Daily Dose Of Jazz…
William Douglass was born on February 28, 1923 in Sherman, Texas. His extended family relocated to Los Angeles, California when he was six months old in an effort to escape Jim Crow laws. As a member of a musical family he took an early interest in music and when he heard drummer Gene Krupa performing Sing, Sing, Sing on the radio his path was set. He met and befriended Dexter Gordon while attending McKinley Junior High School in Los Angeles, at which point he first began playing drums.
At Jefferson High School, both he and Gordon began taking band under teacher Lloyd Reese, and took private keyboard instructions. Never taking private drum lessons, Bill eventually made the acquaintance of drummer Cozy Cole, who allowed him to watch him practice. What he learned by watching him and other drummers helped him evolve a style of his own.
While still in schoo he, Dexter and Lammar Wright, Jr. he began playing in Central Avenue night clubs. Eventually he began drumming for pianist Gerald Wiggins, along with double bass and tuba player Red Callender, until he and Callender left to form a trio with blind pianist Art Tatum.
In 1941 upon graduating from high school he enlisted in the United States Army and was assigned to the Black 10th Cavalry Regiment at Camp Lockett. This led to his start to seeing the world being stationed in Casablanca, Oran, Algiers, Naples and Rome. During these travels, Bill became drum major of his 28-piece ensemble, a position he attributed to his great height.
Leaving the service he went on to a stint with Benny Goodman, where he was at the time the only black member of the band. Bill eventually became part of the union struggle for integration and equality. Even as a working musician, Douglass expanded into teaching drums at Drum City. Among his students, were Ray Brown, Jr., Karen Carpenter, and Ella Fitzgerald.
Drummer and educator Bill Douglass, who was an active proponent of desegregation in the American Federation of Musicians, died on December 19, 1994.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jesse Powell was born in Smithville, Bastrop County, Texas, on February 27, 1924. He received his formal music training before he began his professional career at age eighteen, when he toured with fellow Texan, Oran “Hot Lips” Page beginning at the age of eighteen during 1942–43.
During the war years he went on to play with Louis Armstrong in 1943–44, then with the Luis Russell Orchestra in 1944–45. He replaced fellow Texas tenorist Illinois Jacquet in the Count Basie Band for a tour of California in 1946. At this time Powell also worked with blues singers Champion Jack Dupree and Brownie McGhee.
1947 saw Jesse joining Curly Russell’s band, and in 1948 he formed his own band in New York City. That same year he performed with trumpeter Howard McGhee at the first international jazz festival in Paris. In 1949–50, he was a member of the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band, with whom he recorded a solo on Tally Ho. In 1953 he once again formed another jump-rhythm band, and in 1964 a Powell quintet played at Birdland in New York City.
Tenor saxophonist Jesse Powell died on October 19, 1982 in New York City.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Thomas Penn Newsom was born in Portsmouth, Virginia on February 25, 1929 and earned degrees from the Norfolk Division of the College of William & Mary, the Peabody Conservatory of Music, and Columbia University. He went on to serve in the United States Air Force during the Korean War where he played in the band.
He toured with the Benny Goodman Orchestra and performed with Vincent Lopez in New York. Newsom joined the Tonight Show Band in 1962, and left it when Carson retired in 1992. In addition to Carson’s orchestra, he performed with the orchestra for The Merv Griffin Show.
Well known within the music industry as an arranger as well as a performer, he arranged for groups as varied as the Tonight Show ensemble and the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, and musicians Skitch Henderson, Woody Herman, Kenny Rogers, Charlie Byrd, John Denver, and opera star Beverly Sills.
He won two Emmy Awards as a music director, one in 1982 with Night of 100 Stars, and in 1986 for the broadcast of the 40th Annual Tony Awards. He also recorded six albums as a bandleader and another four as a sideman.
On April 28, 2007 saxophonist Tommy Newsom, who was nicknamed Mr. Excitement by Johnny Carson and was the band’s substitute director, died of bladder and liver cancer at his home in Portsmouth. He was 78 years old.
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Jazz Poems
WALKING PARKER HOME
Sweet beats of jazz impaled on slivers of wind Kansas Black Morning/First Horn Eyes/ Historical sound pictures on New Bird wings People shouts/ boy alto dreams/ Tomorrow’s Gold belled pipe of stops and future Blues Times Lurking Hawkins/ shadows of Lester/ realization Bronzer fingers–brain extensions seeking trapped sounds Ghetto thoughts/ bandstand courage/ solo flight Nerve-wracked suspicions of never songs and doubts New York altar city/ black tears/ secret disciples Hammer horn pounding soul markson unswinging gates Cultural gods/ mob sounds/ visions of spikes Panic excursions to tribal Jazz wombs and transfusions Heroin nights of birth/ and soaring/ over boppy new ground Smothered rage covering pyramids of notes spontaneously exploding Cool revelations/ shrill hopes/beauty speared into greedy ears Birdland nights on bop mountains, windy saxophone revolutions. Dayrooms of junk/ and melting walls and circling vultures/ Money cancer/ remembered pain/ terror flights/ Death and indestructible existence In that Jazz corner of life Wrapped in a mist of sound His legacy, our Jazz-tinted dawn Wailing his triumphs of oddly begotten dreams Inviting the nerveless to feel once more That fierce dying of humans consumed In raging fires of Love.
BOB KAUFMAN
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Joseph Gabriel Esther Maneri was born on February 9, 1927 in Brooklyn, New York. His formal schooling only went through the eighth grade, dropping out because of an undiagnosed attention deficit disorder. He went on to receive a rigorous classical music education from Josef Schmid, who taught courses in Arnold Schoenberg’s harmony, counterpoint and composition. As a composer he was mostly self-taught and his compositions were featured at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1961, including his Divertimento for piano, drums, and double bass.
His early work was with Gunther Schuller and his 20th Century Innovations Ensemble performances of Third Stream music at Carnegie Hall. Schuller arranged a record deal for Maneri with Atlantic Records, but the 1963 recording was not released. Twenty-five years later the Atlantic recording session tapes were released by the Avant label under the title Paniot’s Nine. During the 1990s Joe released 14 additional albums on the ECM, Hat Hut, Leo labels, often in collaboration with his free-style violinist son Mat.
Maneri went on to teach harmony, 16th Century counterpoint and composition at the Brooklyn Conservatory while continuing to compose. In 1963, he was commissioned by Erich Leinsdorf of the Boston Symphony Orchestra to write a piano concerto that premiered in 1985 by the American Composers Orchestra and pianist Rebecca la Brecque at Alice Tully Hall. He founded the Boston Microtonal Society, dedicated to microtonal music and tuning.
Saxophonist, clarinetist and composer Joe Maneri invented a keyboard that had 588 notes: 72 pitches per octave and co-authored a theory book titled Preliminary Studies in the Virtual Pitch Continuum, died on August 24, 2009 at the age of 82 of heart failure.
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