Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Pete Rugolo was born Pietro Rugolo in San Piero Patti, Sicily, Italy on December 25, 1915. His family emigrated to the U.S. in 1920 and settled in Santa Rosa, California. He began his career in music playing the baritone saxophone, like his father, but he quickly branched out into other instruments, notably the French horn and the piano. He received a bachelor’s degree from San Francisco State College and then went on to study composition at Mills College in Oakland, earning his master’s degree.
After graduation, he was hired as an arranger and composer by guitarist and bandleader Johnny Richards and spent World War II playing with altoist Paul Desmond in an army band. After WWII, Rugolo worked for Stan Kenton, providing arrangements and original compositions that drew on his knowledge of 20th century music, sometimes blurring the boundaries between jazz and classical music.
While Rugolo continued to work occasionally with Kenton in the 1950s, he spent more time creating arrangements for pop and jazz vocalists, most extensively with former Kenton singer June Christy and others like Ernestine Anderson, Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstine, Peggy Lee, The Four Freshman, Mel Torme to name a few.
He would work on MGM film musicals, serve as A&R director for Mercury Records and produce a handful of self-titled albums. Pete’s scores for television and film on The Fugitive, Leave It To Beaver, Run For Your Life and Where The Boys Are often demanded that he suppress his highly original style. However, there are some striking examples of his work in both TV and film such as the soundtrack for his last movie, This World, Then the Fireworks demonstrates his gift for writing music that is both sophisticated and expressive. Pete Rugolo, jazz composer and arranger, died, aged 95, on October 16, 2011 in Sherman Oaks, California.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Clark Terry was born on December 14, 1920 in St. Louis, Missouri. After high school he started his professional career in the early 40s playing in local clubs, and then served as a bandsman in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He influenced both Quincy Jones and Miles Davis, teaching the later while in St. Louis.
Terry’s years with Basie and Ellington in the late 1940s and 1950s established him as a world-class jazz artist, blending the St. Louis tone with contemporary styles. After leaving Ellington, Clark’s international recognition soared when he became NBC’s first African-American staff musician. He a ten-year member of The Tonight Show band where his unique “mumbling” scat singing became famous when he scored a hit with “Mumbles.”
Terry continued to play with musicians such as J. J. Johnson and Oscar Peterson, and led a popular group with Bob Brookmeyer in the early 1960s. In the 1970s he concentrated on the flugelhorn, performed studio work and teaching at jazz workshops, toured regularly in the 1980s with small groups and performed as the leader of his Big B-A-D Band.
At the behest of Billy Taylor, early in his career he and Milt Hinton bought instruments and gave instruction to young hopefuls and the idea was planted the seed that became Jazz Mobile in Harlem. He toured with the Newport Jazz All Stars and Jazz at the Philharmonic, recorded for the Red Hot + Rhapsody and Red Hot + Indigo albums, composed more than two hundred songs, performed for seven U.S. Presidents, has been both leader and sideman on more than three hundred albums performing with Clifford Brown, Gary Burton, Charlie Byrd, Tadd Dameron, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Lionel Hampton, Paul Gonsalves and Milt Jackson among others, recorded with symphonies and orchestras and established the Clark Terry Archive at William Paterson University.
Swing and bop trumpeter, pioneer of the flugelhorn and educator Clark Terry has received over 250 awards, medals and honors including a NEA Jazz Masters Award, has received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, 16 honorary degrees, a knighthood, keys to several cities, the French Order of Arts and Letters and over the course of a seventy year career is the most recorded trumpet player of all time appearing on more than 900 known recording sessions.
Trumpeter, and flugelhorn player Clark Terry passed away from complications from advanced diabetes on February 21, 2015 at the age f 94 in Pine Bluffs, Arkansas.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jack Purvis was born John Purvis on December 11, 1906 in Kokomo, Indiana. After his mother’s death in 1912 his behavior became uncontrollable, and, as a result of many acts of petty larceny that would remain a part of his adult life, he was sent to a reform school. While there, he discovered that he had an uncanny musical ability, and soon became proficient enough to play both the trombone and trumpet professionally. This also enabled him to leave the reformatory and continue his high school education, while he was playing paying gigs on the side.
One of the earliest jobs he had as a musician was with a band led by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and not long afterward he was working with the Hal Denman dance band. After high school he played with the Original Kentucky Night Hawks, then Bud Rice, Whitey Kaufman’s Original Pennsylvanians, Arnold Johnson’s orchestra, and then traveled to France with the George Carhart band. The balance of the decade he spent recording as a leader and sideman with several bands.
