Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bobby Lee Bradford was born July 19, 1934 in Cleveland, Mississippi and at age eleven his family moved to Dallas, Texas in 1946. He moved to Los Angeles, California in 1953 where he reunited with childhood friend from Texas, Ornette Coleman. He subsequently joined Coleman’s ensemble but was drafted into the U.S. Air Force and replaced by Don Cherry.
After playing in military bands from late 1954 to late 1958, Bradford reunited with Coleman’s quartet from 1961 to 1963, infrequently performing in public, but prolifically recorded under Coleman’s Atlantic contract. Unfortunately these tapes were among those many destroyed in the Great Atlantic Vault Fire. Returning to the West Coast to pursue further studies, he would eventually receive his B.M. degree from Huston-Tillotson College.
He soon began a long-running and relatively well-documented association with the clarinetist John Carter, a pairing that brought both increased exposure at international festivals. Following Carter’s death in 1991, Bobby fronted his own ensemble known as The Mo’tet.
Bradford has performed with Eric Dolphy, Leon “Ndugu” Chancler, Ingebrigt Håker-Flaten, Bob Stewart, Charlie Haden, George Lewis, James Newton, Frode Gjerstad, Vinny Golia, Nels Cline, William Parker, Paal Nilssen-Love, and David Murray, among others.
An educator, he is a professor at Pasadena City College in California and Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he teaches The History of Jazz. Trumpeter and cornetist Bobby Bradford is the father of drummer Dennis Bradford and jazz vocalist Carmen Bradford. He has recorded eight albums as a leader, ten as a co-leader, seventeen as a sideman and continues to perform with his group The Mo’tet.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
René Urtreger was born July 16, 1934 in Paris, France and began his private piano studies at the age of four, and then at the Conservatory. He studied with an orientation toward jazz, playing in a small Parisian club, the Sully d’Auteil, conducted by Hubert Damisch. The Sully boasted an orchestra of talented students including Sacha Distel and Louis Viale.
In 1953, Urtreger won first prize in a piano contest for amateurs, and from that moment decided to be a professional musician. 1954 saw him accompanying saxophonist Don Byas and trumpeter Buck Clayton in a Parisian concert. Their collaboration in the “Salon du Jazz” became one of the most highly requested French performances by the American musicians that toured the French capital.
After serving in the military from 1955 to 1957, René would play in a club on the left bank of the Seine, the famous Club Saint-Germain and again he collaborated with Miles Davis and Lester Young. His work so impressed the latter that he accompanied Young for a short tour of Europe in 1956, however the following year in December, he was part of Davis’s group which recorded the soundtrack to the film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows).
The late 1950s had him working with Lionel Hampton, Stan Getz, Chet Baker, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins and Ben Webster, among others. His canon of jazz work is still widely regarded as sensitive with a full, dense sound of swing. The Academie du Jazz of France formally recognized his accomplishments in 1961 with the Prix Django Reinhardt for outstanding jazz artist of the year. This win subsequently led to him providing soundtracks for films by Claude Berri and others.
Reappearing on the Paris jazz scene he resumed his career as a small-ensemble accompanist with Lee Konitz, Aldo Romano or Barney Wilen. He was featured at “Le Jazz Cool, Le Jazz Hot: A Celebration of Modern Jazz in Los Angeles and France” at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California in 2007. Pianist René Urtreger is currently 83 years of age and continues to perform.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Kenneth Napper was born July 14, 1933 in London, England. He started out on learning to play the piano as a child, then picked up the bass as a student at Guildhall School of Music. Entering the British military in the early 1950s, he played and recorded with Mary Lou Williams in 1953 while on leave. After completing his term of duty, he went on to play with Jack Parnell, Malcolm Mitchell, Vic Ash, and Cab Calloway.
