Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Henry Busse Sr. was born on May 19, 1894 in Magdeburg, Germany to a generational German Band family. He studied violin and then trumpet after a broken finger was set incorrectly. In 1912 at age 18 he ran away from the family farm outside of Magdeburg, where he had been forced to play trumpet in his uncle’s band.
Initially jumping ship in New York City and landing in the German ghettos there, unable to speak English, he found a job on a boat heading to California. He acquired some English on his trip in 1916 that found him in Hollywood working as an extra in Keystone Cop films and playing trumpet in a movie theater pit band.
In 1917, he played the trumpet with the Frisco Jass Band before forming his own band, Busse’s Buzzards which was the nucleus of the Paul Whiteman orchestra of the mid-1920s, and featuring Henry they made four sides in total. Being the subject of discrimination because of his German accent caused concern among those living in post-World War I America.
At one point, eight out of the top ten sheet music sales spots belonged to the band. During his peak with them, Busse was earning $350 weekly, while fellow band member Bing Crosby was earning just $150. Busse co-composed several of the band’s early hit songs, including Hot Lips with Gussie Mueller and Wang Wang Blues. The latter sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc in 1920.
Throughout the 1920s he was concertmaster for the Whiteman Band, played alongside the Dorsey brothers, Ray Bolger, and formed the Shuffle Rhythm Band, which went on to enjoy great success in the 1930s and ’40s. A later group, The Henry Busse Orchestra. This group was more of a dance band than a jazz band and had a successful career.
Hitting his peak in 1930-45 playing dance music before the war, and swing during the war. He and his band appeared in two MGM color movies in 1935 called Starlit Days at the Lido, filmed at the Ambassador Hotel, along with Clark Gable and the studio’s stable of stars and in the movie Lady Let’s Dance.
Trumpeter Henry Busse and his Orchestra continued to record and perform up until his death on April 23,1955. at an undertaker’s convention at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was playing with the Shuffle Rhythm Band.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Pete Edward Jacobs was born on May 7, 1899 in Asbury Park, New Jersey. His first professional job was playing with the Musical Aces. He then joined the band of Claude Hopkins from 1926 to 1928.
Leaving Hopkins he joined Charlie Skeete for a short stint but returned to play with Hopkins from 1928 until 1938. During this ten-year tenure in Hopkins’s orchestra, Jacobs recorded extensively with the group on Brunswick Records, during 1932 to 1937.
Additionally, he appeared with the band in the short films Barbershop Blues in 1933) and By Request in 1936.
Falling ill in 1938 he hung up his drummsticks and quit the group, never returning to active performance. Drummer Pete Jacobs, who was prominent during the swing era for about a decade, died in 1952, month and day unknown.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
George Ewing Lee was born April 28, 1896 in Boonville, Missouri, and was the older brother of pianist and singer Julia Lee. They performed with their father’s string trio at neighborhood house parties and church socials. He played in a band while serving in the Army in 1917, and following this period, he sang in a vocal quartet.
In 1920 he formed and led George E. Lee Novelty Singing Orchestra and with his sister as one of the group’s members, he was a regular performer at Lyric Hall in Kansas City, Missouri through much of the 1920s.
Though he played many instruments, singing was his forte and he had a powerful voice and a penchant for ballads and novelty songs. Through the 1920s no group in Kansas City could compete vocally with the Lee Orchestra.
In 1927 they recorded as an octet with Jesse Stone on piano, for Meritt Records. Among the tunes was Down Home Syncopated Blues, and was the earliest recording of Julia Lee’s voice. They recorded six tunes for Brunswick in 1929.
In 1933, his group was absorbed into the Bennie Moten Orchestra. By 1935 he continued to perform with smaller ensembles through the decade. In 1937, at a resort in the Ozarks, Lee fronted a small group that included 17 year-old saxophonist Charlie Parker. Two years later he struck out on his own again, moved to Jackson, Michigan in 1940 and retired from music in 1941. He began
By the 1940s, he moved to San Diego, California. Vocalist and bandleader George E. Lee, who was sometimes billed as the Cab Calloway of the Middle West, died on October 2, 1958.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Emile Joseph Christian born April 20, 1895 in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans, Louisiana, was the younger brother of noted cornetist and bandleader Frank Christian. He played both cornet and trombone with the Papa Jack Laine bands. He went to Chicago, Illinois in late 1917 to play trombone with the Bert Kelly Jass Band. The following year he moved to New York City, replacing Eddie Edwards in the Original Dixieland Jass Band, touring England and making his first recordings with this band.
After a brief time in the Original Memphis Five, he returned to Europe and from 1924 into the 1930s, he played bass and trombone with various jazz bands. In Berlin, Germany he recorded, in Stockholm, Sweden he recorded with Leon Abbey’s band. In Paris, Nice and Aix-les-Bain, France he played with Tom Waltham’s Ad-Libs. In 1935 he played with Benny Peyton’s Jazz Kings in Switzerland.
Christian played in both Black and White bands in Europe and India before returning to the United States after the outbreak of World War II. The 1950s saw him moving back to New Orleans, where he played with the bands of Leon Prima, Santo Pecora, and Sharkey Bonano and his own band. In 1957 he toured with the Louis Prima Band and continued playing in New Orleans into 1969.
Trombonist and cornetist Emile Christian, who wrote a number of tunes and in his later years mostly playing string bass, died on December 3, 1973 in New Orleans at the age of 78.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Alberta Hunter was born on April 1, 1895 in Memphis, Tennessee to Laura Peterson, who worked as a maid in a Memphis brothel, and Charles Hunter, a Pullman porter, a father she never knew. She attended Grant Elementary School and attended school until around age 15.
Hunter had a difficult childhood and left for Chicago, Illinois, around the age of 11 in the hopes of becoming a paid singer hearing that it paid ten dollars per week. Instead of finding a job as a singer she worked at a boarding house for six dollars a week with room and board.
Her singing career started in a bordello and soon moved to Saloons, bars and clubs that appealed to men, black and white alike. By 1914 Alberta was receiving lessons from jazz pianist, Tony Jackson, who helped her to expand her repertoire and compose her own songs. Her big break came when she was booked at Dreamland Cafe, singing with King Oliver and his band.
Sheeventually rose from the city’s lowest dives to headlining the most prestigious venue for black entertainers, the Dreamland ballroom. She had a five-year residency with the venue in 1917 for $35 a week. She first toured Europe in 1917, performing in Paris and London. The Europeans treated her as an artist, showing her respect and even reverence, which made a great impression on her.
Hunter flourished in the 1920s and 1930s on both sides of the Atlantic. She recorded prolifically during the 1920s, starting with sessions for Black Swan in 1921, Paramount in 1922–1924, Gennett in 1924, OKeh in 1925–1926, Victor in 1927 and Columbia in 1929. While still working for Paramount, she also recorded for Harmograph Records. By the early 1940s she was performing at home and eventually moved to New York City where she performed with Bricktop and recorded with Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet.
Continuing to perform on both sides of the Atlantic she was the head of the U.S.O.’s first black show. In 1944, she took a U.S.O. troupe to Casablanca, in both theatres of World War II, then to Korea until her mother’s death in 1957. She retired from music and went into healthcare, becoming a nurse for 20 years at Roosevelt Island’s Goldwater Memorial Hospital. Aged out of the hospital because they believed she was 70, at 82 she returned to singing. With a two week residency at a Greenwich Village club, that turned into a six year attraction until her death on October 17, 1984 in Roosevelt Island, New York at the age of 89.