Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Carrie Louise Smith was born August 25, 1925 in Fort Gaines, Georgia. Her mother moved her to Newark, New Jersey to escape an abusive husband but left her to be raised by an older cousin when she joined Father Divine’s church.

Leaving school after the eighth grade, Carrie taught herself to play piano, began singing in church and worked a number of jobs including train announcer at Newark’s train station. She became a member of the Back Home Choir that performed at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival. She first gained notice singing with Big Tiny Little in the early 1970s, but became internationally known by 1974 when she played Bessie Smith (no relation) in Dick Hyman’s Satchmo Remembered at Carnegie Hall.

This was when Smith launched a solo career, performing with the New York Jazz Repertory Orchestra, with a sextet led by trombonist Tyree Glenn in 1973, Yank Lawson in 1987, and then with the World’s Greatest Jazz Band. In addition to recording numerous solo albums, she starred in the Broadway musical Black and Blue from 1989 to 1991.

Though not well known in the U. S. she had a cult following in Europe and recorded thirteen albums between 1976 and 2002 as a leader. She also recorded with Art Hodes, Buddy Tate, Doc Cheatham, Hank Jones, Winard Harper, Dick Hyman, Clark Terry, Bross Townsend, Bob Cunningham and Bernard Purdie among others over the course of her career.

Jazz and blues vocalist Carrie Smith, lauded by jazz critics Rex Reed, Leonard Feather, Richard Sudhalter and John S. Wilson, passed away of from complications due to cancer at the age of 86 in Englewood, New Jersey on May 20, 2012.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Martial Solal was born on August 23, 1927 in Algiers, French Algeria to an opera singer and piano teacher. He began learning the piano from the age of six. After settling in Paris in 1950, he soon began working with leading musicians including Django Reinhardt and expatriates from the United States like Sidney Bechet and Don Byas. He formed a quartet and also occasionally leading a big band in the late that same year.

Martial began his recording career as a leader in 1953 and began composing film music, eventually providing over twenty scores. By 1963 he appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island but his Newport ’63 is a studio album recreating the live date. His regular trio featured bassist Guy Pedersen and drummer Daniel Humair and from 1968 he regularly performed and recorded with Lee Konitz in the U. S. and Europe.

Throughout his career Solal has performed solo and during 1993-94 he gave thirty solo concerts for French Radio, releasing a 2-CD set Improvise Pour Musique France on the JMS Records label. Solal has also written a piano method book titled Jazz Works.

In addition, pianist Martial has recorded three-dozen albums and worked with Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette Francois Moutin, Dave Douglas, Gary Peacock, Peter Erskine, Paul Motian, Marc Johnson, Toots Thielemans, John Scofield, Hampton Hawes, Daniel Humair, Niels Pederson, Joachim Kuhn, Hans Koller and Attila Zoller, among others.

In recent years, Martial Solal, who believes music is a language and each performance is a conversation between the participants, has continued to perform and record with his trio.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Frank Capp was born Francis Cappuccio on August 20, 1931 in Worcester, Massachusetts. He began playing with Stan Kenton in 1951, remaining for some time. Later he joined Neal Hefti’s group and often accompanied Peggy Lee on some of her road dates.

Capp subsequently came to Los Angeles, California where he joined Billy May. He performed and recorded with Chet Baker, Herbie Harper Quintet, Joe Pass, André Previn, J. J. Johnson, Ben Webster, Michael Nesmith, Anita O’Day, Frank Sinatra and Bud Shank among others.

Not limited to jazz he also played on numerous rock and roll sessions and is considered to be a member of The Wrecking Crew. This quintessential first-call group of musicians became Phil Spector’s de facto house band. Known as the Wall Of Sound Orchestra. They also played behind such 60s & 70s groups as Jan and Dean, Sonny & Cher, The Mamas & The Papas, Nancy Sinatra, The Byrds, The Monkees, Bob Dylan and The Beach Boys.

In 1975 together with Nat Pierce he founded the Capp/Pierce Juggernaut Band. Among the personnel have been Bill Berry, Bobby Shew, Marshal Royal, Blue Mitchell, Herb Ellis, Chuck Berghofer and Richie Kamuca, while the singers have been Ernie Andrews, Joe Williams, Ernestine Anderson and Nancy Wilson. Still led by drummer Frank Capp at age 84, the Juggernaut has proved sufficiently well founded to survive Pierce’s death in 1992.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Arvin Charles Garrison was born on August 17, 1922 in Toledo, Ohio and taught himself ukulele at age nine and played guitar for dances and local functions from age twelve.

