Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Steve Swallow was born on October 4, 1940 in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. As a child he studied piano and trumpet before turning to the double bass at age 14. While attending a prep school, he began trying his hand in jazz improvisation. In 1960 he left Yale, settled in New York City and played with Jimmy Giuffres trio with Paul Bley.
After joining Art Farmer‘s quartet in 1964, Swallow began to write. It is in the 1960s that his long-term association with Gary Burton’s various bands began. The early 1970s saw him switch exclusively to electric bass guitar, preferring the 5-string.
Steve became an educator in 1974 for two years teaching at the Berklee School of Music. In ‘78 he became an essential and constant member of Carla Bley‘s band, toured extensively with John Scofield in the early 1980s, has returned to this collaboration several times over the years.
Bassist Steve Swallow has consistently won the electric bass category in Down Beat magazine’s Critics and Readers yearly polls since the mid-80s. Having grown a catalogue of some five-dozen albums as a leader and sideman, he continues to compose, perform and record.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Howard Roberts was born on October 2, 1929 in Phoenix, Arizona and began playing guitar at age 8. By age15 he was playing professionally locally. 1950 saw him moving to Los Angeles, California where he began jamming with Sonny Stitt, Dexter Gordon and Buddy DeFranco and working with musicians, arrangers and songwriters including Neal Hefti, Henry Mancini, Bobby Troup, Chico Hamilton, George Van Eps and Barney Kessel. 1952 was the year Roberts played on his first record date, Jam Session No. 10 with Gerry Mulligan and Jimmy Rowles. Around 1956, Bobby Troup signed him to Verve Records and he decided to concentrate on recording, both as a solo artist and session musician.
Roberts played rhythm guitar, lead guitar, bass and mandolin in the studio, for television and movie projects on such projects as The Twilight Zone, The Munsters, I Dream of Jeannie. He would work on Julie London’s Blue Moon recording, with Peggy Lee, George Auld, Shelley Fabares, Chet Atkins, Dean Martin, The Monkees, Roy Clark and many others. As a member of The Wrecking Crew,and part of Phil Spector‘s Wall of Sound, in 2007 he was inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tennessee.
In 1961, Howard designed a signature guitar with a round sound hole and single pickup that was originally produced by Gibson’s Epiphone division. Two years later he recorded his first two albums of nine with Capitol, before signing with ABC/Impulse Records. From the late 1960s, Roberts began to focus on teaching, traveling around the country giving guitar seminars, and writing several instructional books.
For some years he also wrote an acclaimed column “Jazz Improvisation” for Guitar Player magazine and founded the Guitar Institute of Technology and Playback Publishing. Guitarist Howard Roberts died of prostate cancer in Seattle, Washington on June 28, 1992, leaving a jazz catalogue of more than two-dozen albums as a leader and sideman.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Johnny Mathis was born John Royce Mathis in Gilmer, Texas on September 30, 1935. The family moved to San Francisco, California, where he grew up on 32nd Avenue in the Richmond District. His father a vaudevillian, saw his son’s talent, bought a piano and encouraged him by teaching him songs and routines that he performed at home, school and church functions.
At thirteen, Johnny began study with voice teacher Connie Cox, and for six years he learned vocal scales and exercises, voice production, classical and operatic skills. A star athlete in high school he earned four athletic letters, and then enrolled at San Francisco State University on scholarship to become a teacher. However, spotted by Helen Noga, co-owner of The Black Hawk Club at a jam session, she became his manager, got jazz producer George Avakian to hear him and he subsequently sent a telegram to Columbia Records noting: Have found phenomenal 19-year-old boy who could go all the way. Send blank contracts.
The rest, as they say is history. His first album Johnny Mathis: A New Sound In Popular Song was a slow-selling jazz album. Staying in New York to play the clubs, his second album, produced by Mitch Miller,, defined his sound – soft, romantic ballads. Miller paired him with arranger/conductor Ray Conniff, then with Ray Ellis, Glenn Osser, and Robert Mersey By 1956 Johnny recorded two of his most popular songs – “Wonderful, Wonderful” and “It’s Not For Me To Say”. He would appear in films by MGM and 20th Century Fox, the Ed Sullivan Show and The Pat Boone Chevy Showroom.
