From Broadway To 52nd Street
It was just seven days before the panic began leading to the crash an ambitious new musical appeared on October 17, 1929 on the stage of the Cosmopolitan Theatre by the title of Great Day. Music composed by Billy Rose and Vincent Youmans,however the show only experienced a run of only thirty-six performances due to the Crash, one good thing came out of the experience is the composition More Than You Know that went on to become a jazz standard.
The Story: Set in Louisiana on the Randolph Plantation, the Spanish Casino, the Mississippi river and the Levee.
Broadway History: By 1929 as the Roaring Twenties was coming to a close, the country was still reeling in widespread euphoria during this period of peace and great prosperity fueled by increased industrialization and new technologies, such as the radio, the automobile, even had air flight becoming widespread. Millionaires were made overnight as they mortgaged homes and sank life savings into hot stocks like Ford and RCA. Little did they know what lied beneath the horizon. The Fed had raised interest rates several times to cool down the overheated stock market and on October 24th panic selling occurred as investors realized the stock boom had been an over-inflated bubble. Millionaire margin investors were decimated and became bankrupt immediately as the stock market crashed on October 28th and 29th.
At the end of 1929, sixteen billion dollars had been shaved off stock capitalization, 140 billion of depositor money disappeared and 10,000 banks failed ushering in the Great Depression that would last till the mid 1930’s. Though the country would suffer financially, Broadway still mounted plays and entertained audiences.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Johnny Mandel was born John Alfred Mandel on November 23, 1925 in New York, New York. His mother, an opera singer, discovered he had perfect pitch at age five. Piano lessons ensued but Johnny switched to the trumpet and later the trombone.
Johnny studied at the Manhattan School of Music and the Julliard School. By 1943 he was playing trumpet with Joe Venuti, in 1944 with Billy Rogers and then trombone in the bands of Boyd Raeburn, Jimmy Dorsey, Buddy Rich, George Auld and Chubby Jackson. In 1949 he accompanied singer June Christy in the Bob Cooper Orchestra, then with Elliot Lawrence’s outfit, followed by a stint with Count Basie and a move to Los Angeles, California to play with Zoot Sims.
In the late Forties and into the Fifties he wrote jazz compositions like “Not Really the Blues” for Woody Herman, “Hershey Bar” and “Pot Luck” for Stan Getz, “Straight Life” and “Low Life” for Count Basie as well as “Tommyhawk” for Chet Baker. Mandel composed, conducted and arranged the music for numerous movie sound tracks with his earliest credited contribution to “I Want To Live” in 1958 being nominated for a Grammy. Mandel’s most famous compositions include “Suicide Is Painless” from M*A*S*H, “Close Enough for Love”, “Emily”, “A Time for Love”, and “The Shadow Of Your Smile” which won an Oscar for Best Song and a Grammy for Song Of The Year in 1966.
Mandel is a recipient of the 2011 NEA Jazz Masters Award, has won several Grammy Awards for Best Instrumental Arrangements Accompanying Vocals for Quincy Jones’ Velas, Natalie & Nat King Cole’s Unforgettable and Shirley Horn’s Here’s To Life. He has composed music with lyricists Alan & Marilyn Bergman, Paul Williams and Johnny Mercer; and arranged for Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Barbra Streisand, Diana Krall, The Diva Jazz Orchestra and Ann Hampton Calloway among numerous others.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Don Cherry was born Donald Eugene Cherry on November 18, 1936 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. His father, trumpeter and club owner moved the family to Watts in Los Angeles, California when he was four. He would skip high school at Fremont to play with the swing band at Jefferson High, resulting in his transfer to reform school at Jacob Riis, where he first met drummer Billy Higgins.
By the early 50s Cherry was playing with jazz musicians in Los Angeles, sometimes acting as pianist in Art Farmer’s group. While trumpeter Clifford Brown was in L. A. he would informally mentor him. He became well known in 1958 when he performed and recorded with Ornette Coleman quintet. He co-led The Avant-Garde session with John Coltrane replacing Coleman, toured with Sonny Rollins, joined the New York Contemporary Five and recorded with Albert Ayler and George Russell.
Don’s first recording as a leader was Complete Communion for Blue Note in 1965 with Ed Blackwell and Gato Barbieri. He would begin leaning toward funk/fusion and play sparse jazz during his Scandinavia years. He would go on to play with Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden, Carla Bley, Lou Reed, and Sun Ra, and then ventured into developing world fusion music incorporating Middle Eastern, African and Indian into his playing.
Cherry appeared on the Red Hot Organization’s compilation CD, Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool, was inducted into the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame, played piano, pocket trumpet, cornet, flugelhorn and bugle. He recorded some two-dozen albums as a leader and some 48 as a sideman. Don Cherry died on October 19, 1995 at age 58 from liver cancer in Málaga, Spain.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Joe Kennedy, Jr. on November 17, 1923 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and was introduced to the violin by his grandfather. During his induction in the Army he performed with the Camp Lee Symphony Orchestra in Petersburg, Virginia. Returning home he cut his jazz teeth as a member of the Four Strings along with Ahmad Jamal, with Mary Lou Williams supervising their debut recording session.
Kennedy would go on to study and earn degrees at Carnegie Mellon, Virginia State College, Duquesne University. As an educator with the Richmond Public Schools he was the Instrumental Music Supervisor, Supervisor of Music and Supervisor of Secondary Arts and Humanities, Director of Jazz Studies at Virginia Tech and Virginia Commonwealth University developing “An Introduction to African American Music” at the latter.
Joe would be one of the first Blacks to become the Resident Violinist with the Richmond Symphony from 1963 – 1981, traveled abroad with the Benny Carter All-Stars and performed at numerous concerts and festivals throughout the United States, and Europe.
Kennedy performed and recorded several albums as a leader as well as with pianist Ahmad Jamal. He performed with Benny Carter, Toots Thielemans, Billy Taylor and the Modern Jazz Quartet among others. Violinist, composer, arranger and educator Joe Kennedy, Jr., recipient of the 2001 Legacy Award, passed away on April 17, 2004.
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From Broadway To 52nd Street
The music composed by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart seven months earlier for a new two act musical called Spring Is Here opened at the Alvin theatre on March 11, 1929 and ran for 104 performances. It starred Dick Keene, Inez Courtney and John Hundley. Adapted from the play Shotgun Wedding, from this production came two songs destined to become a classic in the jazz world, With A Song In My Heart and Spring Is Here.
The Story: Terry loves Betty, Betty falls for Stacy and attempt to elope but are stopped by her father. Terry flirts with other girls to make Betty jealous. It works and she returns to his arms for the happy ending.
Broadway History: The “Great White Way” is a nickname for a section of Broadway in the midtown section of the borough of Manhattan, specifically the portion that encompasses the Theatre District, between 42nd and 53rd Streets, and encompassing Times Square. However, this was not always the location of the theatre district. In 1880, a stretch of Broadway between Union Square and Madison Square was illuminated by Brush arc lamps, making it among the first electrically lighted streets in the United States.
By the 1890s, the portion from 23rd to 34th Street was so brightly illuminated by electrical advertising signs, that people began calling it The Great White Way. When the theatre district moved uptown, the name was transferred to the Times Square area. The phrase Great White Way has been attributed to Shep Friedman, columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph in 1901, who lifted the term from the title of a book about the Arctic by Albert Paine. The headline “Found on the Great White Way” appeared in the February 3, 1902, edition of the New York Evening Telegram.
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