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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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
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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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
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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Daily Dose Of jazz…
Ralph Towner was born on March 1, 1940 in Chehalis, Washington. Born into a musical family, his mother a piano teacher and his father a trumpet player, Towner learned to improvise on the piano at the age of three. He started trumpet lessons at the age of five, but did not take up guitar until attending the University of Oregon.
Ralph first played jazz in New York City in the late 1960s as a pianist and was strongly influenced by the renowned jazz pianist Bill Evans. He began improvising on classical and 12-string guitars in the late 1960s and early 1970s; and formed alliances with musicians who had worked with Evans, including flautist Jeremy Steig, Eddie Gomez, Marc Johnson, Gary Peacock ad Jack DeJohnette.
He began his career as a conservatory-trained classical pianist, who picked up guitar in his senior year in college, then joined world music pioneer Paul Winter’s Consort ensemble in the late 1960s. Leaving Winter along with band mates Paul McCandless, Glen Moore and Colin Walcott, they formed the group Oregon, mixing folk, Indian classical, avant-garde jazz and frr improvisation.
Around the same time, Towner began a longstanding relationship with ECM Records, releasing virtually all of his non-Oregon recordings since his 1972 debut as a leader Trios / Solos. As a sideman he has ventured int jazz fsion with Weather Report on the 1972 album I Sing The Body Electric.
Unlike most jazz guitarists, Ralph only uses 6-string nylon-string and 12-string steel-string guitars. He tends to avoid high-volume musical environments, preferring small groups of mostly acoustic instruments that emphasize dynamics and group interplay. He make significant use of overdubbing, allowing him to play piano or synthesizer and guitar on the same track. During the Eighties he used more synthesizer but has returned to the guitar in recent years.
Composer, arranger, bandleader and multi-instrumentalist Ralph Towner, who plays 12 string guitar, classical guitar, piano, synthesizer, percussion and trumpet, has an impressive catalogue of some five-dozen recordings spread between his role as a leader, with Oregon, and as a sideman with Paul Winter and Weather Report among others. He continues to perform, record and tour.
Put A Dose In Your Pocket
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Hollywood On 52nd Street
10 Cents A Dance is a song originally written by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart for the Broadway play Simple Simon, which became the inspiration for the 1931 romance-drama film of the same name. The film starred Barbara Stanwyck as a married taxi dancer who falls in love with one of her customers.
The Story: A beautiful streetwise taxi dancer named Barbara O’Neill works at a New York City dance hall called Palais de Dance. One of the dance hall’s wealthy patrons, Bradley Carlton comes to the hall and gives Barbara $100. Concerned about her unemployed friend and neighbor Eddie Miller, Barbara asks Bradley to give him a job, and he agrees. They fall in love, get married, Eddie philanders, they get divorced, they remarry, and then he wanders off to South America. Realizing their love is not strong enough she tries to get another divorce but gets denied by the judge. But after a fight and his gambling she packs her bags, goes to the dance hall and leaves with Bradley for France.
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