Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Bernie Leighton, born on January 30, 1921 in West Haven, Connecticut, first played piano professionally at the end of the 1930s. In the early Forties, he played with Bud Freeman, Leo Reisman, Raymond Scott and Benny Goodman before serving in the Army.

Following his discharge, he found work as a studio sideman through the Sixties with Dave Tough, Billie Holiday, Neal Hefti, Goodman again, Artie Shaw, John Serry, Sr., James Moody and Bob Wilber. He toured a year with Tony Bennett from 1972 to 1973.

While Leighton was best known as a sideman, he also recorded extensively as a leader, releasing albums on Keynote Records, Mercury Records, Columbia Records, Brunswick, Disneyland and Capitol. He also recorded a tribute to Duke Ellington released in 1974. He has a cameo role in the 1986 film Hannah and Her Sisters. Pianist Bernie Leighton passed away on September 16, 1994 in Coconut Creek, Florida.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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