Daily Dose Of Jazz…
James Last was born Hans Last on April 17, 1929 in Bremen, Germany. He grew up in the suburb of Sebaldsbrück and began studying the piano at ageten, although he could play simple tunes when he was nine. He switched to the double bass as a teenager and entered the Bückeburg Military Music School of the German Wehrmacht at the age of fourteen and continued learning to play bass, piano and tuba.
After the end of World War II he joined Hans Günther Oesterreich’s Radio Bremen Dance Orchestra. In 1948 he became the leader of the Last-Becker Ensemble, which performed for seven years. He was voted as the best bassist in the country in a German jazz poll for 1950, 1951 and 1952. When they disbanded, he became the in-house arranger for Polydor Records, as well as a number of European radio stations. During the next decade he helped arrange hits for artists such as Helmut Zacharias, Freddy Quinn, Lolita, Alfred Hause and Caterina Valente.
He won numerous popular and professional awards, including Billboard magazine’s Star of the Year trophy in 1976, and was honoured for lifetime achievement with the German ECHO prize in 1994. In addition, Last sold an estimated 200 million records worldwide in his lifetime of which 80 million were sold by 1973 and won numerous awards including 200 gold and 14 platinum discs in Germany.
In February 2015, after almost 50 years on tour he announced that he was finally bidding adieu to the stage and the last concert of his farewell tour took place in Lanxess Arena in Cologne on April 26, 2015. Composer, bassist and big band leader of the James Last Orchestra, wose “happy music” made him a bestseller in Germany, died on June 9, 2015 in Florida at the age of 86.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jerzy “Duduś” Matuszkiewicz was born on April 10, 1928 in Jasło, Poland and began playing jazz as a youth. He founded a jazz club at the YMCA in Kraków, Poland at age 20. and played with the orchestra of Kazimierz Turewicz.
A music enthusiasts club, Melomani, was founded in 1947 at the Łódź YMCA, a hang-out of nonconformist thinkers during the late 1940s. Moving to Łódź, Poland to study at the new Łódź Film School, he became part of the club and joined the sessions. After only a few concerts, the YMCA was closed due to promoting imperialist ideology using jazz music.
Jerzy founded and led a band in 1950, playing saxophones and clarinet with Marek Szczerbiński-Sart, trumpeter Andrzej “Idon” Wojciechowski, drummer Witold “Dentox” Sobociński, Marian and Tadeusz Suchocki and pianist Andrzej Trzaskowski and bassist Witold Kujawsk. Being separated from Western jazz by the Stalinist regime, they played a repertoire that did not compare to Western standards.
The band was offered space to practise at the Film School, performed informal concerts at the Film School, as well as in bars and private events, once a week. When they received an invitation to play a concert in Warsaw, Poland at the Academy of Fine Arts, they named themselves Melomani.
In 1952, pianist Krzysztof Komeda joined the band and expanded their performance reach. They played at the first jazz festival in Sopot, Poland in 1956. 1958 saw them as the first Polish jazz band invited to perform at the National Philharmonic in Warsaw. The group disbanded that same year.
Until 1964 he performed both in Poland and abroad. The following year he began to mainly compose and conduct music for movies and commercials. Moving to Warsaw with his wife, Grażyna, saxophonist, pianist, composer and bandleader Jerzy Matuszkiewicz died on July 31, 2021 at 93.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
William Orie Potts was born April 3, 1928 in Arlington, Virginia. As a child he played Hawaiian slide-lap steel guitar and the accordion in his teens. At 15 he won an accordion competition with a performance of Twilight Time. After hearing Count Basie on the radio he started studying the piano in high school. He went on to attend Catholic University of America in 1946–1947, then formed his own group under the name Bill Parks, which toured in Massachusetts and Florida.
While serving in the Army from 1949 to 1955 he transcribed charts for Army bands. During this time Bill composed and arranged for Joe Timer and Willis Conover’s ensemble, The Orchestra, which was broadcasted on Voice of America radio. He wrote four of the songs on The Orchestra’s 1954 Brunswick Records LP, and recorded some of their live shows, which occasionally featured guest appearances from Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.
By 1956 he was leading a house band at Olivia Davis’ Patio Lounge in Washington, D.C. and Lester Young booked an engagement there. Potts convinced Young to record with him on two of the evenings. These recordings were later released as the Lester Young in Washington, D.C. sessions.
The following year he worked extensively as a composer, arranger, and performer for Freddy Merkle’s Jazz Under the Dome album which featured Earl and Rob Swope. Soon after this he suffered a crushed vertebra in a car crash and ended up in a body cast for three months. During his recuperation Bill began working on charts and arrangements for an album consisting of jazz reinterpretations of many songs from George Gershwin’s opera Porgy & Bess.
