Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Frank Wellington Wess was born on January 4, 1922 in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of a principal father and a schoolteacher mother. He began with classical music training and played in Oklahoma in high school. He later switched to jazz after moving to Washington, DC and by nineteen was working with big bands.
Although his career was interrupted during World War, he played with a military band in the period. After leaving the military, he joined Billy Eckstine’s orchestra, then a few years later he returned to DC and received a degree in flute at the Modern School Of Music. He played tenor saxophone and flute with Count Basie from 1953 to 1964.
Wess was considered one of the best jazz flautists of his time and from 1959 to 1964 he won the Down Beat Critic Poll for flute. He went on to be a member of Clark Terry’s big band from 1967 into the 1970s, played in the New York Jazz Quartet with Roland Hanna and did a variety of work for TV.
In 1968 Frank contributed to the landmark album The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra. Over the course of his career he played with Kenny Barron, Rufus Reid, Buck Clayton, Benny Carter, Billy Taylor, Harry Edison, Mel Torme, Ernestine Anderson, Louie Bellson, John Pizzarelli, Milt Jackson, Quincy Jones, Yusef Lateeef, Howard Alden, Dick Hyman, Jane Jarvis, Frank Vignola, Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra, Hank Jones and the list continues.
NEA Jazz Master, flautist, alto and tenor saxophonist Frank Wess passed away from a heart attack related to kidney failure on October 30, 2013.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Motohiko “Toko” Hino was born on January 3, 1946 in Tokyo, Japan. His father was a dancer and musician and taught him and his brother Terumasa to tap dancing as children. At the age of ten, he began playing drums and by age 17 was playing professionally.
In the mid-1970s, Hino was repeatedly voted by Swing Journal the best jazz drummer in Japan, though from 1978 he was based in New York City. He released an album under his own name in 1971 and two more in the early 1990s.
He played with musicians such as Joanne Brackeen, Joe Hnedrson, Takehiro Honda, Karen Mantler, Hugh Masekela, John Sofield, Jean-Luc Ponty, Sonny Rollins, Jon Faddis and Billy Harper among others.
On May 13, 1999 drummer Motohiko Hino passed away of cancer.
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Daily Dose Of jazz…
Nick Fatool was born on Jan. 2, 1915 in Milbury, Massachusetts and studied drums as a youth. He first played professionally in Providence, Rhode Island, followed with time in Joe Haymes’s band in 1937 and then Don Beston’s in Dallas soon after. By 1939 he was playing briefly with Bobby Hackett, and then took a chair with the Benny Goodman Orchestra.
Becoming one of the most visible drummers of the 1940s, Nick played with several bands led by Artie Shaw, Alvino Rey, Claude Thornhill, Les Brown and Jan Savitt. In 1943 he moved to Los Angeles, California and recorded profusely as a session musician. The short list of his credits includes Harry James, Errol Garner, Louis Armstrong, Jess Stacy, Tommy Dorsey, Matty Matlock, Glen Gray, Bob Crosby and the Crosby Bobcats.
From1944 to 1958 Fatool played on sessions for Capitol Records as a sideman for Johnny Mercer, Betty Hutton, Jo Stafford, Peggy Lee, Billy May, Nat “King” Cole, Wingy Manone, Dean Martin, Gordon MacRae, Red Nichols, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Ray Anthony, Jack Teagarden, The Andrews Sisters, Frank Sinatra, Andy Griffith, and Robert Mitchum to name a few during this period.
In the 1950s and 1960s Nick found much work on the Dixieland jazz revival circuit, playing with Pete Fountain from 1962-1965 and the Dukes of Dixieland. His only session as a bandleader was as the head of a septet in 1987, “Nick Fatool’s Jazz Band & Quartet” leading Eddie Miller, Johnny Mince, Ernie Carson and others. Drummer Nick Fatool passed away on September 26, 2000 in Los Angeles, California. He was 85.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Manny Oquendo was born on January 1, 1931 in New York City of Puerto Rican ancestry. Growing up he began studying percussion in 1945 and went on to work in the tropical bands and Latin music ensembles like Carlos Valero, Luis del Campo, Juan “El Boy” Torres, Chano Pozo, Jose Budet, Juanito Sanabria, Marcelino Guerra, Jose Curbelo and Pupi Campo.
In 1950, he became the bongo player for Tito Puente followed by Tito Rodriguez four years later. He moved on to Vicentico Valdes the next year and freelanced in the City before joining Eddie Palmieri’s Conjunto La Perfecta in 1962, where he helped develop the New York style of the mozambique rhythm.
Manny co-led Conjunto Libre with bassist Andy González from 1974 and had a worldwide hit with the Freddie Hubbard composition Little Sunflower in 1983 on the album Ritmo, Sonido y Estilo. He also was a sideman with Paul Quinichette.
His timbales solos were famous for their tastefully sparse, straight forward “típico” phrasing and his solos also incorporated the rhythmic language of the folkloric quinto, the lead drum ofrumba. Percussionist Manny Oquendo, who also played bongos, timbales, and left a small catalogue of nine albums as a leader, passed away on March 25, 2009.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
John Kirby was born John Kirk in Winchester, Virginia on December 31, 1908. His mother gave him up for adoption and was raised by Reverend Washington and Nancy Johnson. He was a student at the Winchester Colored School and started trombone lessons around nine years old under the guidance of Professor Powell Gibson. As a kid and that he learned to play music just as it was written and his formal education ended around 1923.
Kirby arrived in Baltimore around 1927 and met trombonist Jimmy Harrison, saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and composer Duke Ellington. It was Harrison who persuaded him to switch from trombone to tuba. He played tuba with Bill Brown and His Brownies, pianist Charlie Sheets and then with John C. Smith’s Society Band. He joined Fletcher Henderson in 1929, recorded tuba on a number of sessions, but switched to double-bass when tuba fell out of favor as jazz bands’ primary bass instrument.
In the early 1930s, John took bass lessons from legendary bassists Pops Foster and Wellman Braud, left Henderson to play with Chick Webb, then joined Lucky Millinder and briefly led a quartet in 1935, but was more often than not a sideman in other groups. He performed behind Billie Holiday and Teddy Wilson on their first recording date.
By 1936, Kirby was a successful sideman on the New York City jazz scene, secured a gig at the Onyx Club leading Charlie Shavers, Buster Bailey, Billy Kyle, Russell Procope and O’Neill Spencer, becoming one of the more significant small groups in the big band era. They recorded the Shaver’s classic Undecided, with Maxine Sullivan most often performing the vocal duties for the group.
Along with his orchestra, John had a 30-minute radio program, Flow Gently, Sweet Rhythm, also known as The John Kirby Show on CBS from April 1940 – January 1941. The program also featured Sullivan and the Golden Gate Quartet and they have been cited as the first black artists to host a jazz-oriented series.
He tended toward a lighter, classically influenced style of jazz often referred to as chamber jazz. He was very prolific and extremely popular from 1938-1941 but lost most of his group to World War II. Through the war years he was able to attract Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Carter, Ben Webster, Clyde Hart, Budd Johnson and Zutty Singleton to his small groups and club dates. As Kirby’s career declined, he drank heavily and was beset by diabetes.
After the war, Kirby got the surviving sextet members back together, with vocalist Sarah Vaughan but the reunion did not last. A concert at Carnegie Hall in December 1950, with Bailey plus drummer Sid Catlett, attracted only a small audience, crushing his spirit and badly damaging what little was left of his career. Double-bassist, trombonist and tubist John Kirby passed away on June 14, 1952 in Hollywood, California at age 43.
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