Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Francy Boland was born François Boland on November 6, 1929 in Namur, Belgium. He first gained notice in 1949 and worked with Belgian jazz greats like Bobby Jaspar. In 1955 he joined Chet Baker’s quintet before moving to the US where he began arranging for Count Basie, Benny Goodman , Woody Herman and Dizzy Gillespie.
Boland set up an octet with drummer Kenny Clarke before returning to Europe and becoming Kurt Edelhagen’s chief arranger. In 1961, based around a rhythm section featuring Clarke, Jimmy Woode and himself, he founded Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland Big Band, which rapidly became one of the most noted Big Bands assembled outside the United States. A decade later in 1972 the band broke up and he mainly concentrated on composing.
Francy primarily lived in Switzerland, from 1976 wrote musical arrangements for Sarah Vaughan among others, and played as a sideman with Johnny Griffin. He was also part of One World One Peace, an effort involving Pope John Paul II. He recorded some three-dozen albums and Carola covered his song “Just Give Me Time” in 1966,
Belgian composer and pianist Francy Boland passed away on August 12, 2005 in Geneva, Switzerland.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ralph Earl Sutton was born on November 4, 1922 in Hamburg, Missouri. A stride pianist in the tradition of James P. Johnson and Fats Waller, he had a stint as a session musician with Jack Teagarden‘s band before joining the Army during World War II.
After the war, he played at various venues in Missouri, eventually ending up in New York City at Eddie Condon‘s club in Greenwich Village. Relocating to San Francisco in 1956, Sutton recorded several albums with Bob Scobey‘s Dixieland band.
Ralph recorded for Riverside and Arbors Record labels as a leader and played and recorded with Jay McShann, Johnny Varro, Ruby Braff and Dick Cary as a sideman. From the 1960s onward, he worked mostly on his own up until the time of his death on December 30, 2001 in Evergreen, Colorado. The following year pianist Ralph Sutton was inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Phil Woods was born Philip Wells Woods on November 2, 1931 in Springfield, Massachusetts. He studied music with his great influence Lennie Tristano, at the Manhattan School of Music and at The Julliard School.
After moving to France in 1968, Phil led the avant-garde jazz group The European Rhythm Machine, and then returned to the United States in 1972 and unsuccessfully attempting to establish an electronic group formed a quintet, which is still performing with some changes of personnel.
Although Woods is primarily a saxophonist he is also a fine clarinet player and solos can be found scattered through his recordings. His pop credits include the alto solos on Billy Joel’s Just The Way You Are, Steely Dan’s Doctor Wu and Paul Simon’s Have A Good Time.
Phil has worked with the likes of Kenny Burrell, Mundell Lowe, Red Garland, Palle Danielsson, Pony Poindexter, Jaki Byard, Richard Davis, Steve Kuhn , Donald Byrd, Kenny Dorham, Art Farmer, , Dizzy Gillespie, Julius Watkins, Louis Hayes, Hal Galper, Milt Jackson, Quincy Jones, Michel Legrand, Tommy Flanagan, Stephane Grappelli, Modern Jazz Quartet, Oliver Nelson, Ron Carter, Lalo Schifrin, Shirley Scott, Carmen McRae, Lew Tabackin and Jimmy Rowles among others.
He has amassed 34 sessions as a sideman and nearly four-dozen albums as a leader and has been nominated for seven Grammy Awards and won one for Images: “Best Large Jazz Ensemble Performance”, and three for “Best Instrumental Jazz Performance, Individual or Group” for Live from the Show Boat, More Live, and At the Vanguard.
His 2005 documentary film “A Life in E Flat” – Portrait of a Jazz Legend” offers an intimate portrait of Woods during a recording session of the Jazzed Media album This is How I Feel About Quincy. In 2007, Phil received a “Jazz Master” award from the National Endowment of the Arts. Saxophonist, clarinetist and composer Phil Woods was married to Chan Parker, the widow of Charlie Parker, until her death in 1999. He continued to perform, record and tour until his passing on September 29, 2015 in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Clifford Brown was born on October 30, 1930 into a musical family in Wilmington, Delaware. Organized into a vocal quartet with three of his youngest brothers buy his father, by age ten he started playing trumpet at school after becoming fascinated with the shiny trumpet his father owned. By age thirteen, he had his own trumpet and was taking private lessons.
