From Broadway To 52nd Street
One Touch Of Venus hit the stage of the Imperial Theatre on October 7, 1943. Kurt Weill composed the music, with lyrics by Ogden Nash. The musical ran for 567 performances and starred John Boles, Kenny Baker, Ruth Bond and Mary Martin. One song, Speak Low, distinguished itself from the pack to become a jazz standard.
The Story: When Whitlaw Savory tells his barber, Rodney Hatch, that his statue of Venus is the most beautiful woman in the world, Hatch disagrees. After all, he is engaged to the most beautiful woman, Gloria. To prove his point, he places Gloria’s engagement ring on the marble, which promptly comes to life. The escapades of Venus and Hatch turn Manhattan upside down, with Savory, Gloria and her mother in pursuit. The fling destroys the Hatch/Gloria romance, so Hatch is disconsolate when Venus returns to stone. But as he is about to walk away, a young girl appears who is the image of Venus and Hatch is certain he has an engagement ring to fit her finger.
Broadway History: During the 1940s, Broadway began to lose its originality and drive. New dramatists were less numerous and Broadway began to face competition from television and movies. Some theaters were pulled down, and now theater no longer dominated Broadway.In the forties, 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, the street most associated with Times Square, began to look less and less like a theater district. The theater business was declining all over the city to the point where there were not enough productions to support the available playhouses. In comparison to the 264 productions in 1927-1928, the number dropped to 187 in 1930-1931, and only 72 in 1940-1941. Times Square had degenerated into a kind of carnival and sex bazaar. The Republic Theater, which was built by Oscar Hammerstein in 1900, became Billy Minsky’s burlesque house. Theaters all over the area were being torn down or turned into slums.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Uri Caine was born June 8, 1956 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and began playing piano at seven, studying with French jazz pianist Bernard Peiffer at 12. He later studied at the University of Pennsylvania and gained great familiarity with classical music and worked in clubs around the city.
His professional career started in 1981 and a mere four years later saw his debut with the Rochester-Gerald Veasley band recording session. During the decade he moved to New York City, appeared on a klemzer album with Mickey Katz and played with Don Byron and Dave Douglas.
Caine has recorded 16 albums and is celebrated for his eclectic and inventive interpretations of the classical repertoire. His 1997 jazz tribute to Gustav Mahler received an award from the German Mahler Society, while outraging some jury members. Caine has also reworked Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Schumann and Mozart.
In 2001 he teamed up with drummer Zach Danziger to conceive an original project fusing live jungle and drum ‘n’ bass beats with fusion jazz called “Uri Caine Bedrock 3” and he worked with Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson of The Roots, Christian McBride, Pat Martino and Jon Swana.
Jazz pianist and composer Uri Caine has been named Composer-in-Residence of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, has received a nomination for a Grammy, been named U.S. Artists Fellow, has recorded twenty-eight albums as a leader and continues to perform and tour.
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Monty Alexander was born Montgomery Bernard Alexander on June 6, 1944 in Kingston, Jamaica. Discovering the piano at the age of 4, Alexander began taking classical music lessons at 6 and became interested in jazz at the age of 14. He started playing in clubs, and on recording sessions by Clue J & His Blues Blasters, deputizing for Aubrey Adams. Two years later, he directed his dance orchestra Monty and the Cyclones and played in the local clubs. Performances at the Carib Theater in Jamaica by Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole left a strong impression on the young pianist.
In 1961 Alexander and his family moved to Miami, Florida, he went to New York in 1962 and started to play at the jazz club Jilly’s. In addition to performing with Frank Sinatra there, he also met and became friends with bassist Ray Brown and vibist Milt Jackson. In 1964, he went to California and recorded his first album “Alexander the Great” for Pacific Jazz at the age of 20.
He has recorded with Milt Jackson, Ernest Ranglin and Ed Thigpen, toured with Ernestine Anderson, steel pan player Othello Molineaux, Mary Stallings, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Golson, and Frank Morgan among others. In some of successive trios he has collaborated with Oscar Peterson, Herb Ellis, Ray Brown, Mads Vinding, and Niels-Henning Orsted Pederson.
Alexander married the late great jazz guitarist Emily Remler in 1981, a union that would last only three years. In the 90s, Alexander formed a reggae band featuring all Jamaican musicians, releasing several reggae albums, including “Yard Movement” and “Stir It Up”, a collection of Bob Marley songs. Monty Alexander, pianist and melodica player, influenced by Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, Wynton Kelly and Ahmad Jamal and the strong Caribbean influence and swinging feeling is consistently representative in his 67 albums as a leader and his numerous sideman collaborations as he continues to record, perform and tour.
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Jerry Gonzalez was born in the Bronx, New York City on June 5, 1949. Of Latin heritage, he grew up with jazz and Afro-Cuban music that left a deep impact on his musical appreciation. Listening to his father’s jazz collection he was influenced by Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong along with gleaning inspiration from Tito Puente, Eddie Palmieri and Mongo Santamaria.
Studying music in junior high school, Gonzalez took up the trumpet and later the congas, continuing he formal training at New York College of Music and New York University. He began his professional career in 1963 playing with Lewellyn Mathews in New York State World’s Fair. In 1970 playing with Dizzy Gillespie, under whose tutelage he fused African based rhythms onto jazz elements seamlessly without detracting from either.
After playing with Manny Oquendo and Eddie Palmieri, Jerry created the Fort Apache Band with Andy Gonzalez (his brother), Larry Willis and Steve Berrios. A later reconfiguration and naming, Jerry Gonzalez & the Fort Apache Band became much more successful performing at European jazz festivals and subsequent recordings. Three albums later, “Rumba Para Monk” released in 1989, topped a readers’ poll in Down Beat magazine and was named the “Jazz Album Of The Year” in France by the Academie du Jazz. In 1998 they won both the industry and journalist polls in the New York Jazz Awards Latin Jazz category.
Gonzalez has played and/or collaborated with Tito Puente, McCoy Tyner, Jaco Pastorious, Chet Baker, Woody Shaw, Tony Williams, Larry Young, Freddie Hubbard, Chico O’Farill, Papo Vasquez, Ray Barretto, The Beach Boys, Chico Freeman and Paquito D’Rivera among others but his most noteworthy contribution is to Afro-Cuban jazz and a resurgence in Latin jazz in the 80s and 90s. With seventeen albums as a leader under his belt and a host of recording sessions as a sideman, since 2000, trumpeter Jerry Gonzalez has lived and played in and around jazz clubs in Madrid.
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Hilton Ruiz was born in New York City on May 29, 1952 of Puerto Rican heritage. He began playing piano at the age of eight, and gigged with Freddie Hubbard and Joe Newman when he was young. Later, he was Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s main pianist from 1974 to 1977 and was featured on such records as The Case of the 3 Sided Dream in Audio Color and The Return of the 5000 Lb. Man.
Hilton recorded several solo albums between the 1980s and 2000s. On May 19, 2006, found unconscious on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, police concluded that he stumbled and fell and was not attacked. As a result of the accident, he remained in a coma until eventually passing away on June 6, 2006 at the age of 54.
Hilton Ruiz, jazz pianist steeped in Afro-Cuban music, was also a talented bebop musician.
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