Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Oscar Brashear was born August 18, 1944, in Chicago, Illinois. After studying at trumpet and music at DuSable High School and Wright Jr. College under John DeRoule, he worked briefly with Woody Herman before going on to join Count Basie from 1968-69, then returning to freelance in Chicago. There her worked with Sonny Stitt, Gene Ammons, Dexter Gordon and James Moody.
A move to Los Angeles in 1971, he worked with Gerald Wilson, Harold Land, Oliver Nelson, Shelly Manne, Quincy Jones, Horace Silver and Duke Pearson.
To date Brashear has contributed to more than five-dozen recording sessions with Teddy Edwards, Jimmy Smith, Sonny Rollins, Benny Golson, Bobby Hutcherson,, B.B. King, Bobby Bland, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Farrell, The Crusaders, McCoy Tyner, Gene Harris, Earth Wind and Fire, Carole King, Ry Cooder and Frank Sinatra among many others. He continues to perform and record as a session player.
Take A Dose On The Road
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Alvin Queen was born in the Bronx, New York on August 16, 1950. He studied drums as a child and at 16 played for Ruth Brown, Don Benny Green and guitarist Tiny Grimes in 1969. He was asked to replace Billy Cobham and started his tenure in the Horace Silver Quintet.
He has played with the George Benson Quartet and worked with Charles Tolliver on several occasions, rejoining him in 1971. During the Seventies, he lived in Canada, before settling in Switzerland in 1979 and creating the label Nilva, an anagram of his first name.
Over the course of his career he has played with the likes of Michael Brecker, Kenny Drew, Bennie Wallace, Johnny Griffin, Eddie Lockjaw Davis, Pharaoh Sanders, John Patton and George Coleman among others. His who’s who list continues with Ray Drummond, John Hicks, Billy Saxton, Dusko Goykovich and James Spaulding as well as a host of European players in recent years.
Drummer, composer and bandleader Alvin Queen continues to perform and record, to date having nine albums under his belt as a leader.
Inspire A Young Mind
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Patti Austin was born on August 10, 1950 in Harlem, New York City to a jazz musician father and grew up on Long Island. She made her debut at the Apollo Theater at age four and had a contract with RCA Records when she was five. Quincy Jones and Dinah Washington have proclaimed themselves as her godparents. But it was a reluctant outing as a teenager to hear one of Judy Garland’s last concerts and the experience-helped focus her career, giving her the desire to interpret a lyric like that.
By the late 1960s Austin was a session musician and commercial jingle singer. During the 1980s, she was signed to Jones’s Qwest Records and began her most prolific hit-making period. By this time she was both one of the leading background session vocalists and also was known as Queen of The Jingles for such companies as Burger King, Almay, KFC, McDonald’s, Avon, Stouffers, Maxwell House and the US Army.
Charting twenty R&B songs between 1969 and 1991, hitting #1 for her hits “Do You Love Me?” / “The Genie”, Baby Come To Me” – a duet with James Ingram, and also hits with “How Do you Keep The Music Playing”, again teaming with Ingram and “It’s Gonna Be Special”. She would sing background for Billy Joel’s “Just The Way You Are” along with Luther Vandross, Jocelyn Brown and Chaka Khan. She would be enlisted to sing duets with Michal Jackson, George Benson, Luther, Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons, Narada Michael Walden and Johnny Mathis.
Austin would be seen leading a new group of Raelettes for the 2006 album “Ray Charles + Count Basie Orchestra = Genius”; participating in the AVO Session Basel tribute to Ella Fitzgerald, and after nine nominations, winning her first Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album for her 2008 album Avant Gershwin.
Patti co-produced and was one of over 70 artists singing on “We Are The World: 25 for Haiti” to raise awareness and aid for those affected by the 2010 earthquake. In 2011 she released a mostly covers album project titled “Sound Advice” re-working Bob Dylan, Michael Jackson, Brenda Russell, Bill Withers and Don McLean songs and a female take on “My Way” among others.
No to be idle Austin co-wrote and sings in the star-studded L.O.V.E. – Let One Voice Emerge, encouraging especially younger Americans to get out there and exercise their right to vote; has been seen in the Bridges/Coppola film “Ticker: The Man And His Dream, and appears in the Academy Award-winning documentary film “20 Feet From Stardom” in 2013. She continues to perform, compose and tour.
Inspire A Young Mind
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Hollywood On 52nd Street
The Second Time Around is a song with words by Sammy Cahn and music by Jimmy Van Heusen. It was introduced in the 1960 film High Time, sung by Bing Crosby with Henry Mancini conducting his orchestra. The song was nominated for and Oscar for Best Original Song.
The Story: High Time is a comedy film directed by Blake and starred Bing Crosby, Fabian and Tuesday Weld. The film is told from the perspective of a middle-aged man who enters the world of a new generation of postwar youth. In the years since its release, the film has come to be viewed as a comedic study of the slowly emerging generation gap between the music and mores of an older generation and postwar youth, as well as an inadvertent time capsule of American adolescents and lifestyles in 1960.
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Hollywood On 52nd Street
Wild Is The Windis a song written by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington for the 1957 film of the same name. The title song was was one of the five nominated songs at the 1958 Academy Awards and was originally performed by Johnny Mathis who also sang it at the Oscars. The movie starred Anna Magnani, Anthony Quinn and Tony Franciosa. The film was a remake of the 1947 Italian film Fury and was adapted from the a novel by Vittorio Nino.
The Story: Wild Is the Wind is about a rancher who marries his Italian sister-in-law after the death of his wife, but she falls in love with his young ranch hand.
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