Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Vincent Lopez was born of Portuguese immigrant parents in Brooklyn, New York City on December 30, 1895. By 1916 he was leading his own dance band in New York City. Five years later his band began broadcasting on the new medium of entertainment radio, giving listeners a weekly 90-minute show on Newark, New Jersey station WJZ. The broadcast was instrumental in making him one of North America’s most popular bandleaders through the 1940s.
In the 1930s and ‘40s Vincent worked occasionally in feature films, notably The Big Broadcast and I Don’t Want to Make History and was one of the first bandleaders to work in Soundies movie musicals. His flamboyant style of piano playing influenced Eddy Duchin and Liberace.
Noted musicians who played in his band included Artie Shaw, Xavier Cugat, Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey, Bob Effros, Mike Mosiello, Fred Lowery, Joe Tarto and Glenn Miller. He featured singers Keller Sisters and Lynch, Betty Hutton, and Marion Hutton. Lopez’s longtime drummer was Mike Riley, who popularized the novelty hit The Music Goes Round and Round.
In 1941, Lopez’s Orchestra began a residency at Manhattan’s Taft Hotel that lasted 25 years. In the early 1950s, he along with Gloria Parker hosted a radio program broadcast from the Taft Hotel called Shake the Maracas in which audience members competed for small prizes by playing maracas with the orchestra.
Bandleader, pianist and actor Vincent Lopez, who published his autobiography Lopez Speaking in 1960, died at the Villa Maria nursing home in North Miami, Florida on September 20, 1975.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Theodore Salvatore Fiorito, known professionally as Ted Fio Rito, was born December 20, 1900 in Newark, New Jersey into an Italian immigrant couple. His mother had sung light opera in Italy. He attended Barringer High School in Newark.
He was still in his teens when he landed a job in 1919 as a pianist at Columbia’s New York City recording studio, working with the Harry Yerkes bands: the Yerkes Novelty Five, Yerkes’ Jazarimba Orchestra and The Happy Six.
His earliest compositions were recorded by the Yerkes groups and Art Highman’s band. Fio Rito had numerous hit recordings, notably his two number one hits, My Little Grass Shack in Kealakekua, Hawaii and I’ll String Along with You. Over the course of his life he composed more than 100 songs, collaborating with such lyricists as Ernie Erdman, Gus Kahn, Sam Lewis, Cecil Mack, Albert Von Tilzer, and Joe Young.
Moving to Chicago, Illinois in 1921 he joined the Dan Russo band and the following year became the co-leader of Russo and Fio Rito’s Oriole Orchestra and opened at Detroit, Michigan’s Oriole Terrace, with a rebranding as the Oriole Terrace Orchestra. Returning to Chicago they did their first radio remote broadcast in 1924. Throughout the 1920s the orchestra played Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Cincinnati and San Francisco.
The Fio Rito Orchestra’s vocalists included Jimmy Baxter, Candy Candido, the Debutantes, Betty Grable, June Haver, the Mahoney Sisters, Muzzy Marcellino, Joy Lane, Billy Murray, Maureen O’Connor, Patti Palmer, Kay and Ward Swingle.
During the 1940s, the band’s popularity diminished, but Fio Rito continued to perform in Chicago and Arizona. He played in Las Vegas, Nevada during the 1960s. In his last years, he led a small combo at venues throughout California and Nevada until his death.
Composer, orchestra leader, and keyboardist Ted Fio Rito, who was popular on national radio broadcasts in the 1920s and 1930s, died from a heart attack on July 22, 1971 in Scottsdale, Arizona.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Joseph Francis Lamb was born of Irish parents on December 6, 1887 in Montclair, New Jersey. The youngest of four children, he taught himself to play the piano and admired the early ragtime publications of Scott Joplin. His first known works were Meet Me At The Chutes and Idle Dreams, at the age of 13 in 1900, but they are unpublished and assumed lost.
During his teenage years while living in Toronto, Canada he published several march and waltz compositions for Harry H. Sparks Music Publisher. Most notable were The Lilliputian’s Bazaar, Celestine Waltzes, and Florentine. Most were published after he left Canada
Lamb dropped out of St. Jerome’s College in 1904 to work for a dry goods company. He met Joplin in 1907 while purchasing the latest Joplin and Scott sheet music in the offices of John Stark & Son. It was there that Joplin was impressed with Lamb’s compositions and recommended him to ragtime publisher John Stark. Stark published Lamb’s music for the next decade, starting with Sensation.
