Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Joe Pass was born Joseph Anthony Jacobi Passalaqua on January 13, 1929 in Brunswick, New Jersey but was raised in Johnston, Pennsylvania. Inspired by Gene Autry’s portrayal of a guitar-playing cowboy. His father gave him his first guitar on his 9th birthday and encouraged him to pick up tunes by ear, play pieces not specifically written for guitar and practice scales leaving no spaces between the notes of the melody.
As early as 14, Joe started gigging with bands fronted by Tony Pastor and Charlie Barnet as he honed his guitar skills and learned the music business. He began traveling with small jazz groups, eventually ending up in New York City. Unfortunately, he fell victim to drug abuse spending a good portion of the 1950s in relative obscurity, reappearing only after a two-and-a –half year stay in rehab at Synanon that resulted in the 1962 album “The Sounds of Synanon”.
Throughout the sixties Pass recorded a series of albums for the Pacific Jazz label, received Downbeat magazine’s “New Star Award” in ’63, toured with George Shearing, was a sideman with Louis Bellson, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Joe Williams, Della Reese and Johnny Mathis, and worked on TV shows including The Tonight Show with Carson, Merv Griffin, Steve Allen and others.
By the early 1970s, Pass and guitarist Herb Ellis were performing together regularly at Donte’s in Los Angeles, a collaboration that led to the recording of Jazz/Concord with Ray Brown and Jake Hanna in tow. During this time he also collaborated on a series of music books, and his Joe Pass Guitar Style is considered a leading improvisation textbook for students of jazz.
In 1970 Norman Granz signed pass to his Pablo records in which he released as a leader and worked with Benny Carter, Milt Jackson, Herb Ellis, Zoot Sims, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie and many, many others. In 1974, along with Oscar Peterson and Niels-Henning Orsted Pederson they won a Grammy with their album “The Trio” for Best Jazz Performance by a group. Throughout the late 70sto mid 80s, Joe and Ella Fitzgerald would record six albums together as her career was nearing its end. In 1994, guitarist Joe Pass died from liver cancer in Los Angeles on May 23rd at the age of 65.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jay McShann, born James Columbus McShann on January 12, 1916 in Muskogee, Oklahoma began played the piano from the age of 12. His primary education came from Earl “Fatha” Hines late-night radio broadcasts from the Grand Terrace Café. Leaving home he spent time at college and working with bands throughout Oklahoma, Arkansas, Arizona and New Mexico.
In the 1930 Jay moved to Kansas City working with both local groups and his own band with his 1938 band comprised of Charlie Parker, Bernard Anderson, Al Hibbler, Paul Quinichette, Earl Coleman, Ben Webster and Walker Brown, creating a music that would become known as the Kansas City sound.
Nicknamed Hootie, it was during the 1940s that he stood at the forefront of the blues and hard bop jazz musicians mainly from Kansas City. His first recordings were all with Charlie Parker, the first as “The Jay McShann Orchestra” on August 9, 1940. After World War II he began to lead small groups featuring blues shouter Jimmy Witherspoon. Witherspoon started recording with McShann in 1945, and fronting McShann’s band, and had a hit in 1949 with “Ain’t Nobody’s Business”.
Jay McShann was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame, was nominated twice for a Grammy Award, performed regularly with violinist Claude Williams and continued to recording and touring into the nineties around Kansas City and Toronto, Ontario. The blues and jazz pianist Jay McShann, whose career spanned more than sixty years, passed on December 7, 2006, at St. Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Born Kenneth Spearman Clarke on January 9, 1914 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Kenny Clarke grew up in a musical family, studied multiple instruments, including vibes and trombone, as well as music theory and composition while still in high school. As a teenager he played in the bands of Leroy Bradley and Roy Eldridge. He later toured around the Midwest for several years with the Jeter-Pillars band that also featured bassist Jimmy Blanton and guitarist Charlie Christian. By 1935, he was more frequently in New York, where he eventually moved and worked in groups led by Edgar Hayes and Lonnie Smith.
While working in the bands of Edgar Hayes and Roy Eldridge, Clarke started developing the rhythmic concepts that would later define his contribution to the music. He began experimenting with moving the time-keeping role from the combination of snare drum or hi-hat and bass drum to embellished quarter notes on the ride cymbal, the familiar “ding-ding-da-ding” pattern, which Clarke is often credited with inventing. One of these passages, a combination of a rim shot on the snare followed directly by a bass drum accent, earned Clarke his nickname, “Klook”, which was short for “Klook-mop”, in imitation of the sound this combination produced. This nickname was enshrined in “Oop Bop Sh’Bam”, recorded by Dizzy Gillespie in 1946 with Clarke on drums, where the scat lyric to the bebop tune goes “oop bop sh’bam a klook a mop.”
