Daily Dose of Jazz…

George Warren Barnes was born on July 17, 1921 in South Chicago Heights, Illinois. His father being a guitarist taught him to play the acoustic guitar at the age of nine. A year later, in 1931, Barnes’s brother made a pickup and amplifier for him. Barnes said he was the first person to play electric guitar.

From 1935~1937 he led a band that performed in the Midwest, 1938 he recorded the songs Sweetheart Land and It’s a Lowdown Dirty Shame with blues guitarist Big Bill Broonzy.

In doing so, it has been claimed that he became the first person to make a record on electric guitar, fifteen days before Eddie Durham recorded on electric guitar with the Kansas City Five, though the claim has been contested. In 1938, when he was seventeen, Barnes was hired as a staff guitarist for the NBC Orchestra, staff guitarist and arranger for Decca and recorded with Blind John Davis, Jazz Gillum, Merline Johnson, Curtis Jones, and Washboard Sam.

In 1940, Barnes released his first solo recording, I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles and I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love with Me on Okeh Records. Drafted in 1942 and serving in the Pentagon, after his discharge in 1946, he formed the George Barnes Octet and was given a fifteen-minute radio program on the ABC network.

In 1951, he was signed to Decca by Milt Gabler and moved from Chicago to New York City. In 1953, he joined the television orchestra on the show Your Hit Parade that was conducted by Raymond Scott and featured Barnes as a featured soloist. Working as a studio musician in New York City, playing on hundreds of albums and jingles from the early 1950s through the late 1960s. He played guitar on Patsy Cline’s New York sessions in April 1957.

In the Sixties, he recorded three albums for Mercury: Movin’ Easy (1960) with his Jazz Renaissance Quintet, Guitar Galaxies (1960), and Guitars Galore (1961). The latter two contained his orchestrations for ten guitars, known as his guitar choir, which used guitars in place of a horn section. The two albums employed a recording technique known as Perfect Presence Sound.

Barnes received the most attention as a jazz guitarist when he recorded as a duo with Carl Kress from 1961–1965. In 1969 Barnes formed a duo with jazz guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli that lasted until 1972. In 1973, he and cornetist Ruby Braff formed the Ruby Braff–George Barnes Quartet and recorded several albums.

He recorded seventeen albums as a leader and as a sideman, Barnes recorded another thirty-nine not limited to Louis Armstrong, Steve Allen, Tony Bennett, Jackie Cooper, Bob Dylan, Bud Freeman, Johnny Guarnieri, Dick Hyman, Betty Madigan, Wingy Manone, Carmen McRae, Jimmy McPartland, Sy Oliver, Don Redman, Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa, Jimmy Scott, Cootie Williams, and Joe Venuti.

As a studio musician, he also participated in hundreds of pop, rock, and R&B recording sessions. He played on many hit songs by the Coasters, on This Magic Moment by the Drifters, and on Jackie Wilson’s Lonely Teardrops. His electric guitar can be heard in the movie A Face in the Crowd.

He left New York City after his last European tour in 1975 to live and work in the San Francisco Bay area. Guitarist George Barnes, who was primarily a swing guitarist, passed away from a heart attack in Concord, California on September 5, 1977 at the age of 56.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Joseph Arthurlin Harriott was born in Kingston, Jamaica on July 15, 1928. Harriott was educated at Alpha Boys School, an orphanage in the city where he learned to play the clarinet, the instrument that was assigned to him shortly before his tenth birthday. He took up the baritone and tenor saxophone while performing with local dance bands before settling on the alto saxophone.

Moving to London, England as a working musician in the summer of 1951 at the age of 23 as a member of Ossie Da Costa’s band, he initially began as a bebopper, and also became a pioneer of free-form jazz. Harriott was part of a wave of Caribbean jazz musicians who arrived in Britain during the 1950s, including Dizzy Reece, Harold McNair, Harry Beckett and Wilton Gaynair.

Deeply influenced by Charlie Parker, he developed a style that fused Parker with his own Jamaican musical sensibility, most notably the mento and calypso music he grew up with. During the 1950s, he had two long spells with drummer Tony Kinsey’s band, punctuated by the membership of Ronnie Scott’s short-lived big band, occasional spells leading his own quartet and working in the quartets of drummers Phil Seamen and Allan Ganley.