Joseph’s twelve rags published by Stark from 1908 to 1919 can be divided into two groups: the “heavy” rags are incorporated with Joplin’s melody–dominated style and Scott’s expansive use of the keyboard registers. The “light” rags with the cakewalk tradition show the narrow-range melodies inspired by Joplin.
He went on to work as an arranger for the J. Fred Helf Music Publishing Company and in 1914 became an accountant for L. F. Dommerich & Company. When popular music interest shifted from ragtime to jazz Lamb stopped publishing his music, playing and composing only as a hobby.
Composer Joseph Lamb, who was the only non-African American of the Big Three composers of classical ragtime, the other two being Scott Joplin and James Scott, died of a heart attack in Brooklyn, New York at age 72 on September 3, 1960.
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Jazz Poems
BLACK AND BLUE
(WHAT DID I DO TO BE SO BLACK AND BLUE)
VERSEOut in the street,
Shufflin’ feet,
Couples passin’ two by two,
While here am I,
Left high and dry, black, and ‘cause i’m black I’m blue.
Browns and yellers
All have fellers,
Gentlemen prefer them light.
Wish I could fade,
Can’t makee the grade,
Nothin’ but dark days in sight.
REFRAIN
Cold empty bed,
Springs hard as lead,
Pains in my head,
Feels like old Ned,
What did I do
To be so black and blue?
No joys for me,
No company,
Even the mouse
Ran from my house,
All my life through
I’ve been so black and blue.I’m white
Inside,
It don’t help my case
‘Cause I
Can’t hide
What is on my face,ooh!
I’m so forlorn,
Life’s just a thorn,
My heart is torn,
Why was I born?
What did I do
To be so black and blue?
REFRAIN
Just ‘cause you’re black,
Folks think you lack,
They laugh at you
And scornyou too,
What did I do
To be so black and blue?
When you are near,
They laugh and sneer,
Set you aside
And you’re denied,
What did I do
To be so black and blue?
How sad I am
Each day I feel worse,
My mark of Ham
Seems to be a curse, ooh!
How will it end?
Ain’t got a friend,
My only sin
Is in my skin,
What did I do
To be so black and blue?
ANDY RAZAF | 1895~1973
MUSIC BY THOMAS “FATS” WALLER
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Clarence Williams was born on October 8, 1898 in Plaquemine, Louisiana to Dennis, a bassist, and Sally Williams. He ran away from home at age 12 to join Billy Kersands’ Traveling Minstrel Show, then moved to New Orleans, Louisiana. He first worked shining shoes and doing odd jobs, but soon became known as a singer and master of ceremonies.
By the early 1910s, he was a well-regarded local entertainer also playing piano, and was composing new tunes by 1913. Williams was a good businessman, working arranging and managing entertainment at the local Black vaudeville theater. He played at various saloons and dance halls around Rampart Street, and in the clubs and houses in Storyville.
He started a music publishing business with violinist/bandleader Armand J. Piron in 1915, which by the Twenties was the leading Black owned music publisher in the country. He toured briefly with W. C. Handy, and set up a publishing office in Chicago, Illinois before settling in New York City in the early 1920s. During the decade he and his blues singer/actress wife Eva Taylor moved to the borough of Queens with the intention of creating a community of black artists.
He was one of the primary pianists on scores of blues records recorded in New York during the 1920s. He supervised the 8000 race series recordings for the New York offices of Okeh phonograph company in the 1920s. He also recorded extensively, leading studio bands for OKeh, Columbia, Vocalion, Bluebird and occasionally other record labels.
As a producer he participated in early recordings by Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Bessie Smith, Virginia Liston, Irene Scruggs, his niece Katherine Henderson, and others. Most of his recordings were songs from his publishing house.
In 1943, he sold his extensive back-catalogue of tunes to Decca Records for $50,000 and retired. He bought a bargain used-goods store, the Harlem Thrift Shop.
Pianist, composer, promoter, vocalist, theatrical producer, and publisher Clarence Williams, died on November 6, 1965 in Queens, New York.
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