Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Clifford Edward Thornton III was born on September 6, 1936 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania into a musical family, his uncle pianist Jimmy Golden and his cousin, drummer J. C. Moses. He began piano lessons when he was seven-years-old, and studied with trumpeter Donald Byrd during 1957 after Byrd had left Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, and also that he worked with 17-year-old tuba player Ray Draper and Webster Young. Following a late 1950s stint in the U.S. Army bands, he moved to New York City.

In the early 1960s, Clifford lived in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, New York in an apartment building with other young musicians, including Rashied Ali, Marion Brown, and Don Cherry. He performed with numerous avant-garde jazz bands, recording as a sideman with Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, and Sam Rivers.

During the Seventies, Thornton and others were affected by the compositional ideas of Cecil Taylor, was active in the Black Arts Movement, and associated with Amiri Baraka and Jayne Cortez. This musical and artistic network provided him with a variety of perspectives on ideas such as black self-determination, performance forms, outside playing, and textural rhythm; and giving him access to performers who would provide the abilities some of his later compositions required.

He was included in the dialogue around the developing thought of political artists, including Shepp, Askia M. Touré, and Nathan Hare, as well as the journals Freedomways and Umbra. As an educator, he taught world music at Wesleyan University and created an Artists-in-Residence on campus, giving the academic world-music community exposure to Sam Rivers, Jimmy Garrison, Ed Blackwell, and Marion Brown. He arranged performances by Rashied Ali, Horace Silver, McCoy Tyner, and numerous others

Trumpeter, trombonist, activist, and educator Clifford Thornton, who played free and avant~garde jazz in the 1960 and ‘70s, passed away on  November 25, 1989.

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Three Wishes

Upon request by Pannonica as to his three wishes Danny Quebec~West responded by telling her: 

1. 1. “That the United States government… I wish that the capitalistic system be like the socialistic system in subsidizing the starving musicians, for art’s sake.”

   2. “My second wish ~ speaking of a field not concerning music ~ I wish that the stigma on jazz musicians concerning drugs… that the world have socialization of medicine, and therefore that we canget all we want.”

   3. “I hope when they do decide to let me be heardagain after such a long layoff, I hope that I can reach from their toes to their heads, and explode every minute cell in their brain ~ meaning the public, being that I feel that I have been treated very unjustly music~wise..”

*Excerpt from Three Wishes: An Intimate Look at Jazz Greats ~ Compiled and Photographed by Pannonica de Koenigswarter

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Willie Ruff was born on September 1, 1931 in Sheffield, Alabama and learned to play both the French horn and the double bass. He attended the Yale School of Music graduating with a Bachelor and Master of Music degrees by 1954.

He met pianist Dwike Mitchell in 1947 when they were teenage servicemen stationed at the former Lockbourne Air Force Base in Ohio. They began a professional relationship when Mitchell recruited him to play bass with his unit band for an Air Force radio program. They later played in Lionel Hampton’s band but left in 1955 to form their own group, then together as the Mitchell-Ruff Duo that lasted over fifty years. They also played as the second act to artists such as Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie.

From 1955 to 2011, the duo regularly performed and lectured in the United States, Asia, Africa, and Europe. In 1950 the Mitchell-Ruff Duo was the first jazz band to play in the Soviet Union and in China in 1981. Ruff was chosen by John Hammond to be the bass player for the recording sessions of Songs of Leonard Cohen, was one of the founders of the W. C. Handy Music Festival in Florence, Alabama in 1982.

As an educator, Willie was a faculty member at the Yale School of Music, teaching music history, ethnomusicology, and arranging. He is founding Director of the Duke Ellington Fellowship Program at Yale, held a visiting appointment at Duke University, where he oversaw the jazz program and directed the Duke Jazz Ensemble, and also has been on faculty at UCLA and Dartmouth.

French hornist, double bassist, music scholar, and educator Willie Ruff, was awarded the Sanford Medal, the Connecticut Governor’s Arts Award, and was an inductee of the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, primarily a Yale professor from 1971 to 2017, and continues to reside in Alabama.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Roy Willox was born August 31, 1929 in Welwyn, Hertfordshire, England into a musical family in 1929. At 16 he initially played with Johnny Claes for a short time in 1945 and then worked in other well-known bands before joining the Ted Heath Orchestra for a five-year stint from 1950 to 1955. During this time he also worked in a band with Keith Christie.

A collaboration with Jack Parnell and other bands led to extensive freelance in television, radio and theater. In the field of jazz, he was part of Harry South’s band in the 1960s and 1970s. This period of performing saw him occasionally returning to the Heath band throughout the 1990s and 2000s, playing the Ted Heath Bands farewell concert at London’s Royal Festival Hall in 2000.

In his later years Roy worked with Kenny Baker, the Robert Farnon Orchestra, and Laurie Johnson’s London Big Band. 2009 with the all-star formation The Allan Ganley Jazz Legacy. He was involved in 156 jazz recording sessions between 1951 and 2016 with Cleo Laine, Larry Page, George Chisholm, Beryl Bryden, Johnny Keating, Tubby Hayes, Kenny Clare, Dudley Moore, Louie Bellson, The London Jazz Chamber Group, Michel Legrand, Phil Woods, and the Len Phillips Big Band.

As a session musician, he is also in pictures of Bert Kaempfert, Tiny Tim ~ Live! At the Royal Albert Hall, and Harry Nilsson ~ A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night. Alto saxophonist Roy Willox, who also plays clarinet and flute, passed away on November 25, 2019.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Red Kelly, born Thomas Raymond Kelly on August 29, 1927 in Shelby, Montana initially took lessons on drums, but he was unable to work the hi-hat because polio had inhibited the use of his feet. Switching to double-bass during his teen years, in 1949 he began playing bass in a big band led by Charlie Jackson.

In the early 1950s he toured with Charlie Barnet, Herbie Fields, Claude Thornhill, and Red Norvo. It was while working with Norvo that led to the moniker Red. Kelly and bassist Red Mitchell were living in the same apartment, and when Norvo called Mitchell to invite him to tour, he got Kelly on the phone instead.

He played with Woody Herman for several years, including on a 1954 tour of Europe, and around this time Red also recorded with Dick Collins and Nat Pierce. Relocated to the West Coast, he started playing briefly in Seattle, Washington and then in Los Angeles, California with Maynard Ferguson, Med Flory, Stan Kenton, and Lennie Niehaus.

He was a member of the Modest Jazz Trio with Red Mitchell and Jim Hall, who recorded an album in 1960, and worked with Harry James for most of the 1960s. Later in his life he moved to Tacoma, Washington where he left the music business and ran his own restaurant, Kelly’s. Double-bassist Red Kelly passed away on June 9, 2004 in Tacoma, Washington.

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