Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ella Jane Fitzgerald was born on April 25, 1917 in Newport News, Virginia, the child of common law parents who separated shortly after her birth. Her mother moved her to Yonkers, New York and as a child she wanted to be a dancer but loved listening to the jazz of Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and The Boswell Sisters.
However, losing her mother to a heart attack in 1932 and the subsequent trauma caused her grades to drop, skip school, become a bordello lookout, and become involved with a Mafia affiliated numbers runner. This trouble led to reform school, ultimate escape, homelessness, and apprehension and sent to the Colored Orphan Asylum in the Bronx.
Ella made her singing debut at age 17 on November 21, 1934 at the Apollo Theatre. Pulling in a weekly audience won her the opportunity to compete in the Amateur Nights where she won first prize. Her winning spirit led her to perform with the Tiny Bradshaw band at the Harlem Opera House in 1935, and then to meet Chick Webb who offered her an opportunity to test with the band at a Yale University dance. This led to a regular gig with Webb at the Savoy Ballroom and in 1938 her rendition of the nursery rhyme A-Tisket, A-Tasket that she co-wrote, brought her wide public acclaim. When Webb died in 1939, Ella became the bandleader renaming it Ella Fitzgerald and Her Famous Orchestra, and went on to record nearly 150 songs during this tenure.
Pursuing a solo career she left the band, signed with Decca Records, began working with Norman Granz’s Jazz At The Philharmonic, and saw the demise of swing and the big touring bands. With Granz as her manager creating Verve Records around her and the advent of bebop, Fitzgerald changed her style of singing evident in her work with Dizzy Gillespie. She included scat in her repertoire and her rendition of Flying Home became one of the most influential vocal jazz records. Other songs like Oh, Lady Be Good would enhance her reputation as an important jazz vocalist.
Over the course of a career spanning nearly 60 years she recorded her now famous songbooks, recorded for a host of labels, performed all over the world. Fitzgerald appeared on film in Pete Kelly’s Blues, St. Louis Blues, and Let No Man Write My Epitaph. On television her most famous commercial was with Memorex in which her singing of a note and the subsequent playback shatters a glass – “Is it live or is it Memorex?”
Ella Fitzgerald, the three-octave vocalist noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing, intonation and horn-like improvisation ability is considered one of the supreme interpreters of the Great American Songbook. She has been photographed by Annie Liebovitz, won 14 Grammy awards, received the National Medal of Art by President Ronald Reagan and the Presidential Medal Of Freedom from George H.W. Bush.
After a long battle with diabetes Ella Fitzgerald passed away on June 15, 1996 at the age of 79 in Beverly Hills, California. So important was her contribution to the genre that her career history and archival material are housed at the Archives Center at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History; her personal music arrangements are at The Library of Congress; her extensive cookbook collection was donated to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University; and her published sheet music collection is at the Schoenberg Library at UCLA.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Benny Harris was born on April 23, 1919 in New York City. His first major gig as a trumpeter was in 1939 with Tiny Bradshaw. He would go on to play with Earl Hines in 1941 and 1943, and worked New York’s 52nd Street bebop circuit in the 1940s.
Harris collaborated with Benny Carter, John Kirby, Coleman Hawkins, Don Byas and Thelonious Monk. He was with Boyd Raeburn from 1944-45 and Clyde Hart in 1944; he and Byas worked together again in 1945. He played less in the late 1940s, though he appeared with Dizzy Gillespie in 1949 and Charlie Parker in 1952. After this Harris quit music entirely.
Never a well-known soloist, Benny is better known for such compositions as “Crazeology” and “Ornithology”, the latter being a signature Charlie Parker tune; “Reets and I”, a Bud Powell favorite; and “Wahoo”, a tune associated with Duke Pearson.
