Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Johnny Varro was born January 11, 1930 in Brooklyn, New York and began studying piano at the age of ten. During his teenage years, he was introduced to jazz by way of the Commodore Music Shop in New York City. There he met the manager Jack Crystal, father of Billy Crystal, who was running jam sessions on the Lower East Side. At these sessions he met Willie “The Lion” Smith, Big Sid Catlett, Joe Thomas, Hot Lips Page, Joe Sullivan, Pete Brown and others. The experience of sitting in for Joe Sullivan and Willie “The Lion” Smith was invaluable and soon allowed Johnny to become a hired player.
His first professional job was with Bobby Hackett touring the East Coast with his quartet. In 1954 he worked at Nick’s with Phil Napoleon and later with Pee Wee Erwin. In 1957 Eddie Condon asked Johnny to play at his club as intermission pianist, which led to his becoming Eddie’s band pianist.
For the next several years between the Condon tours, Varro worked most of the jazz rooms around New York City before moving to Miami in 1965 to work on the Jackie Gleason Show. He toured with the Dukes of Dixieland, then moved to Los Angeles, California, where he lived, played and toured for the next 14 years. He created the swing group covering the styles of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s called Swing 7.
Pianist Johnny Varro, who has recorded some two dozen albums, made a final move to Tampa Bay, Florida in the early Nineties, where he continues to play jazz festivals, jazz parties and concerts around Europe and the United States.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Sonya Jason was born on January 10, 1963 in Wayne, Nebraska. By the age of four, she began playing piano and took classical piano lessons for nine years. Joining the school band at age ten she took up the saxophone. At thirteen she joined her first jazz band where she learned the rudiments of swing, the basic ability that all jazz musicians must possess.
Her family’s move to the Southwest enabled Sonya to join the Apollo High School band in Phoenix, Arizona, then voted Arizona’s leading jazz band. It was here that she first heard the passionate recordings of Latin saxophonist Gato Barbieri, and began studying the bebop stylings of Charlie Parker, gaining further inspiration from the saxophone work of Phil Woods and David Sanborn.
She won the Phil Woods Scholarship offered by Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. Two years of liberal arts study at Mills College in Oakland California and private lessons with bebopper Hal Stein led to her move to Boston. While at Berklee she studied privately with saxophonists Joe Viola, Jimmy Mosher, George Garzone and Herman Johnson. She honed her arranging skills with Herb Pomeroy and Grammy award-winning arranger Robert Freedman. After graduating summa cum laude from Berklee in 1985, Sonya returned to Arizona to begin her professional career.
Gigging all over Arizona she gained versatility working with bands of varied styles, jazz, latin, top 40, reggae, rock, classical, big band swing, and show bands. In 1987 she formed a quartet that performed as opening act for Natalie Cole, Richard Marx, Chuck Berry, Ramsey Lewis, Janis Siegel, Smokey Robinson, Spyro Gyra, Lionel Hampton, Mose Allison and the Stanley Clarke/George Duke Project, to name a few..
In 1988 she released her debut recording Secret Lover on her Saja Productions label. in December 1988. In 1991 she moved to Los Angeles, California and signed with Warner Music Discovery and two years later her second release Tigress.
In addition, Sonya appeared in the Showtime movie, Lush Life, starring Jeff Goldblum and Forest Whitaker, and was featured in two cable music specials, Music and the Biz and Hurry Up and Wait.
Relocating to the San Francisco, California Bay Area in 1999. Since moving she has recorded a few albums, served as musical director and arranger for theCoastal Theatre Conservatory’s presentation of Cinderella with over a hundred youth of all ages, and was band director and orchestrator of This Side Of The Hill Players.
First-call saxophonist Sonya Jason carries on a thriving music teaching studio, continues to perform as a soloist for several bands and orchestras, tour and record.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Benny Strickler was born in Fayetteville, Arkansas on January 9, 1917 and took music lessons as a pre-teen and later played in a town band. After graduating high school, he became a professional musician and played with several territory bands in Arkansas and the Southwest. In 1935, with wife Frances in tow, he joined the migration from the Dust Bowl to the Golden State.
Benny established himself as one of the top trumpeters in Los Angeles, California. He played with bands led by Ben Pollack, Joe Venuti, Vido Musso and boxing champ/string bassist Max Baer. He even got an invitation from Artie Shaw, which he turned down.
He recorded his first recordings in 1937 with the Choir of Brass led by vocalist/pianist Seger Ellis. In 1941 he went to work with Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys and along with Danny Alguire and Alex Brashear and reedman Woodie Woods they shaped the swinging sound of the band between 1941-42. World War II broke them up with some enlisting, others drafted, however, Benny was exempted due to tuberculosis.
His illness worsened and was ultimately forced to quit playing. He returned to Arkansas, checking into a Booneville sanitarium. Trumpeter Benny Strickler, who played with the top Western Swing and Traditional bands, played sporadically until he succumbed to the tuberulosis and died on December 8, 1946.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Pamela Wise was born on January 8, 1956 in Steubenville, Ohio. She began composing and playing piano by ear at age five and started lessosn at nine. After studying the basics she began playing for her church choir, directed by her bassist father. While in high school she formed Ohio Movement, a r&b group performing throughout the Midwest and East Coast. Eight years later she left the band and moved to Cleveland, Ohio with her brother and entered Cuyahoga Community College to further study music.
A move to Detroit, Michigan with her brother led her to play with several r&b groups in the Detroit area, meeting her future husband Wendell Harrison and eventually composing and performing for Freddie Hubbard, Woody Shaw, Leon Thomas and Eddie Harris. In 1989 she formed a group that enlisted James Carter, Dwight Adams, Jaribu Shahid, Ali Muhammad and Andrew Daniels.
Pamela has collaborated with Regina Carter, Akua Dixon Turre, and with Jerry Gonzalez produced her cd Songo Festividad. She went on to release A New Message From The Tribe, Kindred Spirits, Negre Con Leche, and Pamela’s Club projects.
Composer, pianist and music director Pamela Wise continues to perform, record, collaborate and educate.
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Jazz Poems
IN PRAISE OF BUDDY BOLDEN
- You have shown me dissipation, the tome, the rhythm, and cool sonorous blue…
- The right consciousness is always dream, it wakes in us ideology and topos.
- Not only the blues like melic, like persimmon and soda.
- Not anything, just blonde sorrow.
- I can’t wait to choose my own fall, the bass and pica.
- Did you taste the drug, the white words of sound…
- Nothing will prepare me, not even drums and delusion. I wander in their halls, their tantrums. But mine was apparatus and rebellion. The plumb edifice of transgression.
- When we play, nothing else matters, not the placards on the train, not the yet and the how. We find plums and pendulums.
- I told them that this was not enough. No horses, no shoulders, no fields to drown, only blankcotton testimony and confession.
- When we leave, we leave the pipe and parts of the body. You whistle like a factory. Me, like an empty room.
- I would like to test myself, and remove these old tunings and feathers, these tulips.
- Do it then. Leave for the salty tincture of the city, the North.
- The leaves were all cankered when I returned. Like a salvo I burned. Not for them. Not for this place. But for this rotten reflection. The only true rejection of process.
- You meant to leave the phonetic terror of the moon, the New Orleans horn of sand and distraction.
- Leave me to fall. For this is all that I know. I accept, I accept this black stone of mine, mine own three lives, my crime.
LUCIEN QUINCY
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
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