singing in the rowdiest juke joints of the 1920s. She first recorded vaudeville songs in New York for Okeh Records in 1923. That same year she recorded “Pawn Shop Blues” in Atlanta, which was the first time a black blues singer had been recorded outside New York or Chicago.

Among the first blues singers to be recorded, in 1927 Lucille signed with Paramount Records in Chicago, recording her first big success, “Sweet Petunia”, later covered by Blind Blake. By 1930 her recordings had begun to concentrate on drinking and sex, with songs such as “Sloppy Drunk Blues”, “Tricks Ain’t Walkin’ No More” and “Black Angel Blues” later covered by B. B. King as “Sweet Little Angel”. She would later record for Brunswick Records.

Many of Bogan’s songs, most of which she wrote herself, have thinly-veiled humorous sexual references with the theme of prostitution featured prominently in several of her recordings. In the early Thirties Lucille returned to New York and recorded prolifically under the pseudonym Bessie Jackson until the middle of the decade. Lucille Bogan does not appear to have recorded after 1935, spending some time managing her son’s jazz group, Bogan’s Birmingham Busters, before moving to Los Angeles, where she died on August 10, 1948 from coronary sclerosis.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Ida Cox was born Ida Prather on February 25, 1896 in Toccoa, Georgia but grew up in Cedartown, Georgia and grew up in Cedartown, Georgia singing in the local African Methodist Church choir. She left home to tour with traveling minstrel shows, often appearing in blackface into the 1910s.

By 1920, she was appearing as a headline act at the 81 Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia along with another headliner at that time, Jelly Roll Morton. It was during this period that a demand for recordings of race music grew and the classic female blues era had begun and would extend through the 1920s. From 1923 through to 1929, Cox made numerous recordings for Paramount Records and headlined touring companies, sometimes billed as the “Sepia Mae West”, continuing into the 1930s.

During the 1920s, she also managed Ida Cox and Her Raisin’ Cain Company, her own vaudeville troupe. At some point in her career, she played alongside Ibrahim Khalil, a Native American and one of the several jazz musicians of that era who belonged from the Ahmadiyya Muslim community.

In 1939 she appeared at Café Society Downtown in New York’s Greenwich Village, participated in the historic Carnegie Hall concert “From Spirituals to Swing”, and resumed her recording career with a series of sessions for Vocalion Records and Okeh Records, with groups that at various times included Charlie Christian, Hot Lips Page, Henry “Red” Allen, J. C. Higginbotham and Lionel Hampton.

By the Sixties after spending several years in retirement Cox recorded a final album on the Riverside label with Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins Sammy Price, Milt Hinton and Jo Jones titled Blues For Rampart Street that included “Wild Women Don’t Have The Blues” that gained a new audience.

She returned to live with her daughter in Knoxville, Tennessee where she passed away of cancer in November 10, 1967.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Johnny Dunn was born on February 19, 1897 in Memphis, Tennessee and learned to play trumpet as a youth. He attended Fisk University in Nashville and had a solo act in Memphis before he was discovered by W.C. Handy and traveling to New York with him in 1917. After a three-year association featured playing cornet, Johnny joined Mamie Smith’s Jazz Hounds, recording with her band before leaving a year later to lead his Original Jazz Hounds.

During the 1920s he ventured to Europe with the Will Vodery band, recorded with Noble Sissle in France, played and recorded with Willie “The Lion’ Smith and memorable sessions with Jelly Roll Morton in New York, had a hit song “Sergeant Dunn’s Bugle Call Blues”.

By the 30s Dunn was working steadily in Europe and often residing there for periods of time in the Netherlands. He was among the best of the musicians playing in the immediate pre-jazz years and he influenced many of his contemporaries. Overshadowed though he was by the arrival of Louis Armstrong, Dunn was still an able and gifted player, showing subtle power and using complex patterns that never descended into mere showmanship.

His stylistic roots became outmoded during the 30s but his decision to remain in Europe and his early death on August 20, 1937, in Paris, meant that his reputation never suffered and is recognized as having been a highly accomplished trumpeter.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

James Hubert Blake was born on February 7, 1887 in Baltimore, Maryland to former slaves and was the only surviving child of eight. Blake’s musical training began when he was just four or five years old when he wandered into a music store, climbed on the bench of an organ, and started “fooling’” around. The store manager recognized his genius, told his mother and subsequently bought an organ.

At seven, he received music lessons from the Methodist church organist, by fifteen he played piano at Aggie Shelton’s Baltimore bordello and got his first big break in the music business when world champion boxer Joe Gans hired him to play the piano at Gans’ Goldfield Hotel, the first “black and tan club” in Baltimore in 1907. In 1912, Blake began playing ragtime in vaudeville with James Reese Europe’s “Society Orchestra” which accompanied Vernon and Irene Castle’s ballroom dance act. Shortly after World War I, Blake joined forces with performer Noble Sissle forming the vaudeville music duo, the “Dixie Duo” that transformed into 1921’s “Shuffle Along”, the first hit musical on Broadway written by and about African-Americans.

Throughout his career Blake made three films with Sissle for Lee DeForest’s Phonofilm Sound-On-Film, later played the Boathouse nightclub in Atlantic City, was bandleader with the USO during World War II, with his career winding down in 1946 enrolled and graduated from New York University, revived in 1950 with new interest in ragtime as artist, historian and educator, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Reagan, awarded numerous honorary doctorates and had another hit Broadway play “Eubie!” in his honor. Eubie Blake continued to play piano and record until his death on February 12, 1983 in Brooklyn, New York. He was 96.

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