Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Dee Dee Bridgewater was born Denise Eileen Garrett on May 27, 1950 in Memphis, Tennessee but grew up in Flint, Michigan. Exposed to jazz as a young girl by her father who was a jazz trumpeter and music teacher, she was singing in rock and R&B bands by age sixteen. Two years later she enrolled at Michigan State University, then transferred to the University of Illinois and toured the Soviet Union with their jazz band in 1969. Then in 1970 she met trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater, married and moved to New York City where he got a gig playing with Horace Silver.
In the early seventies Bridgewater joined the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra as lead vocalist, marking her commencement of her jazz career. She subsequently performed with such greats as Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Max Roach, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and others over the course of a career spanning four plus decades.
Dee Dee Bridgewater is a two-time Grammy Award winning singer-songwriter, a Tony Award winning actress, host of NPR’s Jazzset, and a United Nations Ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization. She has paid musical tribute to Ella Fitzgerald with her 1997 Grammy winning Dear Ella recording, to Horace Silver with her Love and Peace, and Billie Holiday with her 2010 Eleanora Fagan (1915-1959) To Billie With Love from Dee Dee.
Her album This Is New investigated the music of Kurt Weill, sang French classics on J’ai Deux Amours and brought the contributions of African musicians of Mali alive with Red Earth. She has performed on nearly every major stage around the world and continues to record, perform and tour.
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From Broadway To 52nd Street
The curtain rose on Oklahoma on the stage at the St. James Theatre on March 3, 1943. The cast consisted of Alfred Drake, Joan Roberts, Celeste Holm and Lee Dixon performing music and lyrics by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. Running 2,212 performances, the musical would go on to receive rave reviews as a film thirteen years later and str such greats as Shirley Jones, Gordon McRae, Rod Steiger and Eddie Albert. From the play came two songs that became jazz standards – People Will Say We’re In Love and The Surrey With The Fringe On Top.
The Story: The musical is about Laurie, a country girl, who is courted by a cowboy, Curly, and is pursued by the villain Jud, who also sees her as a love interest.
Broadway History: As change came to the Broadway play in the early 1940s, jazz musicians also sought change by looking for new directions to explore. A new style of jazz was born, called bebop. It had fast tempos, intricate melodies and complex harmonies. Bebop was considered jazz for intellectuals. The demise of the huge big bands was imminent to be replaced by smaller groups that did not play for dancing audiences but for listening audiences.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Charles Earland was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on May 24, 1941 and learned to play the saxophone in high school. By age 17 he was playing tenor with Jimmy McGriff and in 1960 started his first group. He didn’t start playing the organ until after a stint with Pat Martino, then joined Lou Donaldson’s band until 1969.
Earland led a successful group in 1970 that included Grover Washington, Jr. and he eventually started playing the soprano saxophone and synthesizer but it was his simmering organ grooves the earned him the nickname “The Mighty Burner”.
In 1978 Earland hit the disco/club scene with “Let the Music Play” written by Randy Muller from Brass Construction. The record hit the U.S. charts for 5 weeks and reached number 46 in the U.K. Singles chart. From 1988 he traveled extensively performing worldwide with one of his many career highlights being to play the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1994.
He continued to perform throughout the U.S. and abroad until his death from heart failure in Kansas City, Missouri at the age of fifty-eight on December 11, 1999. Charles Earland, The Mighty Burner, was a composer, organist, and saxophonist in the soul jazz idiom.
From Broadway To 52nd Street
Lady In The Dark took the stage at the Alvin Theatre on January 23, 1941. The musical starred Gertrude Lawrence, McDonald Carey, Dianne Kaye and Victor Mature with the music composed by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Ira Gershwin. It ran for four hundred and sixty-seven performances. Beyond its Broadway run, Lady In The Dark would b staged in the United Kingdom in 1981, was also made into a 1944 film and a live 1954 television special. Except for the final song, all the music in the play is heard in three extended dream sequences: the Glamour Dream, the Wedding Dream, and the Circus Dream which, to some extent, become three small operettas integrated into a straight play. The final song, “My Ship”, which went on to become a jazz standard, functioned as a leitmotif for Liza’s insecurity: as each dream commences, a snippet of the tune is heard, as it is a haunting melody which Liza recognizes but cannot name, or sing with words, until her anxiety is resolved.
The Story: The protagonist, Liza Elliott, is the unhappy albeit successful editor of a fashion magazine, Allure, who is undergoing psychoanalysis. Relating a dream to her analyst, all the familiar male figures in her life appear in her dream but they act in unfamiliar ways. By recounting her dream, Liza realizes that her father’s disdain for her as a child has warped her relations with men.
Broadway History: Innovations to Broadway would come in 1943 with Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma, which integrated music, song, and dance with a detailed plot. West Side Story followed in these footsteps in 1957 by introducing serious themes, causing the genre to be called simply “musicals”. In 1967 Hair would herald the rock musical to prominence.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jimmy Ponder was born May 10, 1946 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and picked up his brother’s guitar at age 11. Teaching himself by ear and practicing an average six hours a day, he began learning the music of Bo Diddley. Learning quickly he played his first professional gig at age 11 and was performing in Pittsburgh clubs by age 13. He won citywide talent shows and while in junior high, sang in a “Doo-Wop” group and later played guitar in an R&B bands.
At age 16 Ponder set his sights on being a jazz guitarist. He began playing jazz in Pittsburgh with Sam Pearson’s avant-garde group Sam P. and the Players. He also performed with the Bobby Jones Trio and the Jimmy McGriff Trio. After graduating from South Hills High School he joined the Charles Earland Trio and going on the road for three years to begin his long jazz career.
In the 70s Jimmy moved first to Philadelphia and then New York, recording extensively as a leader recording twenty-one albums and over 80 sessions as a sideman playing with the likes of Lou Donaldson, Shirley Scott, Houston Person, Donald Byrd, John Patton, Stanley Turrentine, Etta Jones, Sonny Stitt and Jimmy McGriff.
In 1978 while recording for Muse Records, Jimmy’s “All Things Beautiful” hit #38 on the Billboard Jazz Albums and his 2000 Ain’t Misbehavin’ went to #16. He also recorded with Cadet, ABC, Highnote, Milestone and LRC Records. He considers Wes Montgomery and Kenny Burrell his major influences incorporating Montgomery’s approach of playing octaves with the thumb into his unique bluesy sound has influenced other guitarists. His playing is described as aggressive rhythm-and-blues figurations with swift and lucid chromatic bop lines.
Guitarist Jimmy Ponder returned to Pittsburgh in 1990 where he led a trio with drummer Roger Humphries. He became at artist-in-residence at Duquesne University and continues to record and work in jazz venues around the country until his death on September 16, 2013 in his hometown of Pittsburgh.
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