Benny Harris, bebop trumpeter and composer died on May 11, 1975 in San Francisco, California.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lionel Leo Hampton was born on April 20, 1908 in Louisville, Kentucky and was raised by his grandmother. The multi-instrumentalist spent his early childhood first in Birmingham, Alabama and then in Kenosha, Wisconsin before his family settled in Chicago by the time he was ten. During his teen years he took up the xylophone, fife and drums. It was drums that kicked started his career in music playing with the Chicago Defender Newsboy’s Band.
Towards the end of the Roaring Twenties Hampton moved to California playing with the Dixieland Blues-Blowers, the Les Hite band and recording with The Quality Serenaders. But it was in 1930 when Louis Armstrong invited Hampton to play vibes during one of his California dates that his career as a vibraphonist and the popularity of the instrument began. But it was later that his star would shine when Johnny Hammond brought Benny Goodman to see Hampton play and invited him to join his group.
Over the course of his lifetime Lionel Hampton led his own orchestras, played with Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Teddy Wilson, Gene Krupa, Wes Montgomery, Illinois Jacquet, Dinah Washington Arnett Cobb, Charlie Parker, Quincy Jones, Buddy Rich, Slam Stewart and the list of jazz luminaries is to numerous.
Hampton, a vibraphonist, pianist, percussionist, bandleader and actor was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame in 1992, received the Papal Medal from Pope Paul VI, has toured and performed around the world, had his vibraphone of 15 years placed in the National Museum of American History and the University of Idaho renamed their music school for Hampton, becoming the first university to do so for a jazz musician.
One of the first jazz pioneers of the vibes and a giant whose career spanned over six decades, Lionel Hampton passed away of heart failure at the age of 94 on August 31, 2002.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Thomas “Tommy” Benford was born in Charleston, West Virginia on April 19, 1905 the younger brother of tuba player Bill Benford. He studied drums and music at the Jenkins Orphanage in Charleston, South Carolina and went on tour with the school band traveling to Europe in 1914. By 1920 he was working with the Green River Minstrel Show. He returned to Europe in 1932 becoming part of the expatriate community, for the next nine years toured and played with all the great jazz musicians who came to the continent.
He returned to the United States in 1941 and throughout his long career Benford played and recorded with Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Eddie South, Coleman Hawkins Bill Coleman, Joe Turner, Django Reinhardt, Sidney Bechet, Noble Sissle and Willie “The Lion” Smith. He is credited with helping Chick Webb to play drums and shaped early jazz drumming alongside Sid Catlett.
For the last several decades of his life he was a member of the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band and with Bob Greene’s World of Jelly Roll Morton. Jazz drummer Tommy Benford passed away at the age of 88 on March 24, 1994 in Mount Vernon, New York.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lawrence “Bud” Freeman was born on April 13, 1906 in Chicago, Illinois and became one of the most influential and important jazz tenor saxophonists of the Big Band era. During high school in 1922 he became one of the original Austin High School Gang playing the C-melody saxophone alongside Jimmy McPartland and Frank Teschemacher. Two years later he switched to tenor and influenced by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and Louis Armstrong the Gang would formulate their own style that would become part of the emerging Chicago jazz sound.
In 1927 Freeman moved to New York and worked as a session player and band member with Red Nichols, Roger Wolfe Kahn, Ben Pollack Joe Venuti and Eddie Condon in 1933 producing one of his most notable performances on the recording of “The Eel” which would later become Bud’s nickname for his long snake-like improvisations.
Bud’s smooth and full-tenor sax style with a heavy robust swing was the signature that got him gigs with the Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman orchestras along with leading his own Summa Cum Laude Orchestra. During WWII he joined the Army and led the band in the Aleutian Islands. Returning to New York after his discharge, for the next couple of decades he led his own groups, worked with Eddie Condon, Buck Clayton, ruby Braff, Vic Dickerson and Jo Jones. He was a member of the World’s Greatest Jazz Band off and on, moved to England in 1974, performing, touring and recording throughout Europe. He returned to Chicago and continued to work well into his eighties.
Tenor saxophonist, clarinetist, composer and bandleader Bud Freeman passed away on March 15, 1991 in his hometown of Chicago. He was posthumously inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall Of Fame in 1992.
