Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Matt Lavelle was born on April 11, 1970 in Paterson, New Jersey and began his music career with Hildred Humphries, a swing era veteran who played with Count Basie and Billie Holiday.
Playing in ensembles led by Sabir Mateen since 2002, three years later Matt began study with Ornette Coleman. He has been a member of the Bern Nix Quartet since 2010 and recorded with Giuseppi Logan the same year.
In 2011 he created the 12 Houses Orchestra. Lavelle is also a visual artist inspired by his Grandfather Fritz Kluber. He is author of the Substack No Sound Left Behind. Matt published a book titled New York City Subway Drama and Beyond, in 2011. In 2013 he published a short story titled The Jazz Musician’s Tarot Deck.
He has recorded nineteen albums as a leader, and another forty-five as a sideman with Nix and Logan as well as Sumari, Eye Contact, Daniel Carter, Bern Nix, Giuseppi Logan, Matana Roberts, William Hooker, Francois Grillot, Steve Swell, Sabir Mateen, Ras Moshe, Assif Tsahar, William Parker, Charles Waters, Barry Chabala, Earth People, Allen Lowe, D3, Julie Lyon, Tom Cabrera, The Cooperative Sound, Stars Like Fleas, Eric Plaks, and Pete Dennis.
Trumpeter Matt Lavelle, who also plays flugelhorn, alto and bass clarinet, continues to perform, record and tour.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Johnny Simmen was born Hans Georg Simmen on April 7, 1918 in Brugg, Switzerland. He learned to play the piano for seven years, but never performed publicly. After a Louis Armstrong concert at the Zurich Tonhalle in 1934, he became fascinated with jazz. In 1935, he founded the first jazz club in Zurich, Switzerland where jazz enthusiasts could meet, where recording evenings were held, and lectures were given.
As early as the start of the Forties, Simmen was reporting from Switzerland for the American magazine Down Beat. Since he felt his high school English skills were inadequate, he took lessons and obtained the Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in 1942, enabling him to be fully effective as a Swiss correspondent . He was able to resume his work for Down Beat in the first two years after the war.
He published numerous articles in journals such as the Bulletin du Hot Club de France, the British Melody Maker, Down Beat and the Canadian Coda. He lectured internationally on jazz and was friends with Bill Coleman, Teddy Wilson, Joe Turner and Horace Silver. He was considered one of the most knowledgeable jazz writers, specializing in musicians of the pre-bop era. Johnny’s knowledge of piano technique made his articles on jazz pianists very concise.
Simmen wrote liner notes for new editions, beginning with the prestige album Benny Carter in 1933. Starting in 1979, he produced recordings with important musicians of the 1930s. Most notably, in 1994, he released a whole series of recordings on Best of Jazz .
Holding down several day jobs, Johnny was a civil servant for the city of Zurich from 1943. Three years later Johnny joined Swissair, where as the exclusive designer of the in-flight jazz programs to entertain Swissair passengers until 1987. He delivered programs every two months, initially lasting one hour, later one and a half hours, and finally two hours.
Author and music producer Johnny Simmen died on September 23, 2004 in Zurich, Switzerland.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Barry Miles was born Barry Miles Silverlight on March 28, 1947 in Newark, New Jersey and grew up in North Plainfield, New Jersey. In 1956 he joined the musicians union at age nine as a child prodigy on drums, piano and vibraphone appearing with Miles Davis and John Coltrane among other talents of the day. He appeared live and on television shows including To Tell the Truth, Dick Van Dyke’s variety show, and The Andy Williams Show.
In 1961 at age fourteen he made his solo artist debut recording, “Miles of Genius”, as drummer and composer with sidemen Al Hall and Duke Jordan. Miles continued to perform with his own band in the early 1960s in which he composed the material that enabled up and coming talents such as Woody Shaw, Eddie Gómez and Robin Kenyatta to display their talents.
While a student at Princeton University he concentrated on his piano playing, recording a live album in 1966 entitled Barry Miles Presents His Syncretic Compositions. He followed in 1969 with the eponymously titled album, Barry Miles, incorporating electric instruments.
The Seventies saw him recruiting his brother Terry Silverlight on drums along with guitarists Pat Martino and John Abercrombie to record his White Heat album, which is regarded as one of the pioneering fusion jazz recordings. For the next decade, Miles recorded several albums in which he developed the principle of fusing styles together in jazz.
In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, Barry went on to work as Roberta Flack’s musical director for a stint that lasted fifteen years. During that time he composed, produced and recorded songs that Flack recorded in the film Bustin’ Loose, and on her album Oasis. He established a long-lasting relationship with Al Di Meola as his performing, recording and co-producing keyboardist.
He wrote the instruction book, “Twelve Themes With Improvisations”, and is currently out of print. In 2013, he released Home and Away, Volume One, his first album as a leader in 27 years. Pianist, record producer and author Barry Miles continues to perform, record and produce.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jack Payne was born John Wesley Vivian Payne on August 22, 1899 in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, England. He is the only son of a music publisher’s warehouse manager and it wasn’t until he was serving in the Royal Flying Corps that he played the piano in amateur dance bands. Towards the end of World War I, he led dance bands for the troops and was part of a voluntary group The Allies Concert Party that performed to wounded soldiers convalescing around Birmingham.
He played with visiting American jazz bands at the Birmingham Palais during the early 1920s, including the Southern Rag-a-Jazz Orchestra in 1922, before moving to London in 1925. He played in a ten-piece band which became the house band at London’s Hotel Cecil. Three years later Payne became the BBC Director of Dance Music and the leader of the BBC’s first official dance band.
After leaving the BBC in 1932 he returned to playing hotel venues and switched labels to Imperial, followed by Rex from 1934. Payne took his band on nationwide tours and made a couple of films, composed and published waltzes, and recorded jazz working with Garland Wilson.
>Returning to the post of Director of Dance Music at the BBC until 1946. Bandleader and composer Jack Payne, who authored two autobiographies, died in Tonbridge, Kent, England on December 4,1969, aged 70.
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Jazz Poems
FILLING THE GAP When Bird died, I didn’t mind I had things to do— polish some shoes, practive a high school cha-cha-cha. I didn’t even know Clifford was dead: I must have been lobbing an oblong ball beside the gymnasium. I saw the Lady right before she died— dried, brittle as last year’s gardenia. I let her scratch an autograph. But not Pres. Too bugged to boo, I left as Basie’s brass booted him off the stand in a sick reunion— tottering , saxophone dragging himmlike a stage-hook. When I read Dr. Williams’ poem, “Stormy,” I wrote a letter of love and praise and didn’t mail it. After he died, it burned my desk like a delinquent prescription… I don’t like to mourn the dead: what didn’t, never will. And I sometimes feel foolish staying up late, trying to squeeze some life out of books and records, filling the gaps between words and notes. That is why I rush into our room to find you mumbling and moaning in your incoherent performance. That is why I rub and squeeze you and love to hear your live, alterable cry against my breast Lawson Fusao Inadafrom Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young
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