Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Charles Edward Smith was born June 8, 1904 in Thomaston, Connecticut and began collecting Hot Records from early jazz in the 1920s. He worked with William Russell, Eugene Williams, John Hammond, Hugues Panassié and Charles Delaunay in the Hot Record Society from 1937, from which the jazz label HRS Records was established. Along with Steve Smith, he was editor of the jazz magazine Hot Record Society Rag.
Smith was among the early representatives of jazz criticism in the 1930s, having published essays in journals such as the Symposium, The Daily Worker and Esquire. He published the book Jazzmen with Frederic Ramsey in 1939 and was one of America’s first jazz books along with Wild Hobson’s American Jazz Music.
He wrote articles on groups like the Austin High School Gang as well as interviews with early jazz musicians like Willie Cornish, Papa Jack Laine, Leon Roppolo and Nick LaRocca. With the 1942 The Jazz Record Book, an attempt was made to list a canon of important jazz records, which prompted future writers to produce further books such as Marshall Stearns’ The Story of Jazz, Joachim-Ernst Berendt & Günther Huesmann’s Jazz Book, Barry Kernfeld’s Encyclopedia of Jazz and Allen Lowes That Devilin’ Tune.
Charles also wrote for The New Republic, the magazine Jazz Information and a series of liner notes from folk music albums, folk blues and early jazz players such as Pee Wee Russell, Jelly Roll Morton as well as modern jazz musicians Al Cohn, Miles Davis/Milestones, Chico Hamilton/South Pacific in Hi-Fi and J.J. Johnson/Dial JJ 5. He also wrote the accompaniment text for the LP edition of John Hammond’s Concert Series, From Spirituals to Swing – Carnegie Hall Concerts, 1938/39 on the Vanguard label.
Author and critic Charles Edward Smith, who is considered one of the early serious jazz critics, passed away on December 16, 1970 in New York City.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
James Melvin Lunceford was born on June 6, 1902 on a 53 acre farm in the Evergreen community, west of the Tombigbee River, near Fulton, Mississippi. They moved seven months after his birth to his other’s hometown of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and as a child he learned several instruments. By high school they were living in Denver, Colorado where he studied music under Wilberforce J. Whiteman, father of bandleader Paul Whiteman. He went on to continue his studies at Fisk University. By 1922, he was playing alto saxophone in a local band led by the violinist George Morrison which included Andy Kirk, another musician destined for fame as a bandleader.
In 1927 he organized a student band at Manassas High School in Memphis, Tennessee called the Chickasaw Syncopators, and later changed to the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra. Under the new name, the band started its professional career in 1929 and made its first recordings in 1930. He gained recognition as the first public high school band director in Memphis. After a period of touring, the band accepted a booking at the Harlem nightclub The Cotton Club in 1934 for their revue ‘Cotton Club Parade’ starring Adelaide Hall. His orchestra, with their tight musicianship and the often outrageous humor in their music and lyrics, made an ideal band for the club, and his reputation began to steadily grow.
The band’s style of playing was based its ensemble work and for using a two-beat rhythm, called the Lunceford two-beat, as opposed to the standard four-beat rhythm, a distinction made possible by the imaginative arrangements by trumpeter Sy Oliver. Comedy and vaudeville also played a distinct part in Jimmie’s presentation incorporating costumes, skits and jabs at mainstream white bands.
Over the next decade the orchestra recorded on the Decca and Vocalion labels, toured Europe extensively, lost arranger Oliver to the Dorsey band and appeared in the movie Blues In The Night. Unfortunately, most of Lunceford’s sidemen were underpaid and left for better paying bands, leading to the band’s decline.