Junior year in high school he received lessons from Boysie Lowrey, played in a jazz group that Lowery put together, made trips into Philadelphia while earning a good education from Howard High. He briefly attended Delaware State University as a math major, before switching to Maryland State College that had a more vibrant musical environment. He played in the fourteen-piece, jazz-oriented, Maryland State Band.
In June of 1950, he was seriously injured in a car accident and during his yearlong hospitalization Dizzy Gillespie visited the young trumpeter and pushed him to pursue his musical career. Limited to the piano for months due to his injuries, Clifford never fully recovered and would routinely dislocate his shoulder for the rest of his life. However, he quickly became one of the most highly regarded trumpeters in jazz.
Brown was influenced and encouraged by Fats Navarro. His first recordings were with R&B bandleader Chris Powell. He worked with Art Blakey, Tadd Dameron, Lionel Hampton, and J. J. Johnson, before forming a band with Max Roach. The Clifford Brown & Max Roach Quintet was a high water mark of the hard bop style with pianist Richie Powell, tenor saxophonists Harold Land, Teddy Edwards, Sonny Rollins and bassist George Morrow, throughout the tenure of the group.
Brownie, as he was affectionately called had a sound that was warm and round, and notably consistent across the full range of the instrument. He could articulate every note, even at very fast tempos which seemed to present no difficulty to him; serving to enhance the impression of his speed of execution. He had a highly developed sense of harmony, delivered bold statements through complex chord changes of bebop harmony and fully expressed himself in a ballad.
Clifford never touched drugs and had no fondness for alcohol, however his clean living would not save him from his tragic death on the rainy night of June 26, 1956 due to an auto accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. That night band member Richie Powell and his wife Nancy would also lose their lives.
At age 25 trumpeter Clifford Brown would leave behind only four years of recordings, nonetheless, he influenced later jazz trumpet players like Donald Byrd, Woody Shaw, Lee Morgan, Booker Little, Freddie Hubbard, Valery Ponomarev, Wynton Marsalis and many others. His compositions “Joy Spring” and “Daahoud” are jazz standards. He won the Down Beat critics’ poll for the “New Star of the Year” in 1954; and was inducted into the Down Beat “Jazz Hall of Fame” in 1972 in the critics’ poll.
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Cleo Laine was born Clementina Dinah Campbell on October 28, 1927 in Southall, Middlesex, England of mixed heritage to a black Jamaican father and white English mother. She began taking singing and dancing lessons at an early age and attended the Featherstone Primary School. Prior to her singing career she worked as an apprentice hairdresser, librarian and for a pawnbroker, married a roof tiler and had a son, all before 1957.
Laine took up singing professionally in her mid-twenties, auditioning successfully for John Dankworth’s band, with which she performed until 1958, when she married Dankworth in secret. She began her career as a singer and actress, playing the lead in a new play at London’s Royal Court Theatre in the 50s. This propelled her into consistent theatre applause and acclaim over the next two decades.
During this period she had two major recording successes, You’ll Answer to Me, reaching the British Top 10 and Shakespeare and All that Jazz with Dankworth received widespread critical acclaim. Cleo’s international recognition started in 1972 with her first tour of Australia followed by performances in the U.S. at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, and then heading to Canada with coast-to-coast tours of both countries. Television saw her on The Muppet Show, duet albums with Ray Charles (Porgy and Bess) as well as Arnold Schoenberg‘s Pierrot Lunaire, for which she was nominated for a Grammy Award. She also had a succession of record releases; several nominations and a Grammy win for her live Carnegie Hall 1983 concert.
In 1979 Laine was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to music and in the 1997 New Year’s Honours list, her membership of the order was elevated to Dame Commander, and she was appointed Dame Cleo Laine DBE, the equivalent of a knighthood for women.
She is the only female performer to have received Grammy nominations in the jazz, popular and classical music categories. She has published a self-titled autobiography Cleo in 1994 followed up with You Can Sing If You Want To in 1997. She has recorded over a hundred albums, received several honorary doctorates, fellowships and awards, has had a street named after her and at 85 years of age the longevity of her voice has been almost unchanged from decades earlier.
Contralto singer and actress Cleo Laine, who had a three-octave range passed away at her home in Wavendon, Buckinghamshire, England on July 24, 2025 at the age of 97.
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