Harriott began recording under his own name in 1954, releasing a handful of E.P. records for Columbia, Pye/Nixa and Melodisc throughout the 1950s. However, the majority of his 1950s recordings were as a sideman with the musicians previously mentioned, also backing a diverse array of performers, from mainstream vocalist Lita Roza to traditional trombonist George Chisholm to the West African sounds of Buddy Pipp’s Highlifers. Harriott also appeared alongside visiting American musicians during this period, including a “guest artist” slot on the Modern Jazz Quartet’s 1959 UK tour.

Forming his own quintet in 1958, Joe’s hard-swinging bebop was noticed in the United States, leading to the release of the Southern Horizons and Free Form albums on the Jazzland label. By now firmly established as a bebop soloist, in 1960 Harriott turned to what he termed “abstract” or “free-form” music. During the late 1960s he and violinist John Mayer developed Indo-Jazz Fusion – an early attempt at building on music from diverse traditions. His work in 1969 was to be the last substantial performance of his career.

While he continued to play around Britain wherever he was welcome, no further recording opportunities arose. He was virtually destitute in his last years and ravaged by illness. Alto saxophonist and composer Joe Harriott passed away from cancer on January 2, 1973.

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Three Wishes

Freddie Hubbard told Pannonica that if given his three wishes would be: 

1. 1. “Happiness.”

   2. “Musical success. ”

   3. “I can’t get that third one. I’m trying to find that third one. I know I want a baby.”

*Excerpt from Three Wishes: An Intimate Look at Jazz Greats ~ Compiled and Photographed by Pannonica de Koenigswarter

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Michel De Villers was born July 13, 1926 in Villeneuve-sur-Lot, France and learned to play alto saxophone as a teenager. He would later expand to clarinet and baritone saxophone. Playing in the latter half of the 1940s with Jean-Claude Fohrenbach, Django Reinhardt and Rex Stewart, he then joined the Edward VII Theatre band in Paris. 

In the 1950s he worked in the bands of Geo Daly, Jack Diéval, André Persiany, and Gérard Pochonet. He also played with touring American musicians such as Buck Clayton, Bill Coleman, Jonah Jones, and Lucky Thompson. The Seventies saw De Villers as less active as a musician, working as a jazz writer and radio screenwriter. In the 1980s he became active again as an educator and performer, working later in his career with Christian Garros, Pierre Michelot, Roger Guérin, and Marc Fosset.

Saxophonist, clarinetist, and bandleader Michel De Villers October 25, 1992, Mont St. Aignan, France.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Alex Welsh was born on July 9, 1929 in Edinburgh, Scotland, Welsh and started playing in the teenage Leith Silver Band and with Archie Semple’s Capital Jazz Band.  After a move to London in the early 1950s, he formed a band with clarinetist Archie Semple, pianist Fred Hunt, trombonist Roy Crimmins, and drummer Lenny Hastings. The band played a version of Chicago-style Dixieland jazz and was part of the traditional jazz revival in England in the 1950s.

In the 1960s, Welsh’s band played with Earl Hines, Red Allen, Peanuts Hucko, Pee Wee Russell, and Ruby Braff. During that period and into the early 1970s, Welsh frequently toured, including many visits to the United States. Influenced by his fellow trad jazz bandleader Chris Barber, he built up an extensive musical repertoire, working from popular music, jazz, and a large mainstream following for ensembles.

Welsh recorded under the Decca Record label from 1955 and had four records released that year, I’ll Build A Stairway To Paradise, Blues My Naughtie Sweetie Gives To Me, and What Can I Say After I Say I’m Sorry, and Dixielanders. Although none of these recordings charted, he found some success with the single Tansy from the film No My Darling Daughter.

In 1963 he was part of the biggest trad jazz event in Britain and would go on to tour internationally, playing festivals on both the American and European continents. He was a regular in the early 1970s, playing clubs around London and having continued success as a vocalist and playing Dixieland, and trad jazz. Singer, bandleader, cornetist, and trumpeter Alex Welsh passed away on June 25, 1982 in Hillingdon Hospital in London, England, at the age of 52.

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