Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Buddy Clark was born Samuel Goldberg on July 26, 1912 in Dorchester, Massachusetts, He made his big band singing debut in 1932 as a tenor, with Gus Arnheim’s orchestra, but was not successful. Singing baritone he gained wider notice in 1934 with Benny Goodman on the Let’s Dance radio program. From 1936 to 1938 he performed on the show Your Hit Parade.

In the mid-1930s he signed with Vocalion Records, having a top-20 hit with Spring Is Here. He continued recording, appearing in movies, and dubbing other actors’ voices until he entered the military, but did not have another hit until the late 1940s. In 1946 he signed with Columbia Records, scoring his biggest hit with the song Linda. 1947 saw hits for Clark with How Are Things in Glocca Morra?”, Peg O’ My Heart, An Apple Blossom Wedding, and I’ll Dance at Your Wedding. A duet with Doris Day, Love Somebody, sold a million recordsand reaching #1 on the charts. Through the Forties decade he had nine more chart hits untilhis death.

Vocalist Buddy Clark, who was a popular crooner during the big band era, passed away in a plane crash on Beverly Boulevard in West Los Angeles, California on October 1, 1949.

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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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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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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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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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