Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Known professionally as Acker Bilk, Bernard Stanley Bilk MBE was born in Pensford, Somerset on January 28, 1929. He earned the nickname “Acker” from the Somerset slang for friend or mate. His parents tried to teach him the piano but, as a boy, he found it restricted his love of outdoor activities, including football. He lost two front teeth in a school fight and half a finger in a sledding accident, both of which he said affected his eventual clarinet style.

Leaving school Bilk worked at a cigarette factory in Bristol, then three years with the Royal Engineers in the Suez Canal Zone. While there he learned to play the clarinet after his sapper friend, John A. Britten, gave him one bought at a bazaar. He later borrowed a better instrument from the army and kept it after demobilization and played with friends on the Bristol jazz circuit and in 1951 moved to London to play with Ken Colyer’s band. Disliking London he returned west and formed his own band in Pensford called the Chew Valley Jazzmen, which was renamed the Bristol Paramount Jazz Band when they moved to London in 1951. Booked for a six-week gig in Düsseldorf, Germany, the band developed their distinctive style complete with striped-waistcoats and bowler hats.

His return from Germany, Acker based himself in Plaistow, London, and his band played the London jazz clubs. It was here he became part of the late 1950s trad jazz boom in the United Kingdom. They had an eleven chart hit singles in the Sixties, played the Royal Variety Performance, and became an internationally known musician in 1962 when he added a string ensemble on one of his albums that won him an audience outside the UK. His composition Stranger on the Shore was used in a British television series of the same name. He went on to record it as the title track of a new album and the single stayed on the charts for 55 weeks.

He appeared in two theatrical motion pictures, recorded a series of albums in Britain that were also released successfully in the United States on the Atlantic Records subsidiary Atco, however, his success tapered off when British rock and roll made its big international impact beginning in 1964. In the cabaret circuit, he had a couple of more hits, continued to tour, appointed MBE in 2001 and was awarded the BBC Jazz Awards’ Gold Award.

Clarinetist and vocalist Acker Bilk, known for his breathy, vibrato-rich, lower-register style, passed away in Bath, Somerset, on November 2, 2014, at the age of 85.

More Posts: bandleader,clarinet,history,instrumental,jazz,musical,vocal

Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Walter Page Cavanaugh was born in Cherokee, Kansas on January 26, 1922 who began on piano at age nine and played with Ernie Williamson’s band in 1938–39 before moving to Los Angeles, California and joining the Bobby Sherwood band at age 20.

While serving in the military during World War II, he met guitarist Al Viola and bassist Lloyd Pratt, with whom he formed a trio. After the war’s end they performed together in the style of the Nat King Cole Trio, scoring a number of hits in the late 1940s, including The Three Bears, Walkin’ My Baby Back Home, and All of Me.

The trio appeared in the films A Song Is Born, Big City, Lullaby of Broadway with Doris Day and Romance on the High Seas, Day’s first film, in 1948. He recorded dozens of tracks with Doris Day, Frank Sinatra, Dinah Shore, June Christy, Mel Torme and other legendary singers.

In the early 1950s, Cavanaugh had a program, Page Pages You, on the short-lived Progressive Broadcasting System. Additionally, the trio played on Frank Sinatra’s radio program, Songs by Sinatra, and on The Jack Paar Show.

Cavanaugh played in Los Angeles, California nightclubs through the 1990s, both in a trio setting, with Viola for many years and as a septet, Page 7. He recorded with Bobby Woods & Les Deux Love Orchestra. He recorded for MGM, Capitol, RCA, Star Line, Tiara, and Dobre Records over the course of his career, releasing his final trio album, Return to Elegance, in 2006. Pianist Page Cavanaugh passed away on December 19, 2008 of kidney failure.

More Posts: bandleader,history,iano,instrumental,jazz,music

Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Joe Albany was born Joseph Albani on January 24, 1924 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Albany studied piano as a child and by 1943 he was working on the West Coast in Benny Carter’s orchestra. In 1946 he played with Charlie Parker and then 20-year-old Miles Davis.

