Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Charles Redland was born Carl Gustaf Mauritz Nilsson, on July 7, 1911 in Södertälje, Sweden. The son of a musician, he learned several instruments when he was young. By the 1930s he was a member of bands in which he played alto saxophone, clarinet, trumpet, and trombone.
During that decade he doubled as a leader. On clarinet he recorded with Benny Carter in Sweden in 1936. He composed and arranged jazz and popular music, as well as more than eighty films, in addition for radio and television programs.
Saxophonist, composer and bandleader Charles Redland passed away on August 18, 1994 in Stockholm, Sweden.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Born on July 6, 1920 in Abany, New York, Dick Kenney was one of a circle of big-band trombonists influenced by Bill Harris. Anxious to get to the jazz center once his chops were together, cello had been his initial introduction to music, but it was as a trombonist that he got into the Toots Mondello band in the early ’40s.
It was a bandleader named Paul Villepigue who took the budding trombonist from Albany to New York City. From 1946 there ensued two years of education with Johnny Bothwell, then Kenney headed for the West Coast and a return to college studies prior to seriously hitting the big band circuit. His first outing was with Charlie Barnet, then moved to Les Brown in 1957, migrating to Brown’s New England stomping or rather fox-trotting.
The trombonist’s big band work is well documented having recorded as a featured artist on more than one hundred sides, many in the late ’60s. The list includes Stan Kenton’s visionary City of Glass as well as addresses from forgotten artists, a good example being the Bothwell collection entitled Street of Dreams. Tromonist Dick Kenney, who played in the jazz and pop genres as well as on soundtracks, retired from music.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jerry Gray was born Generoso Graziano on July 3, 1915 in East Boston, Massachusetts. His father was a music teacher who began teaching his son violin at age seven. As a teenager he studied with Emanuel Ondříček and was a soloist with the Boston Junior Symphony. By age eighteen he had formed a jazz band and was performing in Boston clubs.
1936 saw Gray joining the Artie Shaw orchestra as lead violinist and studied musical arrangement under Shaw. A year later he became a staff arranger. Over the next two years he penned some of the band’s most popular arrangements, including Carioca, Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise, Any Old Time, and Begin the Beguine. After the band broke up in 1939, Glenn Miller offered him a job arranging
In November 1939, Shaw suddenly broke up the band and moved to Mexico. On the next day, Glenn Miller called Gray and offered him a job arranging for his band. During his time with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Jerry produced many of the most recognizable recordings of the era, arranging Elmer’s Tune, Moonlight Cocktail, Perfidia, and Chattanooga Choo-Choo among others, while his compositions among numerous others included Sun Valley Jump, The Man In The Moon, Caribbean Clipper, Pennsylvania 6-5000, and his most famous song, A String of Pearls. Many of his compositions became best-sellers.
The war years saw Jerry in Miller’s unit and became chief arranger for Miller’s “Band of the Training Command”, better known today as the Glenn Miller Army Air Forces Orchestra. He was the full orchestra’s assistant conductor, and conducted the orchestra’s first concert in Paris after Miller’s airplane disappeared over the English Channel.
After the war for a while he did radio and studio work around Los Angeles, California, including leading the band on a radio show called Club 15 that featured Dick Haymes. In 1949 he accepted a request from Decca Records to lead his own Miller-esque orchestra that was called Jerry Gray and the Band of Today.
Violinist, arranger, composer, and leader of swing big bands Jerry Gray, who continued to lead the Fairmont Hotel band into the 1970s, passed away of a heart attack on August 10, 1976 in Dallas, Texas. He was 61.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Clarence Profit was born on June 26, 1912 in New York City. Coming from a musical family, he began studying piano at the age of three and led a ten-piece band in New York City in his teens.
A visit to his grandparents in Antigua resulted in his staying in the Caribbean for five years. He also led a group in Bermuda. Returning to the States, Clarence led a trio. He co-composed Lullaby In Rhythm with Edgar Sampson. He was respected in his era, but after his early death he fell into obscurity. He was born, and died, in New York City.
Pianist and composer Clarence Profit, closely associated with the swing era, passed away in New York City on October 22, 1944.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Albert King was born on June 19, 1912 in Panama and raised in Kingston, Jamaica where he attended Alpha Boys School. During the 1930s he led his own band, Bertie King and his Rhythm Aces, one of Jamaica’s foremost dance orchestras.
Leaving the island in 1936, he sailed to England on the same ship as his friend Jiver Hutchinson. Once in London he joined Ken Snakehips Johnson’s West Indian Dance Band, then played with Leslie Hutchinson’s band. He also worked with visiting American musicians including Benny Carter, George Shearing and Coleman Hawkins.
In 1937, while in the Netherlands he recorded four sides in the Netherlands with Benny Carter, and the next year he recorded with Django Reinhardt in Paris, France. In 1939 he joined the Royal Navy. He left the Navy in 1943 and formed his own band, also working and recording with Nat Gonella.
Returning to Jamaica in 1951, he assembled his own band, the Casa Blanca Orchestra, playing in the mento style. With no Jamaican record labels at this time, he arranged for his recordings to be pressed in a plant in Lewisham, England, owned by Decca Records. Bertie returned a number of times to the United Kingdom, working and recording with Kenny Baker, George Chisholm, Chris Barber, Kenny Graham and Humphrey Lyttelton. During this period in his career he toured Asia and Africa with his own band and played and recorded in London with some of the leading Trinidadian calypsonians.
King went on to lead the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation house band in the 1950s. His sidemen included Ernest Ranglin and Tommy Mowatt. He recorded extensively with this outfit, until 1965 when he moved to the USA. His last known public performance was in New York City in 1967. Clarinetist and saxophonist Bertie King passed away in 1981.
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