On July 12, 1947 while signing autographs at a local record store in Seaside, Oregon, saxophonist, flautist and bandleader Jimmie Lunceford collapsed and passed away on the way to the hospital. Accounts from other bandmates who also got sick within hours of the meal, substantiate the claims that they were poisoned by a disgruntled restaurant owner unhappy with having to serve Negroes. However the official autopsy has his caused of death as coronary occlusion.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Carl Briggs Pruitt was born on June 3, 1918 in Birmingham, Alabama and began his career as a pianist, but switched to bass in 1937. For a brief time he played around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and then went on to work through the Forties with Roy Eldridge, the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra, Lucky Millinder, Maxine Sullivan, Cootie Williams, and Mary Lou Williams.
The 1950s saw Pruitt touring with Earl Hines and the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra, but was mostly active as a sideman and session musician on recordings with Shorty Baker, Arnett Cobb, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Bill Doggett, Wynonie Harris, Bull Moose Jackson, Roland Kirk, George Shearing, Sahib Shihab, and Hal Singer among others.
Pruitt did not perform or record frequently in the 1960s or 1970s, but he did play with Woody Herman at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1967 and recorded with Ray Nance in 1969. He toured France with Doc Cheatham and Sammy Price in 1975.
Double-bassist Carl Pruitt passed away in June of 1977.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Frank Signorelli was born in New York City on May 24, 1901 and was a founding member of the Original Memphis Five at age sixteen in 191. He went on to join the Original Dixieland Jazz Band briefly in 1921. By 1927 he was playing in Adrian Rollini’s New York ensemble, and subsequently worked with Eddie Lang, Bix Beiderbecke, Matty Malneck and Paul Whiteman.
1935 saw him as a part of Dick Stabile’s All-America Swing Band and from 1936 to ‘38 he played in the revived version of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. He recorded with Phil Napoleon in 1946 and with Miff Mole in 1958.
As a songwriter, Signorelli composed I’ll Never Be The Same, initially called Little Buttercup by Joe Venuti’s Blue Four, Gypsy that was recorded by Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra, Caprice Futuristic, Evening, Anything, Bass Ale Blues, Great White Way Blues, Park Avenue Fantasy, Sioux City Sue, Shufflin’ Mose, Stairway to the Stars and A Blues Serenade which was recorded by Signorelli in 1926, Glenn Miller and his Orchestra in 1935 and Duke Ellington’s version in 1938.
On December 9, 1975, pianist Frank Signorelli, who never led a recording session, passed away in New York City, New York.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
John William Barber was born May 21, 1920 in Hornell, New York outside Rochester and was also known as Bill Barber or Billy Barber. He started playing tuba in high school and studied at the Juilliard School of Music. After graduating, he travelled west to Kansas City, Missouri, where he played with the Kansas City Philharmonic and various ballet and theatre orchestras.[1]
Joining the United States Army in 1942 he played in Patton’s 7th army band for three years. After the war, he started playing jazz, joining Claude Thornhill’s big band where he became friends with trombonist Al Langstaff, Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan in 1947. Bill became one of the first tuba players to play in a modern jazz style, playing solos and participating in intricate ensemble pieces.
Barber became a founding member of Miles Davis’s nonet in 1949 in what became known as the Birth of the Cool recording sessions. He then worked in theatre pit orchestration of the King and I, Paradiso and the City Center Ballet before joining up with Davis and Gil Evans in 1957 to record albums such as Sketches of Spain, Miles Ahead, Quiet Nights and Porgy and Bess. He also performed on John Coltrane’s album Africa/Brass.
During the 1950s and Sixties her recorded several albums with Art Blakey, Bob Brookmeyer, Kenny Burrell, Gigi Gryce, Slide Hampton and Pete Rugolo. Completing a master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music he chose to go into education and became an elementary school music teacher in Copiague, New York. He continued to play where possible including with the Goldman Band.
In 1992, he recorded and toured with a nonet led by Gerry Mulligan, reworking material from Birth of the Cool. From 1998 to 2004 he was part of The Seatbelts, New York musicians who played the music of the Japanese anime Cowboy Bebop.
Tubist Bill Barber, who never led a recording session, passed away of heart failure in Bronxville, New York on June 18, 2007.
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