After splitting from Noga, Mathis established Jon Mat Records to produce his recordings, Rojon Productions to handle all of his concert, theater, showroom and television appearances, and all promotional and charitable activities, hired a new manager and business partner, signed with Mercury, then Columbia Records, the latter being his permanent label. His recordings have been used in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The X-Files and Mad Men; and his discography crosses all genres including jazz, pop, Brazilian, Spanish, Soul, R&B, rock, Broadway, Tin Pan Alley and disco.
He has the distinction of having the longest stay of any recording artist on the Columbia Record label, having been with the label from 1956 to 1963 and from 1968 to the present and makes him the third biggest selling recording artist of the 20th century, only after Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra.
Johnny Mathis has received three Grammy awards including a Lifetime Achievement Award, has been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, nominated for an Oscar, has taped twelve of his own television specials, made over 300 television guest appearances with 33 of them being on The Tonight Show and his songs have been heard in 100 plus television shows and films around the globe. He continues to perform but from 2000 onwards has limited his concert engagements to fifty to sixty appearances per year.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
John Gilmore was born on September 28, 1931 and grew up in Chicago, Illinois but didn’t start playing the clarinet until age 14. While in the Air Force in the late Forties he took up the saxophone, then pursued a musical career, playing briefly with pianist Earl Hines before encountering Sun Ra in 1953.
For the next four decades, Gilmore recorded and performed almost exclusively with Sun Ra. Thought to have the makings of stardom like John Coltrane or Sonny Rollins, the latter taking informal lessons from Gilmore in the late 50s and partially inspired by his sound on “Chasin’ The Trane”.
By 1957 he was co-leading a Blue Note date with Clifford Jordan titled Blowing In From Chicago, that is regarded as a hard bop classic with Horace Silver, Curly Russell, and Art Blakey. In the mid-1960s John toured with the Jazz Messengers, participated in recording sessions with Paul Bley, Andrew Hill, Pete La Roca, McCoy Tyner, Melba Liston, and a handful of others. In 1970 he co-led a recording with Jamaican trumpeter Dizzy Reece, however his main focus throughout remained with the Sun Ra Arkestra.
Gilmore was devoted to Sun Ra’s use of harmony, which he considered both unique and a logical extension of bebop. He was the Arkestra’s leading sideman and soloist, performing with fluency and tone on straight-ahead post bop sessions and abstractly capable of long passages based exclusively on high-register squeals. Though his fame was shrouded in the relative anonymity as a member of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, he led the band after Ra’s death up until his own passing of emphysema in 1995.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Hank Levy was born Henry Jacob Levy on September 27, 1927 in Baltimore, Maryland. He learned to play the saxophone and matriculated through Catholic University studying composition with George Thaddeus Jones. It was here that he became interested in odd meters through their use by such composers as Paul Hindemith, Maurice Ravel, and Igor Stravinsky. An adept composer of counterpoint, his talent can be heard in such compositions as Passacaglia and Fugue and Quintessence among others for both the Don Ellis Orchestra and Stan Kenton.
Levy was also prolific as an arranger of jazz standards, though few of them were published during his lifetime. He was especially fond of the music of the stage as it came through bebop: Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern. In his last years, he more frequently turned to bebop originals by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Tadd Dameron.
As an educator Hank was a full-time professor at Towson State University in 1967. He founded and directed for nearly a quarter of a century the Jazz Program and created the “Towson State Jazz Ensemble”. By 1970 he had brought the band to national prominence winning the outstanding band honors at the prestigious Notre Dame Jazz Festival, with and additional honor of “Best Lead Trumpet”.
Levy recorded an album in 1975 with the ensemble titled “2 + 2 = 5” comprised of six of his compositions. The “Hank Levy Legacy Band” currently performs his music, they have recorded two live CDs to date, and several of his works are still in print through various distributors. Saxophonist, composer and arranger Hank Levy passed away on September 18, 2001 in Parkville, Maryland.