Fully recovered by 1959, he released a session under his own name titled The Jazz Soul of Porgy and Bess for United Artists Records. It featured a nineteen-piece band whose members included Al Cohn, Harry Edison, Art Farmer, Bill Evans, Bob Brookmeyer, Marky Markowitz, Zoot Sims, Charlie Shavers, Earl Swope, and Phil Woods. The album received a five out of five star rating from Down Beat magazine upon its release.
Following this, Potts spent several years working in New York City before returning to the D.C. area, where he worked locally in addition to touring with and/or arranging for Paul Anka, Eddie Fisher, Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, Woody Herman, Quincy Jones, Stan Kenton, Ralph Marterie, Buddy Rich, Jeri Southern, Clark Terry, and Bobby Vinton.
In 1967 he released an album on Decca Records, How Insensitive, with a studio group called Brasilia Nueve. This group included Markowitz and Sims from the Porgy and Bess session , as well as Tito Puente, Chino Pozo, Mel Lewis, Barry Galbraith, and Louie Ramirez.
As an educator Bill taught music theory at Montgomery College from 1974 to 1990 and was the leader of the student jazz band. He also led a big band for occasional performances at Washington’s Blues Alley nightclub in the 1980s.
Retiring to Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1995, pianist and arranger Bill Potts died of cardiac arrest on February 16, 2005 in Plantation, Florida.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Yervant Harry Babasin, Jr. was born on March 19, 1921 in Dallas, Texas to American/Armenian parents. He attended North Texas State University, one of many noted jazz alumni from the school. Among them were Jimmy Giuffre, with whom he played in Bill Ware’s orchestra around 1940, and Herb Ellis, who played with him in the Charlie Fisk Orchestra starting in 1942. Fisk actually fired his rhythm section after hearing Ellis and Babasin play, and after he was admitted, Babasin quit school to go on tour with Fisk.
He toured in the 1940s with Jimmy Joy, Bob Strong, Billie Rogers, Gene Krupa, Charlie Barnet, Boyd Raeburn, Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Frank DeVol, and Jerry Gray. He also appeared in A Song Is Born, one of many jazz stars to play roles in the film. On the film set he met guitarist Laurindo Almeida, and the two began jamming together. Along with Roy Harte and Bud Shank their quartet was an early experiment blending Brazilian music and jazz. Their 1954 ten inch discs are predecessors to the bossa nova explosion of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
1947 saw him recording the first cello solos known in jazz music, with the Dodo Marmarosa Trio. In order to do so, he tuned his strings in fourths. In later cello ensembles he added a bass player. He and Oscar Pettiford did a session together with two cellos. In the mid-1950s, he put together his own ensemble, Harry Babasin & the Jazzpickers. This ensemble released three albums and played regularly at the Purple Onion in Hollywood, California. One recording of note was made in 1952 at the Tradewinds nightclub in Inglewood. It features Charlie Parker, Chet Baker, Sonny Criss, Al Haig, Larance Marable, and Harry, in one of Bird’s few West Coast appearances.
His career cooled in the 1960s, returning to work with Charlie Barnet and supporting Bob Hope’s USO tours. In the 1970s he and Harte initiated the Los Angeles Theaseum, a jazz archive and preservation society. Harry gave his last tour in 1985 with John Banister on piano. Over the course of his career he was possibly a part of as many as 1,500 recordings.
Bassist Harry Babasin, nicknamed The Bear, died of emphysema in Los Angeles, California on May 21, 1988.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jose Mangual Sr. was born on March 18, 1924 in Juana Diaz, Puerto Rico. He began playing percussion at the age of ten and by 1938 moved to New York at the age of 14. In 1952 he began playing timbales and percussion for Machito’s Orchestra.
In the 1950s Mangual played with the godfather of modern-day salsa Arsenio Rodriguez and with Latin jazz pioneer Cal Tjader. Then he joined Erroll Gardner’s band with whom he traveled the world, playing jazz for international audiences. During this time he performed and recorded with Cannonball Adderley, Sarah Vaughn, Herbie Mann. and appeared on Count Basie’s April in Paris, Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain, Dizzy Gillespie’s Talkin’ Verve, Tito Puente’s Babarabatiri, Willie Bobo’s Spanish Grease, Gato Barbieri’s Viva Emiliano Zapata, as well as on multiple Charlie Parker’s compilations.
He has also performed with Dexter Gordon, Carmen McRae, Jorge Dalto, Stan Getz, Louis Jordan, Ray Charles, Tito Rodriguez, Xavier Cugat, Tito Puente and Chano Pozo.
In the 1970s, Mangual recorded two instructional albums Buyú and José Mangual* & Carlos “Patato” Valdez* – Understanding Latin Rhythms Vol. 1 with Carlos “Patato” Valdez for the drum maker Latin Percussion.
In 1986 he co-wrote and recorded Los Mangual – Una Dinastia with his sons Jose, Jr. and Luis Mangual. In 2001 he was posthumously inducted into the International Latin Music Hall of Fame.
Percussionist Jose Mangual Sr., world renowned for his bongo drum performances and recordings during the 1940s and 1950s, died on September 4, 1998 in New York City.
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