Daily Dose Of Jazz…
King Pleasure was born Clarence Beeks on March 24, 1922 in Oakdale, Tennessee. He moved to New York City in the mid-1940s and while working as a bartender, he became a fan of bebop music. He first achieved popularity by singing the Eddie Jefferson penned vocalese classic Mood’s Mood For Love, based on a 1949 James Moody saxophone solo to “I’m In The Mood For Love”. On a night in late 1951 at Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater, he won the competition and where Clarence Beeks became King Pleasure that night in Harlem.
Pleasure’s 1952 recording, featured vocalist Blossom Dearie, was his first after signing a contract with Prestige Records and is considered a jazz classic. He and Betty Carter also recorded a famous vocalese version of “Red Top”, a jazz classic penned by Kansas City’s Ben Kynard and recorded by Gene Ammons and others. Other notable recordings include “Parker’s Mood”, the year before Charlie Parker died in 1955, and Ammons’s “Hittin’ The Jug”, retitled as “Swan Blues” in 1962.
He would record with the Modern jazz Quartet, sans Milt Jackson, J.J. Johnson, Kai Winding, Lucky Thompson, with backup vocals by Eddie Jefferson and Jon Hendricks along with The Three Riffs. In Los Angeles in 1960 he was recording with Teddy Edwards and Harold Land. But by this time his popularity was waning and he faded into obscurity. However, his early work influenced Jon Hendricks, Annie Ross, Bob Dorough, Mark Murphy, Al Jarreau, The Manhattan Transfer and others.
Jazz vocalist King Pleasure, an early master of vocalese, where a singer sings words to a famous instrumental solo passed away on March 21, 1982, three days before his 60th birthday.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Harold Ashby was born on March 21, 1925 in Kansas City, Missouri. He began playing alto and clarinet as a teenager but gave up music while he was in the US Navy from 1943 to 1945. On return to his native Kansas City in 1946, he was soon playing again and backed the singer Walter Brown, making his first recording with Brown in 1949. He spent most of the Fifties in Chicago playing in blues bands before moving to New York in 1957 to work in the bands of Milt Larkin and Mercer Ellington.
He then found the fringes of Duke Ellington’s band and accepted as a friend and colleague by Ellington’s sidemen, he recorded with Webster (1958), Hodges (1960), Gonsalves (1961) and Lawrence Brown in 1965. Once he joined the band permanently he became a regular in all the small groups that came from the band to record. He was given more prominent roles as the band played across Europe and the Far East and won many fans across the world.
After Ellington’s death, Ashby worked with Sy Oliver in 1976 and made brief tours with Benny Goodman in 1977 and 1982. He toured there with the Ellington Alumni in 1978 and returned the following year with the Kansas City pianist Jay McShann Making another European tour paired him with the pianist Junior Mance, and he was also one of the stars of the 1985 Nice Festival.
He recorded often under his own name in the late Eighties and early Nineties, but illness curtailed his activities and he confined his work to the New York area. Ashby made an exception for one of his last appearances at the 2001 Duke Ellington Conference in Ottawa when Ashby played one of Ellington’s compositions written to feature him, “Chinoiserie”. Happily he was able to regain his top form, but it was his final appearance before an audience of any size. Tenor saxophonist Harold Ashby passed away in New York City on June 13, 2003.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Mark Murphy was born on March 14, 1932 in Syracuse, New York and raised in a musical family, his parents having met as members of the local Methodist Church choir. He grew up in the nearby small town of Fulton where his grandmother and then his aunt were the church organists. Opera was also popular in the house and he started piano lessons at the age of seven.
Murphy joined his brother’s jazz dance band as the singer when a teenager. His influences were Nat King Cole, June Christy, Anita O’Day, Ella Fitzgerald and Art Tatum. Graduating from Syracuse University in 1953, majoring in Music and Drama, university life included performing on campus and clubs playing piano and singing.
In 1954, Murphy moved to New York City working part-time as an actor and singer. He appeared in productions for the Gilbert and Sullivan Light Opera Company, musical TV version of Casey at the Bat and twice took second place at the Apollo Theater amateur contests.
Mark’s debut recording was Meet Mark Murphy in 1956, followed closely by Let Yourself Go in ’57. In 1958 Murphy moved to Los Angeles and recorded for Capitol, but returned to New York in the early ’60s and recorded the album Rah! in 1961 for Riverside Records. By 1963, he hit the charts with his single of “Fly Me To The Moon” and was voted New Star of the Year in Down Beat Magazine’s Reader’s Poll.
