Three Wishes

When Nica queried Budd Johnson as to what he would wish if given the opportunity to have three wishes granted and he related this to her:

1. 1. “That’s a very good question. First of all, I would love to play my instrument – I mean, give it all I have to give. I would love to get recognition. And play my horn the way I know I could – and it’s just me, the reason, if I don’t! I would really love to play as well as I think I can.”
   2. “This may sound very corny, but I have a very wonderful wife, and I would like to make her very happy. The only way I think I could do this is: get with that instrument and really play it, so I could make the money to do the things I want to do for her.”
   3. “I want recognition amongst my friends. I crave sincere friendship. I do have a lot of friends, but I think this might bring us closer together. I seem to have lost track of all them. I had to go my way, reasons… everybody had to do what they had to do.

This is how you get separated. When I used to live up to 152nd Street, They all used to come up to my house, Monk, Bird. They all used to come by and we exchange ideas, and they would say, ‘Write this down for me.’ They would hum it, and I would write it down. They remember my son when he was a little baby in the crib! And I miss all of them.

The reason I put that first is that if I were able to master the horn – I guess nobody can have all this – I would have all my friends, be able to visit them, and be around. I have a lot of dear friends who have gone to the top. And they still like me. But they are busy and I am still scuffling! It’s a funny thing. The better you get, you travel in different circles, automatically. I hope someday to attain all this. This is all I know, the music. All this is one thing.”

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Joe Rushton was born in Evanston, Illinois on November 7, 1907. He started out playing clarinet and all of the other standard saxophone varieties, and was occasionally recorded with these other instruments. Settling on the bass saxophone, through the early to mid Forties he worked with Ted Weems, Jimmy McPartland, Bud Freeman, Floyd O’Brien, Benny Goodman, and Horace Heidt.

Joining Red Nichols’s Five Pennies in 1947 became a musical relationship and collaboration that went well into the early 1960s. He recorded six sides for Jump Records in 1945/47, but otherwise appears on record only as a sideman.

Bass saxophonist Joe Rushton, who is one of the best-known jazz performers to concentrate on bass saxophone, aside from Adrian Rollini, which he played from 1928. transitioned on March 2, 1964, in San Francisco, California at the age of 56.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Edgar Melvin Sampson was born on October 31, 1907 in New York City, New York. He began playing violin aged six and picked up the saxophone in high school, then started his professional career in 1924 in a violin piano duo with Joe Colman. Through the rest of the 1920s and early 1930s, he played with many big bands, including those of Charlie “Fess” Johnson, Duke Ellington, Rex Stewart and Fletcher Henderson.

In 1934, Sampson joined the Chick Webb outfit and during his period he created his most enduring work as a composer, writing Stompin’ at the Savoy and Don’t Be That Way. Leaving Webb in 1936, his reputation as a composer and arranger led to freelance work with Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Red Norvo, Teddy Hill, Teddy Wilson and Webb.

Becoming a student of the Schillinger System in the early 1940s, Edgar continued to play saxophone through the late 1940s and started his own band at the end of the decade. He worked with Latin performers such as Marcelino Guerra, Tito Rodríguez and Tito Puente as an arranger.

He recorded one album under his own name, Swing Softly Sweet Sampson, in 1956. Due to illness, he stopped working in the late Sixties. Composer, arranger, saxophonist, and violinist Edgar Sampson, nicknamed The Lamb, transitioned on January 16, 1973.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Edward Bennett Coles was born October 29, 1910 in Montgomery, Alabama and was the second oldest of ten children and the oldest son. He studied both piano and bass from a young age and formed his first band at age 17. Three years later at age 20, he joined Noble Sissle’s band the Sizzling Syncopators, stayed there six years and performed with greats such as Sidney Bechet and Clarence Brereton.

After a tour of Europe in 1936, Cole left Sissle’s band to join his brother Nat’s group, the Rogues of Rhythm. He appeared in the TV show Bourbon Street Beat in 1959 and later appeared on The Law and Mr. Jones and The Jack Benny Program.

Retiring in the 1960s, bassist, pianist and vocalist Eddie Cole, who was a member of the Cole dynasty of Nat, Freddy and Ike, transitioned on June 18, 1970 at the age of 59 in Los Angeles, California.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

George Washington was born October 18, 1907 in Brunswick, Georgia and raised in Jacksonville, Florida. He began playing trombone at age ten and attended Edward Waters College in the early-1920s.

Washington relocated to Philadelphia in 1925 and played with J.W. Pepper before moving to New York City shortly thereafter. In New York, he studied under Walter Damrosch at the New York Conservatory, playing with various ensembles in the late 1920s.

In 1931, he began playing with Don Redman, and gigged with Benny Carter in 1932 and Spike Hughes in 1933. In the mid-1930s, he played and arranged for the Mills Blue Rhythm Band and worked with Red Allen and Fletcher Henderson. From 1937 to 1943, he played in Louis Armstrong’s orchestra. After his tenure with Armstrong he moved to the West Coast, and played with Horace Henderson, Carter again, and Count Basie.

From 1947 he led his own ensemble, playing in California and the Las Vegas Strip in Nevada. He and drummer Johnny Otis collaborated often, and in 1960 Washington worked with Joe Darensbourg. He did freelance work as a player and arranger later in his life. To date there is no record of his death

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