Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Yve Evans was born in El Paso, Texas on July 20, 1950 into an Army family and was around music while growing up as her mother was a gospel singer. When she was three years old she made her first recording of The Lord’s Prayer acapella. In addition to the church music, she began singing and memorizing songs from the radio including all the cartoon favorites like the Mickey Mouse Club.
She learned to play the piano at the age of nine while rehabilitating from injuries she sustained after being struck by a car. The family followed her dad to Germany at age 12 and she began taking lessons from piano virtuoso Frau Anna Benkel, who introduced her to her love of classical piano. In 1964 Yve was hit by a truck and told she would never walk again or have children. The doctors were wrong and while bedridden at home she would still sit up to practive her piano lessons, take a correspondence course in behavioral psychology plus her regular homework.
Yve eventually walked again and began producing in addition to performing and pursuing the art of storytelling while living in Germany. She spent her summers from age13 to 16 playing in a big band, light opera productions and touring Germany with choral groups. At 16 after moving back to America a teacher attempted to discourage her to not rely on a career in music. She continued in the high school and University choral, mentored and encouraged by Carmen Dragon and Jester Harriston.
Evans cites Sarah Vaughn, Ernie Andrews, Joe Williams, Ella Fitzgerald, June Christie, Della Reese, Bobby Darin and Rosemary Clooney as her main influences. As a pianist, she has leaned over the shoulders of, swapped chord changes with and stolen licks from Dorothy Donegan, Bill Evans, Erroll Garner, George Gafney, Carmen McCrae and Shirley Horn.
Vocalist and pianist Yve Evans, who has seven live recordings and is a Grammy nominated artist, continues to tell stories through her music, sing on the local jazz scene and perform around the world at festivals.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Matthew Mitchell was born July 19, 1975 and grew up in Exton, Pennsylvania. He first played the piano aged six, and composed from the age of 10. He had lessons in jazz and theory at a university from the age of twelve and at this stage he was influenced by pianists Keith Jarrett and Herbie Hancock.
He attended Indiana University for three years and then completed a master’s degree at the Eastman School of Music in the late Nineties before settlling in New York City. After holding down several jobs in the city Matt decided to move to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he worked in a library at The University of the Arts for nine years before leaving when he had too many gigs to fit in.
2011 saw him leading the sextet Central Chain, the following year he introduced a new trio with bassist Chris Tordini and Dan Weiss on drums. During this decade Mitchell was also part of Berne’s Snakeoil band, and John Hollenbeck’s Large Ensemble and Claudia Quintet. He joined and recorded with saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa’s band.
Mitchell was awarded a Pew Fellowships in the Arts in 2012. He has released fifteen albums as a leader or co-leader and recorded as a sideman on thirty albums.
Pianist and composer Matt Mitchell, who is a faculty member at New York’s Center for Improvisational Music, continues to expand his jazz catalogue through performance, composition and recordings.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ivor Mairants was born in Rypin, Poland on July 18, 1908 and moved with his family to the United Kingdom in 1913 where he attended Raine’s Foundation School in Bethnal Green. He began learning the banjo at the age of 17 and became a professional musician three years later.
In the 1930s he was a banjoist and guitarist for British dance bands led by Bert Firman, Ambrose, Roy Fox, Lew Stone, Geraldo, and Ted Heath. In 1950 Mairants established the Central School of Dance Music in London, England which he ran for 10 years. All instruments were taught at this establishment, but emphasis was given to guitar. Among the teaching staff at the school were Johnny Dankworth, Jack Brymer, Kenny Baker, Bert Weedon and Ike Isaacs, and Eric Gilder. In 1960 Mairants handed the school over to Gilder, who renamed it as the Eric Gilder School of Music.
In the Sixties and Seventies his guitar playing was often heard on television, radio, film soundtracks, and many recordings with the Mantovani orchestra and with Manuel and his Music of the Mountains. His 1976 recording of the Adagio from Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez with Manuel sold over one million copies.
He wrote many occasional pieces for jazz bands, was a columnist for Melody Maker, BMG, and Classical Guitar, and was a member of the Worshipful Society of Musicians, a British guild, and a Freeman of the City of London. In 1997 the Worshipful Society inaugurated an annual competition for the Ivor Mairants Guitar Award.
Guitarist, composer and teacher Ivor Mairants, who with his wife Lily in 1958 he created the Ivor Mairants Musicentre, a specialist guitar store in London, died on February 20, 1998.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Mary Osborne was born in Minot, North Dakota on July 17, 1921 into a musical family. As early as age three she showed an interest in music with her earliest instruments including piano, ukulele, violin, and banjo. At nine, she picked up the guitar. At ten, she started playing banjo in her father’s ragtime band. She was featured on her own radio program, performing twice weekly until she was fifteen. At twelve she started her own trio of girls to perform country music in Bismarck, North Dakota.
By the time she turned fifteen, Osborne joined a trio led by pianist Winifred McDonnell, for which she played guitar, double bass, and sang. After hearing Charlie Christian play electric guitar she immediately bought her own electric guitar and had a friend build an amplifier. She sat in with Christian to learn his style of guitar. Her husband and trumpeter Ralph Scaffidi encouraged her musical career.
The early 1940s saw Mary sitting in on jam sessions on 52nd Street, on the road with jazz violinist Joe Venuti and working freelance in Chicago, Illinois when she made a recording with Stuff Smith. In 1945, Osborne headlined a performance with Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins, and Thelonious Monk in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to reviews and audiences that praised her specifically. She, Tatum, and Hawkins went on to record a concert in New Orleans.
Returning to New York City she recorded with Mary Lou Williams in 1945, Coleman Hawkins, Mercer Ellington, and Beryl Booker in 1946, and led her own swing trio. For three years her trio played 52nd street clubs, had a year-long engagement at Kelly’s Stables, and made several recordings. Throughout the 1950s, she played with Elliot Lawrence’s Quartet on The Jack Sterling Show, and appeared on the television show Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts.
By the Sixties her focus changed to learning Spanish classical guitar under Alberto Valdez-Blaine and incorporated pick-less playing into her jazz playing. Osborne moved to Bakersfield, California, where she lived the rest of her life, and founded the Osborne Guitar Company with her husband. Mary taught music and continued to play jazz locally and in Los Angeles, California as well as several jazz festivals over the next two decades.
Guitarist Mary Osborne died on March 4, 1992 at the age of 70, the result of chronic leukemia.
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Jazz Poems
C.T.’S VARIATION
some springs the mississippi rose up so high
that sound of jazz from back
boarded shanties by railroad tracks
visionary women letting pigeons loose
on unsettled skies
was drowned by the quiet ballad of natural disaster
some springs song was sweeter even so
sudden cracks split in the sky / for only a second
lighting us in a kind of laughter
as we rolled around quilted histories
extended our arms and cries to the rain
that kept us soft together
some springs the mississippi rose up so high
it drowned the sound of singing and escape
church sisters prayed and rinsed
the brown dinge tinting linens
thanked the trees for breeze
and the greenness sticking to the windows
the sound of jazz from back
boarded shanties by railroad tracks
visionary women letting pigeons loose
on unsettled skies
some springs song was sweeter even so
THULANI DAVIS
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
