From Broadway To 52nd Street
Girl Crazy opened on October 14, 1930 at the Alvin Theatre with a run of 272 performances starring Ethel Merman and Ginger Rogers singing music composed by the Gershwin Brothers. Two songs emerged from this musical to become jazz classics – Embraceable You and I Got Rhythm.
The Story: A tale where Danny Churchill, in an attempt to flee nightclubs, gambling casinos and women, hires a NY taxi driver to take him to Custerville, Arizona. There he hopes to rest on a dude ranch. Before long he has transformed the ranch into a club with gambling rooms and bevies of girls. He woos and wins the heart of one of the girls, Ginger, who is the daughter of the local saloonkeeper.
Broadway History:Though the Depression was in full swing, stars were still being made as musicals and revues continued to emerge on Broadway. From 1931 – 42 this decade made stars of Ray Bolger and Bert Lahr, who went on to fame as the Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion in The Wizard Of Oz; the double act of Gaxton & Moore, who were part of the comic backbone of vaudeville, got their individual starts on Broadway when Gaxton, having mastered the character of a loveable, oblivious bumbler resembling Elmer Fudd with a Porky Pig personality, performed in George M. Cohan’s Forty-Five Minutes From Broadway in 1906, and the much younger Moore was the romantic lead in Rodgers and Hart’s A Connecticut Yankee in 1927. They were paired in Gershwin’s “Of Thee I Sing” and continued their successful partnership well into the ‘40s. The tradition of the double act was later upheld by the likes of Abbott & Costello, Lewis & Martin and Burns & Allen.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Sammy Davis Jr. was born Samuel George Davis, Jr. on December 8, 1925 to Cuban American parents in New York City. Starting as a child vaudevillian at age three, he toured for years nationally with the Will Masten Trio, and after military service, returned to the trio. He became an overnight sensation following a nightclub performance at Ciro’s in 1951 and with a trio became a recording artist.
As his father and uncle aged, Davis broke out to achieve success on his own and he released several albums that led to being hired to sing the title track for the Universal Pictures film “Six Bridges to Cross” in 1954. He amassed a catalogue of several dozen recordings for Decca, Reprise, Verve, Motown, MGM and 20th Century, consistently kept alive the Great American Songbook from Broadway accompanied by orchestras and big bands and had two #1 hits – “I Gotta Be Me” and The Candy Man.
Sammy starred in four Broadway musicals from 1956 to 1978 in Mr. Wonderful, Golden Boy, Sammy and Stop The World I Want To Get Off. His film career spanned nearly six decades with important roles and appearances in A Man Called Adam, Porgy & Bess, Anna Lucasta, Sweet Charity, Cannonball Run, Moon Over Parador and Tap. As a charter member of the Rat Pack he did several movies with them beginning with Oceans 11.
Not to let television escape his grasp in 1966 had his own variety show, The Sammy Davis Jr. Show, would appear on Archie Bunker, I Dream of Jeannie, The Rifleman, Charlie’s Angels, One Life To Live, General Hospital and the Cosby Show to name a few.
With his career slowing in the late sixties, by 1972 he was a star in Las Vegas earning him the nickname Mister Show Business. In 1987 Sammy toured internationally with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Liza Minelli. He was awarded NAACP’s Spingarn Medal, won a Golden Globe and an Emmy, two-time recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors, has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Awards.
Singer, tap dancer, impersonator and musician Sammy Davis Jr. passed away in Beverly Hills, California on May 16, 1990, of complications from throat cancer. On May 18, 1990, two days after Davis’ death, the neon lights of the Las Vegas Strip were darkened for ten minutes, as a tribute to him.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jay Leonhart was born December 6, 1940 in Baltimore, Maryland and grew up in a musical family where everyone played the piano. By the age of seven, Jay and his older brother Bill were playing banjos and guitars and mandolins and basses. They played country music, jazz and anything with a beat. In their early teens, Jay and Bill were television stars in Baltimore and were touring the country performing on their banjos.