Continuing to play, in 1957 recorded an album for Riverside with an unusual trio line-up with saxophonist Warne Marsh and Bob Whitlock on bass. omitting a drummer. Despite that, most of the 1950s and 1960s saw him battling a heroin addiction, or living in seclusion in Europe. He returned to jazz in the Seventies and played on more than ten albums. Modern and bebop pianist Joe Albany passed away of respiratory failure and cardiac arrest in New York City at the age of 63 on January 12, 1988.

was the focus of a 1980 documentary titled, Joe Albany… A Jazz Life. His daughter Amy-Jo wrote a memoir about her father called Low Down: Junk, Jazz, and Other Fairy Tales from Childhood. The book was adapted for the screen and released in 2014 as the biopic Low Down.

<ahref=”http: notoriousjazz.com=”” wp-content=”” uploads=”” 2017=”” 08=”” bronze-lens.jpg”=””></ahref=”http:>

More Posts: bandleader,history,instrumental,jazz,music,piano

Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Eberhard Weber was born on January 22, 1940, in Stuttgart, Germany and began recording with several groups as a sideman in the early Sixties and released his first record under his own name The Colours of Chloë, in 1973.

From the early 1960s to the early 1970s, Weber’s closest musical association was with pianist Wolfgang Dauner. Their many mutual projects were diverse, from mainstream jazz to jazz-rock fusion to avant-garde sound experiments. During this period, Weber also played and recorded with pianists Hampton Hawes and Mal Waldron, guitarists Baden Powell de Aquino and Joe Pass, The Mike Gibbs Orchestra, violinist Stephane Grappelli, and many others.

Eberhard has released fourteen records under his own name, all under the ECM label. He has led collaborations with Gary Burton, Ralph Towner, Pat Metheny and Jan Garbarek. The mid-1970s saw Weber forming his own group, Colours, with Charlie Mariano, Rainer Brüninghaus and Jon Christensen. With John Marshall replacing Christensen they toured extensively and recorded two further records before disbanding.

Since the early 1980s, Weber has regularly collaborated with the British singer-songwriter Kate Bush, toured with Barbara Thompson’s jazz ensemble Paraphernalia, and by the Nineties touring slowed as did recording but he continued to perform until suffering a stroke in 2007, leaving him unable to play. Bassist Eberhard Weber was awarded the prestigious Albert Mangelsdorff-Preis in November 2009.

More Posts: bandleader,bass,history,instrumental,jazz,music

Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Francis Paudras was born on January 21, 1935 in Chilly-Mazarin, France. While in his early 20’s then an amateur pianist, Francis became a keen follower of jazz in Paris and in the early 1960s he befriended the ailing, alcoholic Bud Powell, one of the premier musicians of be-bop, who had gone to France with his wife, Altevia Edwards, and her son, Johnny. In 1963, with the help of the musician Johnny Griffin, he checked Powell into a hospital, but by then a custody battle emerged between him and his wife.

Powell was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and for the next year, Francis was his caretaker. When Powell was booked for a six-week engagement at Birdland in Manhattan, in December 1964, Mr. Paudras was his advance man, creating a wave of publicity. The run opened to stunning reviews but quickly worsened as Powell slid back into drinking. At the end of the engagement, Powell decided to remain in New York, where he died in 1966.

Paudras later became a friend and supporter of other musicians, including Bill Evans and Jacky Terrasson. Though his devotion to Powell eventually turned into a personal disappointment, he memorialized his friendship in his 1986 book, La Danse des Infideles that was ultimately adapted for the film Round Midnight that same year. He also co-author, with Chan Parker, of ‘To Bird With Love, a book of photographs published in 1981. He also issued recordings of Powell and others through the years, including some he made privately in the early Sixties.

Commercial artist, author, collector of jazz-related artifacts and patron of jazz musicians Francis Paudras passed away by committing suicide at his castle on November 26, 1997 in Antigny, France. He was 62.

More Posts: artist,author,collector,history,instrumental,jazz,music,patron