Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Frank Morgan was born on December 23, 1933 in Minneapolis, Minnesota and took after his father playing the guitar until he was seven, when he went to see Charlie Parker. Meeting him backstage, Parker suggested the clarinet for embouchure and two years later he switched to the saxophone.
Moving to California at age of 14, Frank entered and won a talent contest that provided him the opportunity to solo with Freddy Martin. But he hung out in the wrong circles and started taking heroin at 17, subsequently becoming addicted. He recorded with Teddy Charles in ’53 and Kenny Clarke in ’54 and touted as Charlie Parker’s successor, he would cut his first self-titled album “Frank Morgan” in 1955.
It would be three decades before his sophomore project due to his addiction and spending some twenty years in prison for various drug-related crimes. He would, however, form a small ensemble at San Quentin prison in the 1960s with another addict and sax player Art Pepper.
The Frank Morgan Quartet featured pianist Dolo Coker on piano, Flip Greene on bass and drummer Larance Marable. In 1985 he started recording again, releasing Easy Living in June 1985. This kicked off one of jazz’s most amazing comebacks. He recorded and toured vigorously but suffered a stroke in 1998. He subsequently recovered and once again began recording and performing.
Though mainly playing alto saxophone, Frank also played soprano and has recorded a string of excellent sets for Contemporary, Antilles, and Telarc, and has become an inspiring figure in the jazz world. Bebop alto saxophonist Frank Morgan passed away on December 14, 2007.
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From Broadway To 52nd Street
The Band Wagon hit the stage on June 3, 1931 at the New Amsterdam featuring Frank Morgan, Helen Broderick and Fred and Adele Astaire in their 10th and final Broadway appearance together. This revue utilized for the first time on Broadway, a double revolving stage for both its musical numbers and sketches. Dancing In The Dark written and composed by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, remains a jazz standard.
The Story: The revue, which ran 260 performances, had Fred and Adele cast as two French children cavorting with hoops, riding a Bavarian merry-go-round and several other sketches.
Broadway History: Theater posters are probably as old as the idea of the poster, but they really blossomed as an art form during the Industrial Revolution, when lithographic printing was perfected and affordable. In Paris during the Belle Époque (1880-1914) such posters were everywhere, a feature of the city. It was then that theater posters first became popular as decoration and memorabilia at home. When color printing developed (chromolithography), poster artists became even more popular and individually famous – like artist Jules Cheret, whose beautiful poster-girls (literal pin-up girls) were called “Chèrettes.” More and more reputable artists started creating posters. Toulouse-Lautrec, for instance, created many famous ones – an important part of his career.
Since that heyday, artists have continued to experiment with posters, including posters for the stage. Posters are an interesting genre-blending fine art, illustration, graphic art, advertising, and typography – so poster design attracts artists from each of those fields, for a lively cross-pollination of styles and ideas. All of which make posters a particularly rich and exciting contemporary art form.
The poster is also a supremely timely and ephemeral art designed to be used this one time for this one show, making them a sort of limited-time-offer art. Added to posters’ artistic merit, their time-capsule quality and their commemoration of now vanished events (plus the inevitable rarity of a paper artifact surviving) make posters ideal collectibles.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Joe Lee Wilson was born to farming parents on December 22, 1935 in Bristow, Oklahoma of African American and Creek Native American heritage. Attending a 1951 performance by Billie Holiday began his interest in a music-industry career. He studied in Los Angeles before touring the West Coast, where he sat in with Sarah Vaughan before heading down to Mexico. In New York in the 1960s, he worked with Sonny Rollins, Lee Morgan, Miles Davis, Pharoah Sanders and Jackie McLean.
Wilson formed his band Joy of Jazz, to personify the life-affirming nature of jazz and blues. During the 1970s, Joe operated a jazz performance loft in New York’s NoHo district known as the Ladies’ Fort at 2 Bond Street. His regular band, Joe Lee Wilson Plus 5, featured alto saxophonist Monty Waters and Japanese guitarist Ryo Kawasaki, and hosted Archie Shepp and Eddie Jefferson as frequent collaborators.