In 1941 Arv was leading his own band at a hotel in Albany, New York, then with Don Seat put together a trio that played on both the East and West coasts of the United States until 1948. After 1946 it was called the Vivien Garry Trio, after his wife and bassist.

Garrison recorded on Dial Records with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and was actively at the forefront of the early New York City bebop scene in the 1940s. Jazz critic Leonard Feather interviewed him extensively about his time spent playing with Parker. In the 1950s he returned to his hometown of Toledo and played locally.

Some of his recordings can be heard on a few anthologies, such as, the Onyx 1974 release Central Avenue Breakdown, Vol. 1 shared with Teddy Edwards and Dodo Marmarosa and includes 6 of the 8 tracks that Arv and wife Vivien Garry’s quartet recorded for Sarco Records in 1945; Swing To Bop Guitar: Guitars In Flight 1939-1947 on the Hep label that includes Arv’s famous Five Guitars In Flight recorded for Black & White Records in 1946 with Earle Spencer’s Orchestra; and The Complete Dial Modern Jazz Sessions on Mosaic Records.

Guitarist Arv Garrison passed away on July 30, 1960 from drowning during an epileptic seizure.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Malcolm Earl Waldron was born on August 16, 1925 in New York City to West Indian immigrants, his father was a mechanical engineer., however they moved out of the city to Jamaica, Long Island when he was four. His parents discouraged his initial interest in jazz, but he was able to maintain it by listening to swing on the radio. He started classical piano lessons around age seven but by 16 he became inspired to play jazz on tenor saxophone after hearing Coleman Hawkins’ 1939 recording of Body and Soul, but unable to afford a tenor he settle for an alto saxophone. He played alto for local bands that performed for dances, bar mitzvahs, Spanish weddings, frequently taking over the pianist’s role when other musicians took their solos.

In 1943 Waldron being called up by the Army was based at West Point, allowing him to listen to the greats of jazz in clubs on 52nd Street. After two years of service he returned as a student to Queens College where he studied under composer Karol Rathaus, making his final decision to switch from saxophone to piano. After college he worked for a short time in rhythm and blues bands, including with Big Nick Nicholas.

In 1950 Mal went on to work with Ike Quebec in New York, made his recording debut with the saxophonist in 1952 and played at Café Society Downtown on Mondays for six or seven months. Over the next couple of years he worked frequently with Charles Mingus, recording on several Mingus albums, including Pithecanthropus Erectus, a key development in the movement towards freer collective improvisation in jazz. He would  go on to work with Lucky Millinder and Lucky Thompson, form his own band Idrees Sulieman, Gigi Gryce, Julian Euell, and Arthur Edgehill. This group recorded Waldron’s debut release as a leader, Mal-1, in 1956.

Waldron was Billie Holiday’s regular accompanist from 1957 until her death in 1959, and Introduced by Jackie McLean, he became the house pianist for Prestige Records. Other leaders he worked under at Prestige included Gene Ammons, Kenny Burrell, John Coltrane and Phil Woods. His most famous, Soul Eyes, written for Coltrane, became a widely recorded jazz standard. A prolific composer he has estimated composing more than 400 pieces of music during his time with Prestige.

He went on to perform with Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, Eric Dolphy and Booker Little, and wrote for is own band, scores for modern ballet, and film scores with his score for The Cool World becoming one of the first attempts to stress improvisation rather than composition in a jazz-based film score. In 1963 Waldron having a major breakdown caused by a heroin overdose causing him to lose the ability to remember his name or play the piano, requiring shock treatments and a spinal tap to bring him back. He had to relearn his skills, in part by listening to his own records. Recovery was a slow process, taking over two years till all his faculties fully returned.

From the mid-1960s on, Waldron lived in Paris, Rome, Bologna and Cologne, before moving permanently to Munich. He scored full-length and short films, for television and Amiri Baraka’s theater production The Slave & Dutchman, and played with Ben Webster and Kenny Clarke. He toured and recorded throughout Europe and Japan, stopping in the U.S. playing solo piano but also with Joe Henderson, Herbie Lewis, Freddie Waits, Charlie Rouse, Calvin Hill and Horacee Arnold and Cameron Brown.

The ‘90s saw Mal recording several albums with vocalist Jeanne Lee. Two of his final recordings were duets with saxophonists David Murray and Archie Shepp. Diagnosed with cancer in 2002 he continued to perform until his death on December 2nd of that year in a hospital in Brussels, due to complications resulting from the cancer. He was 77.

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