Clarke himself claimed that these stylistic elements were already in place by the time he put together the famous house band at Minton’s Playhouse, which hosted Monk, Parker, Gillespie, Russell, saxophonist Don Byas and many others while serving as the incubator of the emerging small group sound. While playing at Minton’s, Clarke made many recordings, most notably as the house drummer for Savoy Records. When the musicians from the Minton’s band moved to different projects, Clarke began working with a young pianist and composer John Lewis and vibraphonist Milt Jackson, and with the addition of bassist Ray Brown they formed the Modern Jazz Quartet or MJQ. The group pioneered what would later be called chamber jazz or third stream, referring to its incorporation of classical and baroque aesthetics as an alternative to hard bop.
Clarke stayed with the MJQ until 1955, relocating in Paris in 1956. As soon as he moved to Paris, he regularly worked with visiting American musicians in, as well as forming a working trio, known as “The Bosses”, with Bud Powell also a Paris resident and Pierre Michelot. In 1961 along with pianist Francy Boland, Kenny formed a regular big band “The Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band that lasted eleven years and featured leading European and expatriate American musicians, such as Johnny Griffin and Ronnie Scott.
Drummer Kenny Clarke continued recording and playing with both visiting U.S. musicians along with his regular French band mates until his death on January 26, 1985 in Montreuil-sous-bois. In 1988 he was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame and his innovation set the stage for the development of the bebop combo, which relied heavily on improvised exchanges between drummer and soloist to propel the music forward.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bulee “Slim” Gaillard was born on January 4, 1916 in Santa Clara, Cuba. His childhood in Cuba was spent cutting sugarcane and picking bananas, as well as occasionally going to sea with his father. At age 12, he made his way to America settling in Detroit. A move to New York City in the late 1930s saw Gaillard’s rise to prominence as part of Slim & Slam, a jazz novelty act he formed with bassist Slam Stewart. Their hits included “Flat Foot Floogie”, “Cement Mixer” and the hipster anthem, “The Groove Juice Special”.
Gaillard’s appeal was that he presented a hip style with broad appeal, was a master improviser whose stream of consciousness vocals ranged far afield from the original lyrics along with wild interpolations of nonsense syllables. Gaillard could play several instruments, such as guitar and piano and always managed to turn the performance from hip jazz to comedy.
In the late forties and early fifties, Gaillard frequently opened at Birdland for such greats as Charlie Parker, Flip Phillips and Coleman Hawkins. Slim composed theme songs for radio shows, appeared in several shows in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Charlie’s Angels, Mission Impossible, Along Came Bronson and Roots: The Next Generation. By the early 1980s he was touring the European jazz festival circuit, playing with such musicians as Arnett Cobb.
Slim Gaillard, singer, songwriter, pianist, guitarist and actor noted for his vocalese, spoke 9 languages including “Vout”, a language he constructed out of word play and created a dictionary, passed away on February 26, 1991 in London, England at the age of 75.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Herbie Nichols was born in San Juan Hill, Manhattan, New York City on January 3, 1919. His first known work was with the Royal Barons in 1937, a few years later performing at Minton’s Playhouse but he did not find a very happy experience due to a competitive atmosphere that did not suit his personality.
Nichols was drafted into the Infantry in 1941. After the war he worked in various setting, beginning to achieve some recognition when Mary Lou Williams recorded some of his songs in 1952. He befriended Thelonious Monk and from about 1947 persisted in trying to persuade Alfred Lion at Blue Note to sign him. Lion finally acquiesced and between 1955 and 1956 Herbie recorded less than half his 170 compositions that produced three albums, with other tracks from these sessions not being issued until the 1980s.
As a player he was capable not only of dark lyricism but also of writing melodies so harmonically adventurous that placed his music in a rhythmic league of its own. Nichols was indeed fortunate in the drummers with whom he worked Art Blakey and Max Roach. As a composer he penned such notable standards as “Serenade” that had lyrics added as well as “Lady Sings The Blues” that became synonymous with Billie Holiday, to which she set lyrics and adopted the title for her autobiography.
Jazz pianist and composer Herbie Nichols died from leukemia at the age of 44 on April 12, 1963 in New York City. Although he lived most of his life in relative obscurity, he is now highly regarded by many musicians and critics.