Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Cliff Smalls was born Clifton Arnold on March 3, 1918 and was raised in Charleston, South Carolina. His father, a carpenter, performed piano and organ for Charleston’s Central Baptist Church. He taught Smalls classical music at an early age. He left home with the Carolina Cotton Pickers and also recorded with them, for instance, Off and on Blues and “Deed I Do, which he arranged and featured Cat Anderson in 1937 when he was 19.
With his career coinciding with the early years of bebop, from 1942 to 1946 he was a trombonist, arranger and also backup piano-player for band-leader and pianist Earl Hines, alongside Dizzie Gillespie and Charlie Parker. While in the Hines band he performed often during broadcasts seven nights a week on open mikes coast-to-coast across America. Hines also used Teddy Wilson, Jess Stacy and Nat “King” Cole as backup piano-players but Smalls was his favorite. He also played in the Jimmie Lunceford and Erskine Hawkins bands.
After the inevitable post-World War II breakup of the Hines big-band, Cliff went on to play and record in smaller ensembles with his former Earl Hines band colleagues, singer and band-leader Billy Eckstine, trombonist Bennie Green, saxophonist Earl Bostic and singer Sarah Vaughan. In 1949 he recorded with JJ Johnson and Charlie Rouse. He was the pianist on Earl Bostic’s 1950 hit Flamingo along with John Coltrane but had a serious automobile accident, with Earl Bostic, in 1951 and laid in bed all of 1952, till March of 1953.
Recovering, Smalls shifted his musical career to serve as music director/arranger for singers Eartha Kitt, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis, Jr., Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Clyde McPhatter, Roy Hamilton and Brook Benton. He recorded Bennie Green with Art Farmer in 1956 and was, for many years, a regular with Sy Oliver’s nine-piece Little Big-Band from 1974-1984, a regular stint in New York’s Rainbow Room.
In the 1970s he returned to jazz-recording, including four solo tracks for The Complete Master Jazz Piano Series in 1970, with Sy Oliver in 1973, Texas Twister with Buddy Tate in 1975, Swing and Things in 1976 and Caravan in France in 1978. In 1980 Smalls was featured playing piano in The Cotton Club, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Trombonist, pianist, conductor and arranger Cliff Smalls, who worked in the jazz, soul and rhythm & blues genres, passed away in 2008.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lee Castle was born Lee Aniello Castaldo on February 28, 1915 in New York City. His first major professional job under his birth name was with Joe Haymes in 1935. This he followed by a couple of stints with Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey and also studied under Dorsey’s father. He also performed with Jack Teagarden, Glenn Miller, Will Bradley, and Benny Goodman.
Lee put together his own band in 1938, and continued to lead off and on through the Forties. He didn’t adopt the name Lee Castle in 1942. In 1953 he returned to duty under Tommy Dorsey and his brother Jimmy Dorsey. After Jimmy’s death, Castle became the leader of his ensemble, remaining in the position until the 1980s.
Trumpeter and bandleader Lee Castle passed away on November 16, 1990 in New York City.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Frederick Katz was born on February 25, 1919 in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York City and was classically trained. He studied under Pablo Casals and performed with several symphony orchestras. He was a child prodigy on both the cello and piano and performed in public as a teenager and was drawn to the music of Manhattan nightclubs and to folk music. During World War II he conducted concerts and wrote musical revues for the U.S. Seventh Army. He was a member of the National Symphony Orchestra.
Katz was a member of drummer Chico Hamilton’s quintet, one of the most important West Coast jazz groups of the 1950s. His arco cello defined the chamber jazz focus of Chico Hamilton’s Quintet and the group quickly gained popularity. The Chico Hamilton Quintet, including Katz, appeared in the film noir The Sweet Smell of Success in 1957, starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, where Katz was described in passing as the Quintet’s primary composer. Katz and Hamilton wrote a score for the film which was ultimately rejected in favor of one by Elmer Bernstein.
As a leader Fred recorded several albums, wrote and conducted the arrangements for singer Carmen McRae’s 1958 album Carmen For Cool Ones, and recorded with Dorothy Ashby, Pete Rugolo, Ken Nordine and Paul Horn. He scored nineteen films and television shows including A Bucket of Blood, The Wasp Woman, Creature from the Haunted Sea and The Little Shop of Horrors. Later in his career, Katz became a professor of ethnic music in the Anthropology Department at California State University, Fullerton and California State University, Northridge, where he taught world music, anthropology and religion for over 30 years. One of his students was John Densmore, drummer of The Doors.
Cellist and composer Fred Katz, who was one of the earliest jazz musicians to establish the cello as a viable improvising solo instrument, passed away on September 7, 2013, in Santa Monica, California.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Josiah “Cie” Frazier was born on February 23, 1904 in New Orleans, Louisiana. He studied drums under several New Orleans jazz musicians, including Louis Cottrell, Sr., Red Happy Bolton, and Face-O Woods. He joined the Golden Rule Band with cousin Lawrence Marrero in 1921, and played in Marrero’s Young Tuxedo Orchestra in the 1920s.
He recorded with Papa Celestin’s Tuxedo Brass Band in 1927 and played with A.J. Piron and Sidney Desvigne in the late 1920s and early 1930s. During the Great Depression, Frazier played in WPA bands and in Navy dance bands. In 1945, he recorded with Wooden Joe Nicholas and worked in the 1950s with Celestin, Percy Humphrey, George Williams, and the Eureka Brass Band. He played in the Preservation Hall Jazz Band in the 1960s, working there into the 1980s, and recorded in his last few decades with Kid Howard, De De Burke, George Lewis, Emile Barnes, Captain John Handy, and Don Ewell.
He appeared in the Steve McQueen film The Cincinnati Kid and drummed on a Helen Reddy session. Drummer Cie Frazier passed away on January 10, 1985 in New Orleans.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Frederick L. Robinson was born in Memphis, Tennessee on February 20, 1901, and learned to play the trombone as a teenager. He studied music in Ohio before moving to Chicago, Illinois where he played in Carroll Dickerson’s orchestra. As a member of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, he played on recordings and continued working with both Dickerson and Armstrong until late 1929.
He went on to take a position in Edgar Hayes’s band and in the 1930s he worked extensively as a sideman, with Marion Hardy, Don Redman, Benny Carter, Charlie Turner, Fletcher Henderson, and Fats Waller. From 1939 to 1940 he was in Andy Kirk’s band, and in the later 1940s he worked with George James, Cab Calloway, and Sy Oliver. Early in the 1950s he was performing with Noble Sissle, but sometime after 1954 he became less active as a performer. Trombonist Fred Robinson passed away on April 11, 1984, in New York City.
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