Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Julius Wechter was born on May 10, 1935 in Chicago, Illinois and studied and learned to play the vibraphone and percussion, which he did with the Martin Denny group by the time he was out of highschool in the 1950s. The early Sixties saw him moving to movie soundtracks, television and session work for the Beach Boys, the Monkees, Sonny & Cher, and various Phil Spector productions.
His long and successful association with Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass started when he played percussion on their first hit, The Lonely Bull in 1962. He later composed Spanish Flea. He went on to play marimba and vibes on many of Alpert’s songs in the 1960s, as well as writing at least one song on most of those albums.
Encouraged by Alpert, he formed the Baja Marimba Band which was quite successful, hitting four chart songs in Billboard’s Top 100, and numerous on its Easy Listening Top 40. Disbanding in the mid Seventies, Julius turned his attention to television and movies again, but continued to play with Alpert.
In his later years, he devoted himself to psychology, earned a master’s degree, and served as vice president of the Southern California chapter of the Tourette Syndrome Association.
Marimba and vibraphonist Julius Wechter died on February 1, 1999 at his home in California of lung cancer, at the age of 63, a day after his song Spanish Flea was used in The Simpsons episode Sunday, Cruddy Sunday.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Steve Holt was born on May 9, 1954 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and exhibited musical ability in early childhood, playing piano at the age of four. By the time he was a teenager he was a regular on the Montreal club scene.
He was self-taught until he entered McGill University where he was taught by pianist Armas Maiste, whose bebop playing influenced him. Becoming a student of Kenny Barron he regularly traveled to New York City for private lessons. Holt graduated from McGill in 1981 with that university’s first Bachelor of Music major in Jazz Performance, and went on to teach jazz improvisation there.
His 1983 debut album, The Lion’s Eyes, was nominated for a Juno Award. He has worked with jazz musicians Larry Coryell, Eddie Henderson, and Archie Shepp. He moved to Toronto, Canada in 1987 and worked as an equity analyst and for a while Steve continued playing clubs at night.
In the Nineties he released three albums then decided to concentrate on music full-time. Three years later, his fifth album, The Dream, was released. Moving into music production he stopped performing jazz live until 2014. Following a move to the countryside, his interest in jazz performance returned.
In 2017, he opened a health food store in Warkworth, Ontario, Canada that operates as a jazz venue once a week. After a twenty year absence from the recording field, pianist Steve Holt released Impact, his new album in 2025 under the new band, The Steve Holt Jazz Impact Quintet.
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Daily Does of Jazz…
Jerry Rusch was born on May 8, 1943 in St. Paul, Minnesota and studied at the University of Minnesota from 1962 to 1964, then played in an Army Reserve band before moving to Los Angeles, California in 1966.
Becoming a fixture in the city he played with Gerald Wilson from 1967, Ray Charles, Clifford Jordan, Joe Henderson, Willie Bobo, Louie Bellson, Teddy Edwards, Frank Foster, and Thad Jones/Mel Lewis. In Europe he played with Joe Haider’s Orchestra from 1982 to 1984.
As a sideman he recorded extensively among his credits are work with Charles Kynard, Benny Powell, Henry Franklin, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson and Stan Kenton, as well as Gladys Knight, the Rolling Stones, Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, the Temptations, and many others.
Trumpeter Jerry Rusch, who was also credited as Jerry Rush and performed in the hard bop and post bop genres, died of liver cancer in Las Vegas, Nevada on May 5, 2003 at the age of 59, three days shy of his 60th birthday.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Pete Edward Jacobs was born on May 7, 1899 in Asbury Park, New Jersey. His first professional job was playing with the Musical Aces. He then joined the band of Claude Hopkins from 1926 to 1928.
Leaving Hopkins he joined Charlie Skeete for a short stint but returned to play with Hopkins from 1928 until 1938. During this ten-year tenure in Hopkins’s orchestra, Jacobs recorded extensively with the group on Brunswick Records, during 1932 to 1937.
Additionally, he appeared with the band in the short films Barbershop Blues in 1933) and By Request in 1936.
Falling ill in 1938 he hung up his drummsticks and quit the group, never returning to active performance. Drummer Pete Jacobs, who was prominent during the swing era for about a decade, died in 1952, month and day unknown.
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Jazz Poems
POEM IN WHICH I MAKE THE MISTAKE
OF COMPARING BILLIE HOLIDAY TO A
COSMIC WASHERWOMAN
We were driving back from the record store at the mall
when Terrance told me that Billie Holiday
was not a symbol for the black soul.
He said, The night is not African American either for
your information,
it is just goddamn dark,
and in the background
she was singing a song I never heard before
moving her voice like water moving
along the shore of a lake
reaching gently into the crevices, touching the pebbles
and sand.
Once through the dirty window of a train
on the outskirts of Hoboken, New Jersey,
I swear I saw a sonnet written high up in a
concrete wall,
rhymed quatrains rising from the
dyslexic alphabet of gang signs and obscenities
and Terrance said he saw a fresco
of brown and white angels flying
on a boarded-up building in Chinatown
and everybody knows
there’s a teenager genius somewhere out there,
a firebrand out of Ghana by way of Alabama,
this very minute in a warehouse loft,
rewriting Moby-Dick-The Story of the Great
Black Whale
When he burst out of the womb
of his American youth
with his dictionary and his hip-hop shovel,
when he takes his place on stage
dripping the amniotic fluid of history,
he won’t be any color we ever saw before,
and I know he’s right, Terrance is right, it’s
so obvious
But here in the past of that future,
Billie Holiday is still singing
a song so dark and slow
it seems bigger than her, it sounds very heavy
like a terrible stain soaked into the sheets,
so deep that nothing will ever get it out,
but she keeps trying,
she keeps pushing the dark syllables under the water
then pulling them up to see if they are clean
but they never are
and it makes her sad
and we are too
and it’s dark around the car and inside also is very
dark
Terrance and I can barely see each other
in the dashboard glow.
I can only imagine him right now
pointing at the radio
as if to say, Shut up and listen.
TONY HOAGLAND | 1953~2018
from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
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