During the late Fifties and early 1960s Kenny was the house bassist at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club for several years and played with many British and American jazz musicians. These musicians include Alan Clare, Ronnie Scott, Stan Tracey, Tubby Hayes, Tony Kinsey, Tony Crombie, Jimmy Deuchar, John Dankworth, Pat Smythe, Phil Seamen, Zoot Sims, Carmen McRae, and Paul Gonsalves.
By the late Sixties he worked with Ted Heath, Tony Coe, John Picard and Barney Kessel, as well as with Gonsalves, Tracey, and Dankworth. In 1970 he played with Stephane Grappelli prior to a move to Germany where he played with Kurt Edelhagen from 1970 to 1972. While residing there, Napper focused more on composition and arrangement and then in the late Seventies he moved to the Netherlands.
Through the remainder of the decade and and the Eighties he put down his bass, arranged for radio ensembles, was the staff arranger and conductor for the 50 piece Metropole Orchestra, and then directed his attention to teaching at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. At 83 years of age, double-bassist arranger, composer, conductor and educator Kenny Napper, it is assumed he has retired and returned to the United Kingdom.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bengt-Arne Wallin was born on July 13, 1926 in Linköping, Sweden and was also active under the pseudonym Derek Warne. He began his musical path with a homemade accordion. He then took up the trumpet and by the Forties he was playing trumpet in Linköping, followed by time spent in Gothenburg playing with Malte Johnsson’s Orchestra and in Stockholm Seymour Österwall at Nalen (National Palace) from 1951-1952.
In the years that followed from 1953-1965 he played in Arne Domnérus’s big band and between 1955 and 1965 was also in Harry Arnold’s radio band, after which he put the trumpet on the shelf.
Bengt took a position as an educator in 1972 and for the next twenty-one years he taught at the Music School of Stockholm. By the late 1990’s he started playing the trumpet again, now with his group Five to Five .
For the production show from Barnrike he was awarded the international radio prize Triumph Varieté. He went on to compose music for a variety of musicals and a larger number of television productions, such as The Magic Box. He was also the conductor of various major bands.
Trumpeter, composer, arranger, educator Bengt Arne Wallin, who was also trained in aeronautics, passed away November 23, 2015 in the Sollentuna Parish of Stockholm County, Sweden.
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Arnie Lawrence ,was born Arnold Lawrence Finkelstein on July 10, 1938 in Brooklyn, New York. He studied clarinet in his youth before switching to saxophone and from the age of 12 he was playing in clubs in the Catskills, and by age 17 was performing at Birdland, at one point working a double bill with John Coltrane.
He played with Charles Mingus, Thad Jones, Maynard Ferguson, Clark Terry and Duke Pearson but did not make his first recordings until 1966, playing on Chico Hamilton’s The Dealer. Working for several years with Hamilton and becoming a soloist on The Tonight Show from 1967 to 1972, Arnie made his first records as a leader in 1968.
In the early 1970s Lawrence played with Willie Bobo, then joined Blood, Sweat & Tears in 1974. He did a world tour with Liza Minnelli in 1978–79, and released a few more records under his own name before touring with Louie Bellson and Elvin Jones in the early 1980s. He composed a symphony he titled Red, White and Blues, which was premiered by an orchestra in Williamsburg, Virginia. It featured himself, Dizzy Gillespie and Julius Hemphill all soloing in the performance.
Putting on his educator hat he taught from the middle of the 1970s, working as an artist in residence in Kentucky and Kansas. By 1986 he had stopped recording and touring and founded the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York City. Among the program’s students were Roy Hargrove, Brad Mehldau, Larry Goldings, John Popper, Peter Bernstein and Spike Wilner of Smalls Jazz Club. Moving to Israel in 1997, where he founded the International Center for Creative Music, an education facility open to both Jewish and Arab students. He played regularly in Israel and owned his own nightclub called Arnie’s Jazz Underground.
Suffered from lung and liver cancer late in life, alto saxophonist Arnie Lawrence passed away on April 22, 2005, in Jerusalem, Israel and Palestine, as both claim the city as their capital.
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