Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Tiny Parham was born Hartzell Strathdene Parham on February 25, 1900 in Winnipeg, Canada. The pianist and bandleader grew up in Kansas City and worked at The Eblon Theatre, mentored by ragtime pianist and composer James Scott. He would later tour with territory bands in the Southwest before moving to Chicago in 1926.

He is best remembered for the recordings he made in Chicago between 1927 and 1930 working with Johnny Dodds along with several female blues singers and with his own band. Most of the musicians Parham played with are not well known in their own right, though cornetist Punch Miller, banjoist Papa Charlie Jackson, saxophonist Junie Cobb and bassist Milt Hinton are exceptions.

His entire recorded output for Victor are highly collected and appreciated as prime examples of late 1920’s jazz. Tiny favored the violin and many of his records have a surprisingly sophisticated violin solos, along with the typical upfront tuba, horns and reeds.

After 1930 he found work in theater houses, especially as an organist and his last recordings were made in 1940. The cartoonist R. Crumb included a drawing of Parham in his classic 1982 collection of trading cards and later book “Early Jazz Greats” of which Parham was the only non-American born so included in addition to the book’s bonus cd containing a Parham track.

Tiny Parham passed away on April 4, 1943 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Alonzo “Lonnie” Johnson was born on February 8, 1899 in New Orleans, Louisiana into a musical family. He studied violin, piano and guitar as a child, and learned to play various other instruments including the mandolin, but concentrated on the guitar throughout his professional career. By his late teens, he played guitar and violin in his father’s family band and with trumpeter Punch Miller in the Storyville clubs.

In 1917, Johnson joined a revue that toured England, returning home two years later to find that all of his family, except his brother James, had died in the 1918 influenza epidemic. Settling in St. Lois with his brother James the two embarked on a duo performance, though Lonnie also worked the riverboats in the orchestras of Charlie Creath and Fate Marable.

Johnson would go on to enter a blues contest in 1925 winning a recording contract with Okeh Records, record in New York with Victoria Spivey and tour with Bessie Smith’s T.O.B.A. show. By 1927, he recorded in Chicago as a guest artist with Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five, and in 1928 he was in the studio recording with Duke Ellington and with the group The Chocolate Dandies playing 12 string guitar solos on many these early recordings.

With the temporary demise of the recording industry in the Great Depression, Johnson went to work in the steel mills. However, post WWII he revived his career and would record for Decca, top the Billboard “Race Records” charts, tour England, move to Philadelphia, and record for Prestige Records. He settled in Toronto, Canada until he was sidelined when hit by a car, injuries from which he never fully recovered.

Lonnie is credited with pioneering the role of jazz guitar and is recognized as the first to play single-string guitar solos and who influenced such guitarists as Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt. Guitarist, songwriter, jazz and blues singer Lonnie Johnson passed away on June 16, 1970.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Kid Thomas was born Thomas Valentine on February 3, 1896 in Reserve, Louisiana and moved to New Orleans in his youth. Gaining a reputation as a hot trumpet man in the early 1920s, he started his own band in 1926, basing himself in the New Orleans suburb of Algiers.

Unaffected by the influence of Louis Armstrong and later developments of jazz, Kid Thomas had perhaps the city’s longest lasting old-style traditional jazz dance band, continuing to play in his distinctive hot, bluesy sometimes percussive style. Although Valentine played popular tunes of the day even into the rock and roll era, he played everything in a style of a New Orleans dance hall of the early 1920s.

Kid Thomas Valentine started attracting a wider following with his first recordings in the 1950s and played regularly at Preservation Hall from the 1960s through the 1980s. He toured extensively for the Hall, including a Russian tour, as a guest at European clubs and festivals, and working with various local bands as well as his own. During the 1960s Kid Thomas recorded extensively for the Jazz Crusade and GBH labels both with his own band and with Big Bill Bissonnette’s Easy Riders Jazz Band. He made over 20 tours with the Easy Riders in the U.S. Northeast.

By the mid 1980s, as Thomas’s strength started to wane, Preservation Hall management brought in Wendell Brunious, who took over much of his trumpet duties, though Kid continued to lead the band. On June 18, 1987, trumpeter Kid Thomas Valentine passed away.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Florence Mills was born Florence Winfrey on January 25, 1895 in Washington, D.C. and started performing as child. At six she sang duets with her two older sisters and eventually formed a vaudeville act, calling themselves “The Mills Sisters”. The act did well, but eventually her sisters quit performing.

Florence, determined to pursue a career in show business eventually joined Ada Smith, Cora Green, and Carolyn Williams in a group called the “Panama Four” that had some success. Mills stardom came as a result of her role in the successful Broadway musical “Shuffle Along” in 1921, which has been credited with beginning the Harlem Renaissance. She went on to play the Palace Theatre, become an international star with the hit show Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds, with her signature song “I’m A Little Blackbird Looking For A Bluebird”. She became known as the “Queen of Happiness,” for her effervescent stage presence, delicate voice, and winsome, wide-eyed beauty and would be featured in Vogue and Vanity Fair.

By 1926, exhausted from more than 250 performances of the hit show Blackbirds in London in 1926, Florence became ill with tuberculosis and further weakened, passed away of infection following an appendicitis operation on November 1, 1927 at age 32.

Duke Ellington memorialized in his song “Black Beauty” as did Fats Waller with “Bye Bye Florence”, the residential building at 267 Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem’s Sugar Hill neighborhood is named after her and a children’s book, “Baby Flo: Florence Mills Lights Up the Stage” written by Alan Schroeder, will be published by Lee and Low in March 2012.

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