When Jay was fourteen he started playing the bass in The Pier Five Dixieland Jazz Band in Baltimore. After studying at The Peabody Institute he attended the Berklee College of Music and The Advanced School of Contemporary Music in Toronto before leaving school to start touring with the traveling big bands of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
By age 21 Leonhart moved to New York City to start his career and eventually began playing for many of the great jazz musicians, big bands, and singers like Thad Jones, Mel Lewis, Lou Marini, Tony Bennett, Marian McPartland and Jim Hall. He played lots of funky road gigs with big bands, small bands and singers and visited many little jazz joints around the world.
Jay became a very busy studio musician in New York City, visiting every musical genre from James Taylor to Ozzy Osborne to Queen Latifah, has recorded fifteen solo albums, performs a one-man show, regularly plays with Wycliffe Gordon in a duo, was named The Most Valuable Bassist in the recording industry three times by the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and continues to record, perform and tour worldwide.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Art Davis was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on December 5, 1934 where he began studying the piano at the age of 5, switched to tuba and finally to bass while attending high school. He studied at Juilliard and Manhattan School of Music but graduated from Hunter College.
Davis became a busy New York session musician recording with the like of Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach. He worked with many pop artists and also with classical symphony orchestras including the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Art performed with bassist Reggie Workman in Coltrane’s group and pioneered the use of two basses in a jazz combo setting. He also launched a legal case that led to the current system of blind auditions for orchestras. Besides working as a leader, he worked as a sideman with Art Blakey, Curtis Fuller, Eddie Harris, Freddie Hubbard, Elvin Jones, Clifford Jordan, Roland Kirk, Abbey Lincoln, Booker Little, Lee Morgan, Hilton Ruiz and Dizzy Reece among others.
He earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from New York University, moved to southern California in 1986, taught at Orange Coast College and balanced his teaching, psychology practice and jazz performances. Bassist Art Davis died on July 29, 2007 from a heart attack.
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From Broadway To 52nd Street
As the decade of despair opens, Broadway opens another musical to lift the spirits of a theatre going society on February 18, 1930 the Ziegfeld Theatre unveils Simple Simon, starring Ed Wynn as a waif who dreams in fairy tales. Wynn played Ziegfeld Follies until butting heads with W.C. Fields who let the back end of a pool cue down on Wynn’s head with a mighty thwack. He went on to sprout into his repertoire inane inventions like a pair of eyeglasses with a windshield to protect you when you ate grapefruit. But from the play Simple Simon, which ran for 135 performances, came the song Dancing on the Ceiling and He Was Too Good For Me composed by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. The two songs, however, were dropped from the show before the New York opening but get their perpetual encores as jazz standards.
Jazz History: Before the Onyx Club came to life on 52nd Street, Joe Helbock, who may justly claim to be the grandfather of The Street, was bootlegging there in 1927 and ’28 and sold to notables such as Teddy Roosevelt, Babe Ruth, Will Rogers, Marilyn Miller and Jimmy Walker. He hung out with Jimmy Dorsey, Paul “Pops” Whiteman and Roy Bargy at a “speak” called Plunkett’s where all the musicians hung out. In 1927 he opened the Onyx on the parlor floor in the rear of the brownstone at 35 W. 52nd with his partner Fred Hoetter, giving the club its name because of the black marble bar. They started with Art Tatum, Maxine Sullivan, Louis Prima and Stuff Smith. It wasn’t until 1933 that The Onyx put a steady pianist on payroll for the cocktail hour however Willie “The Lion” Smith disputes this claim. As the story goes, one day in 1930, Joe approached Willie saying “Lion, why don’t you stop by every day around five and I’ll give you a little salary for your trouble?” That deal, the Lion emphasizes, established an engagement of the cocktail hour that launched 52nd Street as the Cradle Of Swing.
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