Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Alan Littlejohn was born Albert John Alan Littlejohns on January 4, 1928 in Highgate, London, England. Taking up the trumpet in 1946, he trained as an accountant after the War but also played semi-professionally with bands such as the Blue Note Swingtet and the Galleon Jazz Band. In 1952 he joined Cy Laurie and then a year later moved to play with Eric Silk. Moving to Manchester for eight months he worked with Ron Simpson and the Saints Jazz band in 1954, but then returned to London to work with Eric Silk again.
1955 saw Littlejohn taking a residency at the Putney Jazz Club and a further residency in Chelsea in 1960. In 1963 he led a quintet with trombonist Tony Milliner, pianist Mat Mathewson, bassist Bucky Cowman and Terry Cox on drums, emulating the style of the Bob Brookmeyer/Clark Terry band. Cox and Cowman were soon replaced by Max Cutlan and Dave Holland, respectively.
Over the course of his career Alan would play with Mal Cutlan, Lew Hooper, Jimmy Hamilton, Matt Methewson, Cat Anderson, Peanuts Hucko, Earl Warren, Sonny Dee, the Georgia Jazz Band and to be the support band for Dave Brubeck at his Festival Hall gig. From 1973 to 1978, he played with Alvin Roy’s Band which had a residency at The Prospect of Whitby in London.
When not in residency at clubs in London Littlejohn toured Spain and Germany, guest appeared with the Merseysippi Jazz Band and during the Eighties played as a full-time professional musician for a short period. From 1990 he worked with Laurie Chescoe’s Good Time Jazz until a month before his death. Trumpeter, flugelhornist and bandleader Alan Littlejohn, most notable for his work with artists such as Ben Webster, Earl Hines, Billy Butterfield and recording with Bill Coleman, passed away on November 12, 1995 in Barnet in Hertfordshire.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ehud Asherie was born on December 20, 1979 in Israel and with his family moved to Italy at the age of three. He started playing piano at the age of seven and attended the Sir James Henderson School, now The British School of Milan, before they moved to the United States when he was nine. As a New York City teenager he visited Smalls Jazz Club, taking private lessons from Frank Hewitt, a pianist who often played there and attending the New School University.
Asherie first played at Smalls when he was a high school sophomore. In 2010 he recorded his debut solo piano album, Welcome to New York with a focus on stride and standards. The same year he played Hammond organ on his quartet release, Organic, mixing bop and swing with standards.
He has recorded seven albums as a leader ranging from duo to quintet group configurations on the Arbor and Posi-Tone labels. He has been a sideman recording with Bryan Shaw, Hilary Gardner and Harry Allen. He has performed with Peter Bernstrin, Joe Cohn, Billy Drummond, Bobby Durham, Frank Gant, Paul Gill, Jimmy Green, Dennis Irwin, Jimmy Lovelace, Joe Magnarelli, Bob Mover, Tim Pleasant, Ben Street and Mark Taylor.
Pianist and organist Ehud Asherie has for two years been playing regularly at Smalls with his own trio, the Grant Stewart Quartet and the Neil Miner Quintet. He has also served as a rehearsal pianist for the Village Vanguard Orchestra and Since January 2000 he’s part of Trio65 at New York City’s Rainbow Grill with bassist Joseph Lepore and drummer Tommaso Cappellato. He continues to perform, record and tour.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ellen Johnson was born on December 18, 1954 in Chicago, Illinois. Surrounded by music as a child, her mother was a professional singer who played piano and her uncle had played clarinet in Glenn Miller’s Army Air Force Band.
Growing up in Chicago she studied guitar in high school but had originally planned to become a theater actress. However when she took voice lessons, Ellen became hooked on the music, and began singing in a local band while studying jazz with Willie Pickens at a music conservatory. Moving to the San Diego, California she earned a Master’s Degree from San Diego State University in Vocal Performance.
Notable for her work as an educator, Johnson has been teaching part of the voice faculties of the University of San Diego and the Old Globe Theatre, as well as conducted voice clinics since the mid-1980s. She has also performed special concerts of Duke Ellington’s Sacred Music.
