Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Wellman Braud was born on January 25, 1891 in St. James Parish, Louisiana and settled in New Orleans, Louisiana. In his early teens he was playing the violin and the upright bass and leading a trio in venues in the Storyville District before 1910.
Moving to Chicago, Illinois in 1917 by 1923 he was performing in London, England with the Plantation Orchestra, doubling on bass and trombone. His next move was to New York City, where he played with Wilber Sweatman’s band before joining Duke Ellington.
Braud was the first to utilize the walking bass style that has been a mainstay in modern jazz. His vigorous melodic bass playing, alternately plucking, slapping, and bowing, was an important feature of the early Ellington Orchestra in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1936 he co-managed a short-lived Harlem club with Jimmie Noone, and recorded with the group Spirits of Rhythm from 1935 to 1937.
He would go on to play with the bands of Kaiser Marshall, Hot Lips Page, and Sidney Bechet and returned for a while to Ellington in 1944. In 1956 Wellman joined the Kid Ory Band and in the late 1950s, he joined the Barbara Dane Trio. Doing so he turned down opportunities to return to Duke Ellington’s band and tour with Louis Armstrong.
Upright bassist Wellman Braud, who is a distant relative of the Marsalis brothers on their mother’s side, died on October 29, 1966 in Los Angeles, California, at the age of 76.
Duke Ellington postumously paid tribute to Braud, with the composition Portrait of Wellman Braud on his 1970 album New Orleans Suite.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Rudolph Pickett Blesh was born January 21, 1899 in Guthrie, Oklahoma. He studied at Dartmouth College and held jobs writing jazz reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Herald Tribune in the 1940s. He was a prolific promoter of jazz concerts, particularly New Orleans jazz, and hosted a jazz radio program, This Is Jazz, in 1947.
In collaboration with Harriet Janis, mother of jazz band leader Conrad Janis, wrote the book They All Played Ragtime, which was published in 1950 by Alfred A. Knopf. A promotional record consisting of Maple Leaf Rag recorded to piano roll by Jelly Roll Morton in 1907.
With renewed public interest in ragtime music, Blesh founded Circle Records in 1946, which recorded new material from aging early jazz musicians in conjunction with the Library of Congress recordings of Jelly Roll Morton. Together they sparked renewed interest in the music of Joseph Lamb, James P. Johnson, and Eubie Blake, among others.
Retiring from writing in 1971 Rudi held professorships at several universities later in his life, and wrote liner notes to jazz albums almost up until the time of his death. In 1976, he was nominated for a Grammy Award for his liner notes to Joplin: The Complete Works of Scott Joplin performed by Dick Hyman.
Jazz critic, promoter and enthusiast Rudi Blesh died on August 25, 1985, on his farm in Gilmanton, New Hampshire from a myocardial infarction, aged 86.
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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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