Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Louis “King” Garcia was born on August 25, 1905 in Juncos, Puerto Rico and played early in his life in the Municipal Band of San Juan, whose director was Juan Tizol’s uncle, Manuel Tizol. This led to some work with the Victor Recording Orchestra.
Moving to the United States in the early 1920s during the Jazz Age, he played with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and the Emil Coleman Orchestra. The Thirties saw him increasingly working in the studios, including his most important association, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, which he recorded with both together and separately. He also played with the Vic Berton Orchestra, Richard Himber, Nat Brandwyne, Amanda Randolph, Louis Prima, and vocalist Amanda Randolph.
In the 1940s he returned to play with Coleman again, and led his own Latin ensemble that decade. By the 1960s he had moved to California and faded from the scene, essentially retiring due to failing health.
Trumpeter and bandleader King Garcia, who spent most of his career in the United States, passed away in Los Angeles, California on September 4, 1983.
More Posts: bandleader,history,instrumental,jazz,music,trumpet
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
William James “Count” Basie was born on August 21, 1904 in Red Bank, New Jersey. His father played the mellophone, his mother played the piano and gave him his first piano lessons. Taking in laundry and baking cakes for sale for a living, she paid 25 cents a lesson for his piano instruction. The best student in school, he inished junior high school and spent much of his time at Red Bank’s Palace Theater, where he quickly learned to improvise music appropriate to the acts and the silent movies.
A natural pianist but preferring drums he was discouraged by the obvious talents of Sonny Greer, who also lived in Red Bank and became Duke Ellington’s drummer in 1919, He let the idea of drumming go and concentrated on the piano exclusively at age 15. He and Greer played together in venues until Greer set out on his professional career. By then, Basie was playing with pick-up groups for dances, resorts, and amateur shows, and Harry Richardson’s Kings of Syncopation.
By 1920 Basie was in Harlem where he bumped nto Greer and started meeting the musicians making the scene like Willie “The Lion” Smith and James P. Johnson. Before he was 20 years old, he toured extensively on the Keith and TOBA vaudeville circuits as a solo pianist, accompanist, and music director for blues singers, dancers, and comedians. This provided an early training that was to prove significant in his later career.
Back in Harlem in 1925, he met Fats Waller, who taught him how to play that instrument. As he did with Duke Ellington, Willie “the Lion” Smith helped Basie out during the lean times by arranging gigs at house-rent parties, introducing him to other leading musicians, and teaching him some piano technique.
In 1928, Basie joined Walter Page and his Famous Blue Devils. It was at this time that he picked up the moniker of Count. The next year saw him in Kansas City holding down the piano chair with Bennie Moten. After a couple of re-organizations of the band, Basie formed his own nine-piece band, Barons of Rhythm who played regularly at the Reno Club and on the radio. Moving to Chicago, Illinois the band eventually became the Count Basie Orchestra where they did their first recordings for Vocalion under the name Jones-Smith, as Basie had already signed with Decca.
Over the course of the fifty years he led the band he was instrumental in creating innovations like the use of two “split” tenor saxophones, emphasizing the rhythm section, riffing with a big band, using arrangers to broaden their sound, which any other bands copied. He also brought to prominence such players as Lester Young, Herschel Evans, Freddie Green, Buck Clayton, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Al Grey, Jimmy Rushing, Helen Humes, Thelma Carpenter, and Joe Williams.
Pianist, organist, bandleader, and composer Count Basie, who recorded close to two hundred albums and in 1958 became the first Black man to win a Grammy Award, passed away on April 26, 1984.
More Posts: bandleader,composer,instrumental,music,organ,piano
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jack Teagarden was born Weldon Leo Teagarden on August 20, 1905 in Vernon, Texas into a musical family, two brothers, a sister and father all musicians. His father started him on baritone horn but by age seven he had switched to trombone. His first public performances were in movie theaters, where he accompanied his mother, a pianist.
By 1920, Teagarden was playing professionally in San Antonio, Texas with the band of pianist Peck Kelley. In the mid-1920s he started traveling widely around the United States in a quick succession of different bands. 1927 saw him in New York City where he worked with several bands and by 1928 he was playing with the Ben Pollack band.
In the late 1920s, he recorded with such bandleaders and sidemen as Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Bix Beiderbecke, Red Nichols, Jimmy McPartland, Mezz Mezzrow, Glenn Miller, and Eddie Condon. Miller and Teagarden collaborated to provide lyrics and a verse to Spencer Williams’ “Basin Street Blues”, which in that amended form became one of the numbers that Teagarden played until the end of his days.
Seeking financial security during the Great Depression, Jack signed an exclusive contract to play for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra from 1933 through 1938. In 1946, he joined his lifelong friend Louis Armstrong and his All Stars. In late 1951, he left to again lead his own band.
Suffering from pneumonia, trombonist and singer Jack Teagarden, considered the most innovative jazz trombone stylist of the pre-bebop era, passed away in New Orleans at the age of 58 on January 15, 1964.
More Posts: bandleader,history,instrumental,jazz,music,trombone,vocal
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Zinky Cohn was born on August 18, 1908 in Oakland, California. Little is known about his childhood but it has been speculated by many Jewish historians he descended from one of the so-called 12 tribes.
Moving to Chicago, Illinois in the late 1920s, he played around town and from 1928 to 1930 was a member of Jimmie Noone’s Apex Club Orchestra. He recorded extensively with Noone between 1929 and 1934, especially for Vocalion Records. Many of the tunes Noone recorded were written and/or arranged by Cohn, including Apex Blues, previously attributed to Earl Hines.
Cohn also recorded as a leader in the early 1930s, with a band that featured Leon Washington on tenor saxophone. Cohn recorded with Frankie Franko & His Louisianans in 1930, and also accompanied blues singers such as Georgia White.
Later in the 1930s he led the Chicago musicians’ union, and continued to play locally. Pianist Zinky Cohn passed away on April 26, 1952 in Chicago.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Michael Joseph Smith was born August 13, 1938 in Tiline, Kentucky. At the age of 6 years, he gave his first concert of original solo piano music in Nashville, Tennessee. After serving in the United States Navy, he studied electro-acoustic music, moving between Boston, Massachusetts and New York City. He became involved with the New England Conservatory of Music and the Juilliard School and developed a philosophy and notation form of his original music, titled Geomusic, and composed works with this method for various chamber groups, solo piano, and symphony orchestra.
Embarking on his first European concert tour in 1970, he completed his initial recordings in Italy and developed an interest in Jazz and improvisation. Moving to Paris, France in 1972 he had several concert tours and recordings in Western Europe and America with Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton and others. In 1975 he began recording various albums in Europe and America and toured, mostly solo, Italy, Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Western Europe, South America and Scandinavia over the next year. 1977 saw Michael admitted to the Swedish Composers Society andtwo years later he became a member of the International Society for Contemporary Music.
A return to the United States landed a composer-in-residence in Atlanta, Georgia and completed three ballet projects, has been awarded numerous cultural prizes and stipends in Europe and Scandinavia, and has composed scores for films, television projects, and music for 10 major ballet works.
He has lectured in Atlanta, Boston, Massachusetts, Brunswick, Maine and in Beijing and Xian, China. He has founded three music corporations and has been inducted in the Royal Swedish Academy of Music’s Swedish Musical Heritage project as a “living musical heritage” of Sweden. Pianist and composer Michael Smith, who has released 55 recordings of original compositions in 17 countries and has three film portraits of his life, continues to remain active.