Joe also sang with Eddie Jefferson, Freddie Hubbard and Kenny Dorham, recorded a 1972 live radio program at Columbia University’s WKCR-FM, which was released as an album, Livin’ High Off Nickels & Dimes, on the short-lived Oblivion Records. Wilson’s rendition of “Jazz Ain’t Nothing But Soul” was a radio hit on New York jazz radio in 1975.
While based in Paris, Tokyo, and the United Kingdom, he recorded regularly with the pianist Kirk Lightsey, and one of his last albums was an Italian recording with Riccardo Arrighini and Gianni Basso, Ballads for Trane.
Joe Lee Wilson was inducted into the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame in November 2010, where he gave his last public performance. The baritone gospel-influenced jazz singer, best recognized on several Archie Shepp albums, passed away on July 17, 2011 leaving behind a short but relevant discography.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Rita Reys was born into an artistic family as Maria Everdina Reijs on December 21, 1924 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. She grew up listening to classical music and as a teenager entered and won many local talent competitions.
In 1943, Rita met her first husband, jazz drummer Wessel Iicken, who introduced her to the jazz scene. Forming Rita Reys & The Wessel Ilcken Sextet, she regularly performed at the Sheherezade jazz club in Amsterdam and as her reputation grew began to tour and perform around Europe and Africa between 1945 and 1950.
In 1950, the then Rita Reys Sextet celebrated continued success in The Netherlands, played American army bases and dance clubs in England, and settled in Stockholm, the city known as the jazz center of Europe in the early Fifties. She made her first recordings there for the Artist record label, would follow up with a session with Ove Lind, and others such as Quincy Jones, Clifford Brown, Art Farmer. She would go on to meet Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson and Lester Young.
Reys accepted an invitation by Columbia record producer George Avakian to visit the United States and after arrival recorded The Cool Voice of Rita Reys with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers featuring Horace Silver, Hank Mobley and Donald Byrd. She had a swinging quality of her phrasing that opened the doors of the Village Vanguard for several performances. She has performed with Oscar Pettiford, Zoot Sims, Clark Terry, Herbie Mann, Milt Hinton, Osie Johnson, Jimmy Smith and Lester Young to name a few luminaries.
Vocalist Rita Reys has won France’s Juan Les Pins Jazz Festival; in 1969 she was the first Dutch jazz singer to perform at the New Orleans Jazz Festival, became a Citizen of Honor of New Orleans in 1980, won the Edison Award, the Bird award and has eight gold records.
Throughout the next three decades she would continue to perform, record and tour, returning to the Great American Songbook, paid tribute to George Gershwin and Antonio Carlos Jobim, has published her life story Rita Reys, Lady Jazz, has recorded nearly four-dozen albums since 1957, perform at festivals around the world and was named Europe’s First Lady of Jazz, a title she carries to this day. Vocalist Rita Reys passed away on July 28, 2013 in Breukelen, Netherlands.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Sonny Red was born Sylvester Kyner Jr. on December 17, 1932 in Detroit, Michigan. He learned a lot in the shadow of hard bopper Charlie Parker but went on to develop his own voice and style.
He started professionally in the 1940s playing with Detroit pianist Barry Harris. By the mid-Fifties he was playing tenor with both the trombonist Frank Rosolino, and Art Blakey. Three years later he performing and recording in New York with the trombonist Curtis Fuller.
A fluent soloist, Sonny found success as a sideman and in the late 1950s and early Sixties his reputation increased leading albums for the Blue Note and Jazzland labels. With Barry Harris and Cedar Walton splitting piano duties on the “The Mode” and Harris solely on “Images” these two albums showcased his talent and established his voice. He would go on to work as a sideman with Clifford Jordan, Donald Byrd, Bill Hardman, Paul Quinichette, Bobby Timmons, Frank West and others.
The fortunes of jazz diminishing and changes in the music offered limited opportunities for him to record a slim discography and unfortunately gained him a modest reputation. Sonny Red fell into obscurity in the Seventies and he died in his hometown on March 20, 1981 at 49 years old.
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