Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Roy Lee Porter was born on July 30, 1923 in Walsenburg, Colorado and when he was eight his family moved to Colorado Springs. He began playing drums in rhythm and blues bands while a teenager, then attended Wiley College in Texas briefly, where trumpeter Kenny Dorham was a fellow student.
Replacing Joe Marshall he joined Milt Larkin’s band in 1943. After military service, Roy settled in Los Angeles, California and soon was in demand by some of the pioneers of bebop. He worked with Teddy Bunn and Howard McGhee, making his first recordings with the latter. In 1946, he backed Charlie Parker on such Dial classics, A Night In Tunisia, Yardbird Suite, Ornithology and Lover Man.
Porter played on Los Angeles’ Central Avenue with such bebop players as Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray and Teddy Edwards, and in San Francisco, California with Hampton Hawes and Sonny Criss. He organized a big band and went on the road in 1949 that included Art Farmer, Jimmy Knepper and Eric Dolphy.
During the 1950s he was inactive as a jazz musician due to drug problems and returned to music only infrequently afterwards. Drummer Roy Porter passed away on January 24 or 25, 1998 in Los Angeles.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jef Gilson was born on July 25, 1926 as Jean~François Quiévreux in Guebwiller, France. As a clarinetist he began playing with Claude Luter in the Boris Vian band. After that stint he switched to the piano. The experience of the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band led him to become an arranger and big band leader. In his band played, among others Bill Coleman, Bernard Vitet, Jean-Louis Chautemps, François Jeanneau, Michel Portal, Jean-Luc Ponty, Bernard Lubat, Lloyd Miller and Henri Texier.
For a time he was musical director of the vocal sextet Les Double Six. Gilson’s free jazz recordings did not materialize into success, and in 1968 he temporarily went to Madagascar. His 1971 return saw him concentrating first on ethno jazz, then total improvisation. In 1973 he founded his label Palm, and released recordings with his orchestra Europamerica, and with Butch Morris. For this more arranged record, which started reflecting his achievements of free jazz, he was awarded the 1978 Prix Boris Vian.
Up to his final days he lived withdrawn in Ardèche, France. Pianist, arranger, composer and big band leader Jef Gilson passed away on February 5, 2012.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Claude Luter ws born on July 23, 1923 in Paris, France the son of a professional pianist and studied the instrument with his father before moving to the clarinet in his teens. Seduced by jazz, he abandoned his training as a naval architect, although he retained an interest in sailing and later qualified as a private pilot. He went on to take clarinet lessons from a pit orchestra player, and pursued his passion for jazz by following the Claude Abadie band around Paris’s Latin Quarter clubs in the late 1930s, sometimes acting as a helpmate to the band’s frail trumpeter, the writer Boris Vian, with whom he made his debut on record in 1944.
Encountering trumpeters Pierre Merlin and Claude Rabanit, who became key members of his first band in 1946. Already recording as Claude Luter et Ses Orientais for the French Swing label, Luter and company moved over to the Vieux Colombier, popular with the existentialist crowd. He began a friendship with the trumpeter’s New Orleans-born clarinetist, Barney Bigard, a connection later cemented on record.
Among Luter’s principal influences was soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet. As luck would have it, Bechet made concert appearances in Paris in 1949 and was teamed with Luter’s down-to-earth trad band at the Salle Pleyel. He also sat in with them at the Vieux Colombier, beginning an association that endured after Bechet settled permanently in France.
Luter later visited New Orleans, Louisiana a number of times, recorded there and took part in the centenary celebrations of Bechet’s birth. He also attended the tribute concert for Louis Armstrong’s 70th birthday in Los Angeles, California in 1970. Clarinetist Claude Luter, who doubled on soprano saxophone, passed away on October 6, 2006 in Paris at the age of 83.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Kay Star was born Catherine Laverne Starks on July 21, 1922 on a reservation in Dougherty, Oklahoma, to an Iroquois Native American father and an Irish/Native American mother. The family moved to Dallas when her father got a job at the Automatic Sprinkler Company,and herer mother raised chickens, whom the young girl serenaded in the coop. When her aunt Nora heard her 7-year-old niece she arranged for her to sing on a Dallas radio station, WRR. Finishing 3rd one week in a talent contest, she placed first every week thereafter. When given a 15-minute radio show, she sang pop and country songs and by age 10 she was making $3 a night during the Great Depression.
