Daily Dose Of Jazz…
John Gilmore was born on September 28, 1931 and grew up in Chicago, Illinois but didn’t start playing the clarinet until age 14. While in the Air Force in the late Forties he took up the saxophone, then pursued a musical career, playing briefly with pianist Earl Hines before encountering Sun Ra in 1953.
For the next four decades, Gilmore recorded and performed almost exclusively with Sun Ra. Thought to have the makings of stardom like Rollins or Coltrane, the latter taking informal lessons from Gilmore in the late 50s and partially inspired by his sound on “Chasin’ The Trane”.
By 1957 he was co-leading a Blue Note date with Clifford Jordan titled Blowing In From Chicago, that is regarded as a hard bop classic with Horace Silver, Curley Russell and Art Blakey. In the mid-1960s John toured with the Jazz Messengers, participated in recording sessions with Paul Bley, Andrew Hill, Pete LaRoca, McCoy Tyner and a handful of others. In 1970 he co-led a recording with Jamaican trumpeter Dizzy Reece, however his main focus throughout remained with the Sun Ra Arkestra.
Gilmore was devoted to Sun Ra’s use of harmony, which he considered both unique and a logical extension of bebop. He was the Arkestra’s leading sideman and soloist, performing with fluency and tone on straight-ahead post bop sessions and abstractly capable of long passages based exclusively on high-register squeals. Though his fame was shrouded in the relative anonymity as a member of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, he led the band after Ra’s death up until his own passing of emphysema in 1995.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Hank Levy was born Henry Jacob Levy on September 27, 1927 in Baltimore, Maryland. He learned to play the saxophone and matriculated through Catholic University studying composition with George Thaddeus Jones. It was here that he became interested in odd meters through their use by such composers as Paul Hindemith, Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky. An adept composer of counterpoint, his talent can be heard in such compositions as Passacaglia and Fugue and Quintessence among others for both the Don Ellis Orchestra and Stan Kenton.
Levy was also prolific as an arranger of jazz standards, though few of them were published during his lifetime. He was especially fond of the music of the stage as it came through bebop: Cole Porter, George Gershwin and Jerome Kern. In his last years, he more frequently turned to bebop originals by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Tadd Dameron.
As an educator Hank was a full-time professor at Towson State University in 1967. He founded and directed for nearly a quarter of a century the Jazz Program and created the “Towson State Jazz Ensemble”. By 1970 he had brought the band to national prominence winning the outstanding band honors at the prestigious Notre Dame Jazz Festival, with and additional honor of “Best Lead Trumpet”.
Levy recorded an album in 1975 with the ensemble titled “2 + 2 = 5” comprised of six of his compositions. The “Hank Levy Legacy Band” currently performs his music, they have recorded two live CDs to date, and several of his works are still in print through various distributors. Saxophonist, composer and arranger Hank Levy passed away on September 18, 2001 in Parkville, Maryland.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Leonard Geoffrey Feather was born on September 13, 1914 in London, England and learned to play the piano and clarinet without formal training and started writing about jazz and film by his late teens. At age of twenty-one, Feather made his first visit to the United States and after working in the U.K. and the U.S. as a record producer finally settled in New York City in 1939, where he lived until moving to Los Angeles, California in 1960.
His compositions have been widely recorded, including “Evil Gal Blues” and “Blowtop Blues” by Dinah Washington, and what is possibly his biggest hit, “How Blue Can You Get?” by blues artists Louis Jordan and B. B. King, and some of his own recordings as a bandleader are still available. But it was as a journalist, critic, historian, and campaigner that he made his biggest mark as one of the most widely read and most influential writer on jazz, and having written the liner notes for hundreds of jazz albums.
Leonard wrote the lyrics to the Benny Golson jazz composition “Whisper Not” which was then recorded by Ella Fitzgerald on her 1966 Verve release of the same name. He was co-editor of the Metronome Magazine and served as the chief jazz critic for the Los Angeles Times until his death on September 22, 1994 in Sherman Oaks, California at age eighty.
He leaves a legacy of a talented daughter, vocalist Lorraine Feather, a couple of dozen albums and several books such as The Encyclopedia Yearbook of Jazz in the Sixties, Inside Jazz and From Satchmo to Miles among others.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Specs Wright was born Charles Wright on September 8, 1927 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He played drums in an Army band until his discharge in 1947. Following this he played in a group with Jimmy Heath and Howard McGhee. By 1949 he had joined Dizzy Gillespie’s band alongside John Coltrane, remaining until it disbanded in mid-1950.
Wright would rejoin Dizzy late in the decade as a member of his sextet with Coltrane, Jimmy Heath, Percy Heath and Milt Jackson. He would go on to play with Earl Bostic, Kenny Drew, Cannonball Adderley, Art Blakey and Carmen McRae as well as a member of the Hank Mobley sextet with Curtis Fuller, Ray Bryant, Tommy Bryant, Billy Root and Lee Morgan.
Not one to be idle, though never a leader, he was a sought after sideman playing with Sonny Rollins, Betty Carter, Red Garland, Coleman Hawkins and Lambert, Hendricks and Ross in the early Sixties. Drummer Specs Wright passed away on February 6, 1963. He was 36 years old.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
John Malachi was born on September 6, 1919 in Red Springs, North Carolina and was the pianist for the epochal Billy Eckstine Bebop Orchestra in 1944-45 and again in 1947. He worked with Illinois Jacquet in 1948, Louis Jordan in 1951, and a series of singers including Pearl Bailey, Dinah Washington, Al Hibbler, Joe Williams and Sarah Vaughan.
Malachi is credited with creating the nickname “Sassy” for Sarah Vaughan, working with her both in the Eckstine Orchestra and later during her solo career. He was also fond of categorizing jazz pianists into “acrobats” and “poets,” classifying himself among the latter.
John opted out of the traveling life of the touring jazz musician in the 1960s, living roughly the last decade and a half of his life in Washington, D.C. freelancing, playing with touring bands and artists when they stopped through, and leading music workshops at clubs like Jimmy MacPhail’s Gold Room and Bill Harris’s Pig’s Foot.
Always the educator, Malachi’s generosity towards younger musicians was legendary. One of the musicians he helped influence recalls that younger players referred to his workshops as “The University of John Malachi”. On February 11, 1987 jazz pianist John Malachi passed away in Washington, D.C.
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