From Broadway To 52nd Street
In the same year, on Sunday, May 15, 1925 the Theatre Guild Revue presented the first of three editions of Garrick Gaities that was mounted for only two performances in an effort to raise funds for new tapestries. The song that stood out to become a jazz favorite was Manhattan, composed by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.
Comprised of a series of sketches, the opening number, “Soliciting Subscriptions” was a spoof of the Theatre Guild’s “serious pretensions”, Ryskind wrote skits including a satire of President and Mrs. Calvin Coolidge, and a parody of the Scopes Trial, which was dropped from the show after William Jennings Bryant died. Sterling Holloway and June Cochrane introduced the song “Manhattan”, as its easygoing strolling melody and ingeniously rhymed lyric related all of the everyday pleasures to be found in New York.
Jazz History: The first two decades of the twentieth century saw 52nd Street as a quiet, expensive residential thoroughfare with its five-story brown stones that served as town houses for the city’s well-to-do families and social elite. Prohibition was slow to affect this area and by 1925, six years after it’s passage, the Street had its first speakeasy established by Jean Billia in a converted millionaire brownstone to a multiple dwelling.
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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 Rollins or Coltrane, 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, Curley Russell and Art Blakey. In the mid-1960s John toured with the Jazz Messengers, participated in recording sessions with Paul Bley, Andrew Hill, Pete LaRoca, McCoy Tyner 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.
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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 and Jerome Kern. In his last years, he more frequently turned to bebop originals by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and 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.
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Irene Reid was born on September 23, 1930 in Savannah, Georgia, singing in church and in high school in Georgia. In 1947 after her mother passed, she moved to New York City. Toward the end of the year she tried out for an amateur contest at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and won the competition for five straight weeks. Soon after she was offered a slot as the featured vocalist with Dick Vance at the Savoy Ballroom, which she held from 1948 to 1950.
In 1961–62, Reid sang with Count Basie’s orchestra, and recorded for Verve Records. She would later perform in a Broadway production of the musical “The Wiz”. She sang with Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughan, Aretha Franklin and B.B. King.
Irene receded from fame in the 1970s and 1980s, but launched a comeback near the end of that decade. She appeared at the Savannah Jazz Festival in 1991, 1994, and 1996, and continued releasing albums on Savant Records in the 1990s and 2000s.
In 2002, British DJ duo Beginerz sampled Reid’s vocals to make the club hit “Reckless Girl” and in 2003 Lil’ Kim sampled Reid’s vocals to make the hit “I Came Back For You”.
On January 4, 2008 jazz singer Irene Reid passed away, leaving for posterity more than a dozen albums.
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Ray Wetzel was born on September 22, 1924 in Parkersburg, West Virginia. He played lead trumpet for Woody Herman from 1943 to 1945 and for Stan Kenton from 1945 to 1948. He recorded in 1947 with the Metronome All-Stars, Vido Musso and Neal Hefti before marrying bass player Bonnie Addleman in 1949.
While with the Charlie Barnet Orchestra in 1949, he played trumpet alongside Maynard Ferguson, Doc Severinsen and Rolf Ericson. He played with his wife in Tommy Dorsey’s ensemble in 1950 and with Kenton again in 1951.
Never recording as a leader, he did however compose the Stan Kenton tune “Intermission Riff”. While touring with Dorsey in 1951, trumpeter Ray Wetzel was killed in a car crash at the age of 27 on August 17, 1951 in Sedgwick, Colorado.