The family moved to Memphis, Tennessee where she continued performing on the radio singing Western swing music and a mix of country and pop. While working for Memphis radio station WMPS, misspellings in her fan mail inspired her and her parents to change her name to “Kay Starr”.
By the age of 15, she was singing with the Joe Venuti Orchestra, then went on to work with Bob Crosby and Glenn Miller, who hired her to replace the ill Marion Hutton. After finishing high school, she moved to Los Angeles, California and signed with Wingy Manone’s band. In 1943 she sang with Charlie Barnet’s ensemble, retiring for a year after contracting pneumonia and later developing nodes on her vocal cords as a result of fatigue and overwork.
By 1946 Starr had a solo career and a year later signed a contract with Capitol Records, who also had Peggy Lee, Ella Mae Morse, Jo Stafford, and Margaret Whiting on their roster. In 1948 with a union strike she was left with old songs no of the female singers wanted to record.
In 1950 Kay returned home, heard a recording of Bonaparte’s Retreatby fiddler Pee Wee King. Contacting Roy Acuff’s publishing house in Nashville, got his permission to record the song, he wrote some lyrics and it became her bigget hit selling close to a million in sales. Signing with RCA Victor Records she hit the top ten with My Heart Reminds Me, then returned to Capitol and most of her songs had jazz influences.
After leaving Capitol for a second time in 1966, Starr continued touring the US and the UK, recorded several jazz and country albums on small independent labels including How About This, a 1968 album with Count Basie. By the late Eighties she performed in the revue 3 Girls with Helen O’Connell and Margaret Whiting, and in 1993 she toured the United Kingdom as part of Pat Boone’s April Love Tour. Her first live album, Live at Freddy’s, was released in 1997 and she sang with Tony Bennett on his album Playin’ with My Friends: Bennett Sings the Blues.
Vocalist Kay Starr, who recorded thirty~six albums, passed away from complications of Alzheimer’s disease on November 3, 2016 in Los Angeles at the age of 94. On June 25, 2019, The New York Times Magazine listed her among hundreds of artists whose material was reportedly destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Karel Krautgartner was born on July 20, 1922 in Mikulov, Moravia into the family of a postmaster. He began studying clarinet on a private basis with Stanislav Krtička, and performed a demanding part of the Concertino by Leoš Janáček at the composer’s request at the festival of contemporary music in Frankfurt am Main, Germany in 1926. Acquiring the necessary skills of clarinet playing, and a fanatic passion for clarinet construction and components – reeds, mouthpieces, and barrels, which he later used his knowledge of wind instruments as a lecturer at German universities in Cologne and Düsseldorf.
In 1930 he began playing piano and by 1935 after moving to Brno, Czech Republic he became interested mainly in jazz radio broadcasts. 1936 saw Karel founding the student orchestra Quick band. In 1942, he signed his first professional contract as a saxophonist in the Gustav Brom orchestra in the hotel Passage in Brno. A year later he created Dixie Club and started to arrange in the Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller styles. From 1945 – 1955, the core of the Dixie Club moved to Prague and became a part of the Karel Vlach Orchestra.
He achieved a privileged position as the leader of the saxophone section and started to contribute with his own compositions. In 1956,along with Karel Velebný he put together the Karel Krautgartner Quintet, performed with the All Star Band, and with Studio 5. During the Sixties he became the head of the Dance Orchestra of Czechoslovakia Radio, renamed the Karel Krautgartner Orchestra. In 1968 he emigrated to Vienna, Austria and became the chief conductor of the 0RF Bigband. He eventually moved to Cologne, Germany. Clarinetist, saxophonist, arranger, composer, conductor and educator Karel Krautgartner passed away on September 20, 1982.
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