With a wide range for jazz improvisation, in the mid -’90s she recorded her debut album, Too Good to Title. She also recorded a few songs on Bob Willey’s album Peace Pieces. Vocalist Ellen Johnson continues to perform, and record.
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Russell Jacquet was born on December 4, 1917 in Saint Martinville, Louisiana, the elder brother of tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet. He had stints with Floyd Ray and Milt Larkin before he studying music at Wiley College and Texas Southern University.
Moving west he played with his brother’s band for a time, later forming his own group, that became the house band at the Cotton Club from 1945 to 1949. After that residency ended Russell rejoined his brother’s group. He would later play with several small groups in Oakland, California, as well as in Houston, Texas with Arnett Cobb. He also performed with his brother on a few dates in New York City.
Trumpeter Russell Jacquet passed away on February 28, 1990 in Los Angeles, California. He left a small catalogue of recordings as a leader during his Cotton Club years and four as a sideman with his brother, recorded between 1951 and 1969 on Clef, Argo and Prestige record labels.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Rudolph “Rudy” Van Gelder was born on November 2, 1924 in Jersey City, New Jersey. His interest in microphones and electronics can be traced to a youthful enthusiasm for amateur radio. Named for his uncle who had been the drummer in Ted Lewis’s band in the mid-1930s, he took trumpet lessons and trained as an optometrist at the Pennsylvania College of Optometry, in Philadelphia, thinking he could not earn a living as a recording engineer.
From 1943, after graduating, Van Gelder had an optometry practice in Teaneck, New Jersey, and moonlighted recording local musicians in the evenings who wanted 78-rpm recordings of their work. From 1946, Van Gelder recorded in his parents’ house in Hackensack, New Jersey, in which a control room was built adjacent to the living room, which served as the musicians’ performing area. The dry acoustics of this working space were partly responsible for Van Gelder’s inimitable recording aesthetic.
Interested in improving the quality of the playback equipment he acquired everything that could play back audio: speakers, turntables and amplifiers. One of Rudy’s friends, baritone saxophonist Gil Mellé, introduced him to Alfred Lion, a producer for Blue Note Records, in 1953. Within a few years he was in demand by many other independent labels based around New York City, such as Bob Weinstock, owner of Prestige Records. To accommodate each label – Blue Note, Prestige, Savoy, Impulse, Verve he assigned them to different days as Lion was more stringent with the sound of original music, Weinstock had essentially blowing sessions for some of the best musicians in jazz history.He also engineered and mastered for the classical label Vox Records in the Fifties.
Van Gelder worked during the day as an optometrist until the summer of 1959, when he moved his operations to a larger studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey and became a full-time recording engineer. The new studio’s design was inspired by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright had high ceilings and fine acoustics with “no food or drink and do not touch microphones” policy as he himself always wore gloves when handling equipment.
By 1967 the labels were beginning to utilize other engineers more regularly but Rudy remained active engineering nearly all of Creed Taylor’s CTI Records releases, a series of proto-smooth jazz albums that were financially successful, but not always well received by critics. He was not without his detractors. Despite his prominence in the industry, like Lion who didn’t care for the overuse of reverb, and Charles Mingus refused to work with him because he change the sound of his bass. He remastered the analog Blue Note recordings into 24-bit digital recordings in its RVG Edition series and also remasters of some of the Prestige albums, and was happy to see the LP go by the wayside because it was hard for him to get the sound the way he thought it should be.
He received awards and honors being named a fellow of the Audio Engineering Society (AES), received the society’s most prestigious award, the AES Gold Medal, named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, received the Grammy Trustees Award, and Thelonious Monk composed and recorded a tribute to Van Gelder titled Hackensack.
Producer and recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder, who specialized in jazz and regarded as the most important recording engineer of jazz by some observers, passed away at home in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on August 25, 2016. Among the several thousand jazz sessions he recorded are the acknowledged classics John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Miles Davis’s Walkin’, Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage, Sonny Rollins’s Saxophone Colossus and Horace Silver’s Song for My Father.
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