Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Mary Osborne was born in Minot, North Dakota on July 17, 1921 into a musical family. As early as age three she showed an interest in music with her earliest instruments including piano, ukulele, violin, and banjo. At nine, she picked up the guitar. At ten, she started playing banjo in her father’s ragtime band. She was featured on her own radio program, performing twice weekly until she was fifteen. At twelve she started her own trio of girls to perform country music in Bismarck, North Dakota.
By the time she turned fifteen, Osborne joined a trio led by pianist Winifred McDonnell, for which she played guitar, double bass, and sang. After hearing Charlie Christian play electric guitar she immediately bought her own electric guitar and had a friend build an amplifier. She sat in with Christian to learn his style of guitar. Her husband and trumpeter Ralph Scaffidi encouraged her musical career.
The early 1940s saw Mary sitting in on jam sessions on 52nd Street, on the road with jazz violinist Joe Venuti and working freelance in Chicago, Illinois when she made a recording with Stuff Smith. In 1945, Osborne headlined a performance with Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins, and Thelonious Monk in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to reviews and audiences that praised her specifically. She, Tatum, and Hawkins went on to record a concert in New Orleans.
Returning to New York City she recorded with Mary Lou Williams in 1945, Coleman Hawkins, Mercer Ellington, and Beryl Booker in 1946, and led her own swing trio. For three years her trio played 52nd street clubs, had a year-long engagement at Kelly’s Stables, and made several recordings. Throughout the 1950s, she played with Elliot Lawrence’s Quartet on The Jack Sterling Show, and appeared on the television show Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.
By the Sixties her focus changed to learning Spanish classical guitar under Alberto Valdez-Blaine and incorporated pick-less playing into her jazz playing. Osborne moved to Bakersfield, California, where she lived the rest of her life, and founded the Osborne Guitar Company with her husband. Mary taught music and continued to play jazz locally and in Los Angeles, California as well as several jazz festivals over the next two decades.
Guitarist Mary Osborne died on March 4, 1992 at the age of 70, the result of chronic leukemia.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Alan Dawson was born on July 14, 1929 in Marietta, Pennsylvania and raised in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he played with the Army Dance Band while stationed at Fort Dix from 1951 to 1953. During his service, Dawson explored the post-bop era by performing with pianist Sabby Lewis. After being discharged from the army, Dawson toured Europe with Lionel Hampton.
In early 1960, he resided in Boston, Massachusetts for a regular engagement with bassist John Neves and pianist Leroy Flander. He was an early teacher of drummers Tony Williams, Joseph Smyth, Terri Lyne Carrington, Julian Vaughn, Vinnie Colaiuta, Steve Smith, Kenwood Dennard, Gerry Hemingway, Jeff Sipe, Billy Kilson, Joe Farnsworth, Bob Gullotti, and many others.
Dawson began teaching at Berklee College of Music in 1957. He suffered a ruptured disc in 1975 which led to him halting his touring schedule, to leave Berklee and limit his teaching to his home in Lexington, Massachusetts.
While teaching, Dawson also maintained a prolific performing and recording career. He was the house drummer for Lennie’s on the Turnpike in Peabody, Massachusetts, from 1963 through 1970. Throughout the 1960s he recorded almost exclusively with saxophonist Booker Ervin on Prestige Records. In 1968, he replaced Joe Morello in the Dave Brubeck Quartet and continued until 1972. His performance credits also included stints with Bill Evans, Sonny Rollins, Jaki Byard, Sonny Stitt, Dexter Gordon, Lee Konitz, Quincy Jones, Charles Mingus, and Tal Farlow.
Drummer Alan Dawson died of leukemia on February 23, 1996. He was 66.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ron Collier was born on July 3, 1930 in Coleman, Alberta, Canada and began his musical training in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He was a member of the Kitsilano Boys’ Band. He studied music privately in Toronto with Gordon Delamont and was the first jazz musician to receive a Canada Council grant that led him to study orchestration in New York in 1961 and 1962.
He formed the Ron Collier Jazz Quartet, which performed in the 1950s at the Stratford Festival and on CBC’s Tabloid with Portia White, and in 1963 with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra.
Duke Ellington performed with the Ron Collier Orchestra on the 1969 album North of the Border in Canada. The album included his compositions and those by several Canadian composers. He also created orchestrations for a number of Ellington’s concerts and recordings.
He composed the scores to three films in the 1970s and began directing a student orchestra at Toronto’s Humber College. His band won the Big Band Open Class at the Canadian Stage Band Festival in 1982. He would go on to perform in and lead a number of jazz groups.
Trombonist, composer, and arranger Ron Collier, who was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, died on October 22, 2003 in Toronto, Canada at the age of 73.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ronald “Ronnie” Hughes was born in Aberystwyth, Wales on June 27, 1925 and took up the trumpet at the age of eleven. The following year he was playing local semi-pro gigs. At nineteen he was in the RAF until 1947, spending part of his service in India. After returning to Wales to study photography, he then moved to London, England to join the Trinidadian clarinettist Carl Barriteau band. He worked for a year with the Teddy Foster Band from 1948 until 1949, and was a member of the Ted Heath band from 1949 until 1954.
In the late fifties, Ronnie was in the bands of Geraldo and Jack Parnell, and after his marriage broke up had a spell working on ocean liners. A fluent jazz improviser and reliable and ubiquitous session player during the heyday of TV work, he was one of the original members of the BBC Big Band. He was a member of the Sinatra band and a long-term friend of fellow trumpeter Mannie Klein.
He would go on to appear in the film Quartet directed by Dustin Hoffman, who was captivated by his playing. Throughout his career he worked with Nat Allen, Lesle Holmes’ Londonairs, Harry Parry, Teddy Foster, Cyril Stapleton, Johnny Evans, BBC Radio Orchestra and led own quintet in 1958. He was a member of the Berlin Big Band, Eric Winston & His Orchestra, Johnny Keating and 27 Men, The Pride of London Big Band, and the Ray Davies Orchestra.
Trumpeter Ronnie Hughes died on April 1, 2020 in Banstead, Surrey at the age of 94.
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Jazz Poems
BILLIE HOLIDAY
Here lies a lady. Day was her double pain,
Pride and compassion equally gone wrong.
At night she sang, “Do you conceive my song?”
And answered in her torn voice, “Don’t explain.”
HAYDEN CARRUTHfrom Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
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