In 1930, Purvis led a couple of racially mixed recording sessions including the likes of J.C. Higginbotham and Adrian Rollini. He would work with the Dorsey Brothers, Fletcher Henderson, Fred Waring, Charlie Barnet and the New Orleans Symphony Orchestra. His move to California had him in radio broadcasting, working at Warner Studios and with the George Stoll Orchestra.
By the mid Thirties he was back in New York playing with Frank Froeba’s Swing Band but this engagement and subsequent recordings were the end of his recording career. He disappeared from the music world, ultimately being sent to jail in Texas for robbery. After his second conviction and release Purvis worked as a chef, aviator, carpenter, radio repairman and even a mercenary in South America.
One account of trumpeter Jack Purvis’ death is that he gassed himself in San Francisco, California on March 30, 1962. However, his death certificate indicates the cause of death to be fatty degeneration of the liver. He was best known as the composer of Dismal Dan and Down Georgia Way, also played trombone, harp and a number of other instruments, and was one of the earliest trumpeters to incorporate the innovations pioneered by Louis Armstrong.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Freddy Martin was born Frederick Alfred Martin on December 9, 1906 in Cleveland, Ohio. Raised largely in an orphanage and with various relatives, he started out playing drums, then switched to C-melody saxophone and later the tenor saxophone that he would come to be identified with. He led his own band in high school, played in several local bands and took that money to enroll in Ohio State University.
After working on a ship’s band, Martin joined the Mason-Dixon band, then joined Arnold Johnson and then Jack Albin, with whom he would make his first recording with the “Hotel Pennsylvania Music” for Columbia’s Harmony, Velvet Tone, and Clarion 50 cent labels in 1930. However it was while filling in for Guy Lombardo one night that kick started his career. It was in 1931 at the Bossert Marine Room in Brooklyn, New York that Freddy pioneered the “Tenor Band” style that swept the sweet-music industry. With his own tenor sax as melodic lead, Martin fronted an all-tenor sax section with just two brasses and a violin trio plus rhythm.
The Martin band recorded first for Columbia, Brunswick and RCA’s Bluebird and Victor, backed singers, played hotels and became a staple on NBC’s Maybelline Penthouse Serenade. His adaptation of a Tchaikovsky tune released as Tonight We Love became his biggest hit.
Freddy Martin was nicknamed “Mr. Silvertone” by saxophonist Johnny Hodges and Chu Berry has named him his favorite saxophonist. He used the banner “Music In The Martin Manner.” Having a good ear for singers at one time or another, Martin employed Helen Ward, Stuart Wade, Merv Griffin, Buddy Clark as well as pianists Sid Appleman and Terry Shand, violinist Eddie Stone and many others.
Martin’s popularity as a bandleader led him to Hollywood in the 1940s where he and his band appeared in a handful of films, in the 1950s and 1960s he continued to perform on the radio, appear on television, be the musical director for Elvis Presley’s first Vegas appearance, and continue his hotel gigs. He would continue to lead his band until the early 80s, although by then, he was semi-retired. Bandleader and tenor saxophonist Freddy Martin passed away on September 30, 1983, in a Newport Beach hospital after a lingering illness. He was 76 years old.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Eddie Heywood was born Edward Heywood, Jr. on December 4, 1915 in Atlanta, Georgia. Following in his father’s jazz footsteps, in through the Thirties he played with Waymon Carter, Clarence Love and Benny Carter once he moved to New York in 1939.
After starting his band, Heywood was an occasional sideman with Billie Holiday in 1941. By 1943 he was taking several classic solos on a Coleman Hawkins quartet date and put together the first sestet with Doc Cheatham and Vic Dickerson. Their version of “Begin the Beguine” became a hit in 1944 and three successful years followed.
Between 1947 and 1950, Eddie was stricken with a partial paralysis of his hands and could not play at all. However, it did not stop him when he made a comeback later in the decade. During the Fifties he composed and recorded “Land of Dreams” and “Soft Summer Breeze” and is probably best known for his 1956 recording of his composition “Canadian Sunset,” all of which he recorded with the Hugo Winterhalter Orchestra.
After a second partial paralysis in the 1960s, he made another comeback and continued his career in the 1980s. Pianist Eddie Heywood, who passed away on January 3, 1989 in Miami Beach, Florida, was awarded a star at 1709 Vine Street on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Eddie Heywood: 1915-1989 / Piano
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