Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Duncan Lamont was born on July 4, 1931 in Greenock, Scotland and started out as a trumpet player, leading his own band in Scotland, which won recognition in Melody Maker in 1951. Spending time in London, England he played with Kenny Graham’s Afro-Cubists. During the early 1950s he continued to be active in Scotland and when he switched to tenor saxophone and became a jazz studio player.

He worked with numerous popular British dance bands and jazz groups led by Basil and Ivor Kirchin, Ken Mackintosh, Jack Parnell, Geraldo, Eric Delaney and Vic Lewis, with whom he toured the US. During the 1960s he played with Pat Smythe, Kenny Baker and freelanced extensively. Over the years Lamont led his own small bands and played in big bands and studio orchestras led by Kenny Wheeler, Gil Evans, Bobby Lamb and Raymond Premru, Nelson Riddle, Henry Mancini, Benny Carter and Bill Holman.

Lamont has accompanied on tour or studio orchestras with Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney and Paul McCartney. He composed many songs that were  recorded by  Trudy Kerr, Nancy Marano, Cleo Laine, Joyce Breach and Norma Winstone. He wrote music for children’s television, was nominated for a Grammy, won the John Dankworth Jazz Award, and for more than a decade led a big band to raise money for cancer research. His activities as a composer have long been greatly respected by his professional peers and, at the start of the new century, are starting to receive the wider recognition they so richly deserve.

Tenor saxophonist Duncan Lamont, who gave masterclasses in improvisation and big band sessions at Brunel University, passed away on July 2, 2019 just two day shy of his 88th birthday.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Jerry Gray was born Generoso Graziano on July 3, 1915 in East Boston, Massachusetts. His father was a music teacher who began teaching his son violin at age seven. As a teenager he studied with Emanuel Ondříček and was a soloist with the Boston Junior Symphony. By age eighteen he had formed a jazz band and was performing in Boston clubs.

1936 saw Gray joining the Artie Shaw orchestra as lead violinist and studied musical arrangement under Shaw. A year later he became a staff arranger.  Over the next two years he penned some of the band’s most popular arrangements, including Carioca, Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise, Any Old Time, and Begin the Beguine. After the band broke up in 1939, Glenn Miller offered him a job arranging

In November 1939, Shaw suddenly broke up the band and moved to Mexico. On the next day, Glenn Miller called Gray and offered him a job arranging for his band. During his time with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Jerry produced many of the most recognizable recordings of the era, arranging Elmer’s Tune, Moonlight Cocktail, Perfidia, and Chattanooga Choo-Choo among others, while his compositions among numerous others included Sun Valley Jump, The Man In The Moon, Caribbean Clipper, Pennsylvania 6-5000, and his most famous song, A String of Pearls. Many of his compositions became best-sellers.

The war years saw Jerry in Miller’s unit and became chief arranger for Miller’s “Band of the Training Command”, better known today as the Glenn Miller Army Air Forces Orchestra. He was the full orchestra’s assistant conductor, and conducted the orchestra’s first concert in Paris after Miller’s airplane disappeared over the English Channel.

After the war for a while he did radio and studio work around Los Angeles, California, including leading the band on a radio show called Club 15 that featured Dick Haymes. In 1949 he accepted a request from Decca Records to lead his own Miller-esque orchestra that was called Jerry Gray and the Band of Today.

Violinist, arranger, composer, and leader of swing big bands Jerry Gray,  who continued to lead the Fairmont Hotel band into the 1970s, passed away of a heart attack on August 10, 1976 in Dallas, Texas. He was 61.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Charles Sumner Kennedy was born on July 2, 1927 in Staten Island, New York.  He played with Louis Prima’s big band orchestra in the 1940s, earning himself a solo on that band’s 1943 recording of The White Cliffs of Dover. He put together his own band and after a brief stint as a leader, he joined Gene Krupa’s big band.

Over the course of his career, he also played with Terry Gibbs’s Dream Band, as well as Charlie Ventura, Flip Phillips, Chico O’Farrill, and Bill Holman. In addition to live performances and recordings with big-name bands, he also was a frequent studio musician. He played in the orchestras for popular movies including My Fair Lady and West Side Story.

By the 1970s, he gave up his career as a full-time musician in order to support his family, but continued to perform in clubs near his home in southern California. Alto saxophonist Charlie Kennedy, who was a big band-era musician, passed away of pulmonary disease on April 3, 2009 in Ventura, California at the age of 81.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Ralph Jose P. Burns was born on June 29, 1922 in Newton, Massachusetts and began playing the piano as a child. Attending the New England Conservatory of Music, he learned the most about jazz by transcribing the works of Count Basie, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. While a student, he lived in the home of Frances Wayne, who was an established big band singer and her brother Nick Jerret was a bandleader who began working with him. He found himself in the company of performers as Nat King Cole and Art Tatum.

Moving to New York in the early 1940s, he met Charlie Barnet and the two men began working together. In 1944, he joined the Woody Herman band with members Neal Hefti, Bill Harris, Flip Phillips, Chubby Jackson and Dave Tough. Together, the group developed Herman’s sound. For 15 years, Burns wrote or arranged many of the band’s major hits including Bijou, Northwest Passage, Apple Honey, and on the longer work Lady McGowan’s Dream and the three-part Summer Sequence.

Herman band member Stan Getz was featured as a tenor saxophone soloist on Early Autumn, a hit for the band and the launching platform for Getz’s solo career. Burns also worked in a small band with soloists including Bill Harris and Charlie Ventura. The success of the Herman band provided Ralph the ability to record under his own name. He collaborated with Billy Strayhorn, Lee Konitz and Ben Webster to create both jazz and classical recordings.

Writing compositions for Tony Bennett and Johnny Mathis led to his later work with Aretha Franklin and Natalie Cole. He was responsible for the arrangement and introduction of a string orchestra on two of Ray Charles’s biggest hits, Come Rain or Come Shine and Georgia on My Mind. In the 1990s, Burns arranged music for Mel Tormé, John Pizzarelli, Michael Feinstein and Tony Bennett.

During the 1960s he quit touring as a band pianist and began arranging and orchestrating for Broadway shows including Chicago, Funny Girl, No, No, Nanette, and Sweet Charity. His first film score was for Woody Allen’s Bananas. He worked with Bob Fosse and won an Academy Award for Cabaret, and went on to compose the film scores for Lenny, New York, New York  and All That Jazz, the latter garnered an Academy Award. Besides winning Oscars, Burns won an Emmy,  a Tony and a Drama Desk Award. From 1996 until his death, he restored many orchestrations for New York City Center’s Encores! series.

Carefully hiding his homosexuality throughout his life, pianist, composer and arranger Ralph Burns, who was posthumously inducted into the New England Jazz Hall of Fame in 2004, passed away on November 21, 2001 from complications of a stroke and pneumonia in Los Angeles, California.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Eli Robinson was born on June 23, 1908 in Greenville, Georgia. After working in Cincinnati, Ohio in bands led by Speed Webb, Zack Whyte and also worked with McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. In 1935 he made his first recordings with Blanche Calloway.

1936 saw Eli moving to New York City, where he became a member of the Teddy Hill and Willie Bryant big bands and the Mills Blue Rhythm Band. Three years later he played with Roy Eldridge and joined the big band of Lucky Millinder.

Beginning in 1941, he spent several years as a member of the Count Basie Orchestra. He returned to working with Millinder, then joined Buddy Tate in 1954.

Trombonist and arranger Eli Robinson never recorded as a leader, and passed away on December 24, 1972 in New York City.

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