The late 1960s saw Murphy moving to London, England where he worked primarily as an actor but continued to cultivate his jazz audiences in Europe. He returned to the States in 1972 and began recording an average of an album a year for more than fourteen years on the Muse label including a two volume Nat King Cole Songbook, Bop For Kerouac, Living Room, Beauty and the Beast and Stolen Moments, in which he peened lyrics to the Oliver Nelson tune. He received critical acclaim and numerous Grammy nominations.
In 1984 together with Viva Brasil he recorded the album Brazil Song (Cancões do Brasil) that featured original material by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Milton Nascimento. In 1987, Mark recorded Night Mood, an album of songs by Brazilian composer Ivan Lins, appeared on U.F.O.’s last two releases in which he has written and rapped lyrics on songs composed with the group and opened up further new audiences in the acid-jazz and hip-hop genres demonstrating jazz’s timelessness while transcending generations and styles.
Through the Nineties and into the new millennium he released Song For The Geese, Once to Every Heart, Love is What Stays and Never Let Me Go. Mark collaborated with Finish jazz band Five Corners Quintet and released a tribute EP to Shirley Horn titled Beautiful Friendship. He has guested on recordings with Madeline Eastman, Gill Manly,Guillaume de Chassy, Daniel Yvinec, Till Brönner, Pete and Conte Candoli and has amassed a catalogue of more than forty albums as a leader. Vocalist Mark Murphy has continued to tour internationally into his 80s, appearing at festivals, concerts, in jazz clubs and television until his passing on October 22, 2015 in Englewood, New Jersey.
Take A Dose On The Road
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Roy Haynes was born in Boston, Massachusetts on March 13, 1925, and was keenly interested in jazz ever since he can remember. Primarily self-taught, he began to work locally in 1942 with musicians like guitarist Tom Brown, bandleader Sabby Lewis, and Kansas City blues-shout alto saxophonist Pete Brown. In the summer of 1945 he got a call to join bandleader Luis Russell to play for the dancers at New York’s Savoy Ballroom. When not traveling with Russell, the young drummer spent much time on Manhattan’s 52nd Street and uptown in Minton’s, the incubator of bebop.
From 1947 to 1949 Haynes was Lester Young’s drummer, worked with Bud Powell and Miles Davis in ’49, became Charlie Parker’s drummer of choice from 1949 to 1953, toured the world with Sarah Vaughan from 1954 to 1959, did numerous extended gigs with Thelonious Monk in 1959-60. Through the Sixties he performed and recorded with Eric Dolphy, Stan Getz, John Coltrane, has collaborated with Chick Corea since 1968, and with Pat Metheny during the ’90s. He’s been an active bandleader from the late ’50s to the present, featuring on his recordings Phineas Newborn, Booker Ervin, Roland Kirk, George Adams, Hannibal Marvin Peterson, Ralph Moore and Donald Harrison to name a few.
A perpetual top three drummer in the Downbeat Readers Poll Awards, he won the Best Drummer honors in 1996 (and many years since), and in that year received the prestigious French Chevalier des l’Ordres Artes et des Lettres and in 2002 his album “Birds Od A Feather” was nominated for a Grammy. Roy Haynes, percussionist, composer and bandleader nicknamed Snap Crackle, continues to compose, performer, record and tour.
Dose A Day – Blues Away
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Louis A. Levy, generally known as Lou Levy, was born on March 5, 1928 in Chicago, Illinois and started playing piano when he was twelve. His chief influences were Art Tatum and Bud Powell. A professional at age nineteen, he played with George Auld, Sarah Vaughan, Chubby Jackson, Boyd Raeburn and Woody Herman’s Second Herd during the late Forties. Still with Woody Herman by 1950, he moved on to play with Tommy Dorsey, Flip Phillips before leaving music for a few years.
Lou returned to music and gained a strong reputation as an accompanist to singers, working with Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, June Christy, tony Bennett, Anita O’Day and Pinky Winters. He would also go on to play with Shorty Rogers, Stan Getz, Sonny Stitt, Coleman Hawkins, Bob Cooper, Bennie Wallace, Terry Gibbs, Benny Goodman, Quincy Jones, Supersax, and most of the major West Coast players.
Over the course of his career he recorded as a leader for Nocturne, RCA, Jubilee, Philips, Interplay and Verve leaving behind a catalogue of fourteen albums as a leader and another eighty-one as a sideman.
Bebop and cool jazz pianist Lou Levy died of a heart attack in Dana Point, California at the age of 72 on January 23, 2001.
Dose A Day – Blues Away
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