Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ben Pollack was born on June 22, 1903 in Chicago, Illinois and learned to play drums in high school. He formed groups on the side, performing professionally in his teens. He joined the New Orleans Rhythm Kings in Chicago in 1923 and later went out to Los Angeles, California and joined Harry Bastin Band.
In 1924, returning to Chicago he played for several bands including Art Kessel. That association led to his forming Ben Pollack and His Californians, the 12-piece Venice Ballroom Orchestra in 1925. He had some performances broadcast on WLW radio in Cincinnati, Ohio. Over time the band included Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Jack Teagarden, Jimmy McPartland and Gil Rodin. From about 1928, with involvement from Irving Mills, members of Pollack’s band moonlighted at Plaza-ARC and recorded a vast quantity of hot dance and jazz for their dime store labels.
His band played in Chicago and moved to New York City in 1928, having obtained McPartland and Teagarden around that time. This outfit enjoyed immense success, playing for Broadway shows and winning an exclusive engagement at the Park Central Hotel. Pollack’s band was involved in extensive recording activity at that time, using a variety of pseudonyms in the studios. The orchestra also made a Vitaphone short subject sound film.
Fancying himelf more as a bandleader-singer type he signed Ray Bauduc to handle the drumming chores. They became known as Ben Pollack and his Park Central Orchestra. When Benny Goodman and Jimmy McPartland left the band in mid-1929. They were replaced by Matty Matlock on clarinet and Jack Teagarden’s brother, Charlie, on trumpet and tenor saxophonist Eddie Miller in 1930. Five years later the band broke up.
Pollack formed a new band with Harry James and Irving Fazola, the former with whom he wrote the hit “Peckin'”. In the early 1940s, he organized a band led by comedian Chico Marx, started Jewel Records, opened restaurants in Hollywood and Palm Springs, and appeared as himself in the movie The Benny Goodman Story, and made a cameo in The Glenn Miller Story.
Drummer Ben Pollack, who appeared in five films in the late Forties and Fifties, suffered a series of financial losses, grew despondent and hanged himself in his home in Palm Springs on June 7, 1971.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Robert Roland “Rob” Schneiderman was born in Boston, Massachusetts on June 21, 1957. He began professional jazz career in San Diego, California around the age of 16, when he played piano for visiting soloists such as Eddie Harris, Sonny Stitt, Harold Land, Charles McPherson and Peter Sprague. He continued to collaborate intermittently with Harris, until the latter’s death in 1996, and with McPherson.
In 1982, Rob moved to New York City, where he performed and toured with J.J. Johnson, Chet Baker, Art Farmer, Clifford Jordan, James Moody and Zoot Sims. A performance fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1987 featured him with George Coleman, Jimmy Heath, Claudio Roditi, and Slide Hampton. The collaboration with Slide Hampton resulted in his debut album New Outlook, the first of ten recordings to date as a leader for the Reservoir label.
Schneiderman has played as sidemen for Billy Higgins, Rufus Reid, Brian Lynch, Ralph Moore, Peter Washington, Lewis Nash, Akira Tana, Billy Hart, Gary Smulyan and Ben Riley.
As a jazz educator, he has been in residence at the Stanford Jazz Workshop. He was an adjunct professor in the jazz departments of William Paterson University with Rufus Reid and Queens College with Jimmy Heath. He has also been on the faculty of the Jazzschool in Berkeley, California.
Pianist Rob Schneiderman, who also works as a professor and chair of mathematics at Lehman College of the City University of New York, continues to perform and record.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
George Stevenson was born into a musical family on June 20, 1906 in Baltimore, Maryland. His brother Cyrus and his father both played piano. At 15 he studied saxophone and trombone with A. J. Thomas eventually joined his Baltimore Concert Band. His trombone style was greatly influenced by Tricky Sam Nanton.
By 19 he joined pianist Harold Stepteau and his Melody Boys, before organizing his own 11-piece Baltimore Melody Boys. They disbanded in 1928 and he moved to New York City. He would go on to play with Sammy Price and His Texas Blusicians and Hot Lips Page and His Band. Through the 1930s and 1940s he worked with various other bands including the Savoy Bearcats, Charlie Johnson, Fletcher Henderson, Claude Hopkins, Jack Carter’s Orchestra, Lucky Millinder, Cootie Williams and Roy Eldridge, and Cat Anderson.
From 1948 he went on to freelance with several leaders, continuing to perform through the 1960s. He briefly led his own band in 1959 and his last performances were with Max Kaminsky a year before his death.
Trombonist George Stevenson died on September 21, 1970.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Joseph Vankert Thomas was born on June 19, 1909 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. His first band job was with the Earl Hood Orchestra and after eight months Horace Henderson offered him a job. Heplayed alto saxophone under Hood and Henderson, but took up the tenor saxophone when he joined Stuff Smith’s band in 1932.
He played with Jimmie Lunceford’s band from 1933 until the leader’s death in 1947, often soloing and occasionally singing. After Lunceford died, Thomas and Ed Wilcox co-led his ghost band until he left to form his own septet. This band members were trumpeter Johnny Grimes, trombonist Dicky Harris, baritone saxophonist Ben Kynard, pianist George Rhodes, bassist George Duvivier, and drummer Joe Marshall. They recorded between 1949 and 1951.
When Joe left the music industry he went to work for his family’s undertaking business. He played occasionally, accepting an invitation to the 1970 Newport Jazz Festival, and recorded again under his own name in 1979. Three years later he recorded with a septet that included Grimes, Harris, and Duvivier from his band three decades earlier.
Tenor saxophonist and vocalist Joe Thomas died on August 3, 1986 in Kansas City, Missouri. Material from his career is held by the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
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Jazz Poems
MUSIC FOR HOMEMADE INSTRUMENTS
improvising with Douglas Ewart
I dug your artless, I dug you out. Did you re-do? You dug me less, art. You dug, less do art. You dug me, less art. Did you re-do? If I left art out, you dug. My artless dug-out. You dug, let art out. Did you re-do, dug-out canoe? Easy as a porkpie piper-led cinch. Easy as a baby bounce. Hop on pot, tin pan man. Original abstract, didyou re-do it? Betting on shy cargo, strutting dimpled low-cal strumpets employ a hipster to blow up the native formica. Then divide efficiency on hairnets,flukes, faux saxons. You dug me out, didn’t you? Did you re-do? Ever curtained to experiment with strumpet strutting. Now curtains to milk laboratory. Desecrated flukes & panics displayed by mute politicians all over this whirly-gig. Hey, you dug! Art lasts. Did you re-do? Well-known mocker of lurching unused brains, tribal & lustrous diddlysquats, Latin dimension crepe paper & muscular stacks. Curtains for perky strumpets strutting with mites in the twilight of their origami funkier purses. Artless, you dig. Did you re-do? For patting wood at flatland, thanks. For bamboozled flukes at Bama, my seedy medication. Thanks for my name in the yoohoo. Continental camp-out, percolating throughout the whirly-gig on faux saxon flukes. You dig art, didn’t you? Did you re-do?
Harryette Mullen
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
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