Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Eddie Dougherty was born July 17, 1915 in Brooklyn, New York. Playing drums from age 13, then started working with Billy Gusak before Dickie Wells’s band at 18 in Harlem, New York by the beginning of the 1930s.  He gigged regularly up through 1940 with Kenny Watts & His Kilowatts. His recording career started as a sideman in the 1930s, with Taft Jordan, Frank Froeba, Mildred Bailey, Harry James, Billie Holiday, Frankie Newton, Pete Johnson, and Meade Lux Lewis.

Alongside this he held a gig as the drummer for Keny Watts and his Kilowatts through 1940. He subbed for Dave Tough in the Bud Freeman Orchestra in 1940, then played with Art Tatum, Joe Sullivan, Benny Carter, Benny Morton, and others in the first half of the 1940s. He worked with James P. Johnson several times, including on 1944 recording sessions. His later work included recordings with Cliff Jackson, Mary Lou Williams, Clyde Bernhardt, Wilbur De Paris, Teddy Wilson, and Albert Nicholas. He was still active into the 1980s.

When he finally retired from full-time music decades later, he had amassed a list of credits that not only rivals the length of some short stories, but represented a thorough involvement in many different styles of jazz, vocal music, and rhythm & blues. Drummer Eddie Dougherty passed away on December 14, 1994 in Brooklyn.

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John James Chilton was born on July 16, 1932 in London, England to working-class parents and was evacuated to Northamptonshire, where he began playing the cornet at the age of 12. Switching to trumpet at 17, after doing two years in the RAF, in 1952 he formed his own jazz band.

He worked in Bruce Turner’s Jump Band from 1958 to 1963 which also had a film of their exploits called Living Jazz in 1961. He went on to play in Alex Welsh’s Big Band. During the 1960s he played piano on some pop recordings, worked in Mike Daniels’ Big Band. He formed his own Swing Kings band which backed touring American jazz musicians including Buck Clayton, Ben Webster, Bill Coleman and Charlie Shavers. He also recorded The Song of a Road, one of the radio ballads by folk singers Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger in the 1950s for the BBC.

He would go on to work with cartoonist Wally Fawkes, form John Chilton’s Feetwarmers, and began accompanying jazz singer George Melly. Together they made records and toured the world for nearly 30 years. In 1983 and 1984 they had their own BBC television series called Good Time George, and appeared on countless other TV shows.

A songwriter and composer, one of his songs, “Give Her A Little Drop More”, was used in the film St Elmo’s Fire. John is one of the few European writers to win a Grammy Award for his album notes on Bunny Berigan and was nominated again in 2000. He won the British Jazz Award for Writer of the Year, his Who’s Who of Jazz was described as one of the essential jazz books,  and he wrote award winning books on Coleman Hawkins, Louis Jordan Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong. Trumpeter John Chilton continued to play trumpet with the clarinetist Wally Fawkes in London until he passed away on February 25, 2016 in London.

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Tommy Vig was born on July 14, 1938 in Budapest, Hungary. Internationally recognized as a child prodigy by the age of 6, he played drums with his father, clarinetist Gyorgy Vig and performed concerts on Budapest State Radio, at the City Theatre, the Academy of Music, and the National Circus. By age 8, he made the album The World Champion Kid Drummer with Austrian jazz players in Vienna, Austria including Hans Koller, Ernst Landl, and the Hot Club of Vienna for Elite Special. The following year his drumming won him the 1947 MGM-Jazz Competition in Budapest and as a result made several recordings with the Chappy’s Mopex Big Band for His Master’s Voice.

Completing his studies at the Bartók Conservatory in 1955 and the Ferenc Erkel Music High School in 1956, due to the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he fled to Vienna, where he played concerts with Fatty George and Joe Zawinul. A move to the United States saw him on scholarship at Juilliard School of Music. Since then he has been writing and conducting concerts.

In 1970 Vig relocated to Los Angeles, California where he worked in the studios of Warner Bros., Fox, Universal, CBS, Columbia, ABC, Disney, Goldwyn, MGM, and Paramount. He played on 1500 studio sessions in Hollywood, two Academy Awards, and produced, directed, and conducted the official 1984 Olympic Jazz Festival for the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee. He wrote the music for 30 films and television shows, and added percussion on the recording of Quincy Jones’s soundtrack to Roots.

Vig has worked with Red Rodney, Don Ellis, Cat Anderson, Terry Gibbs, Art Pepper, Milcho Leviev, Joe Pass, the Miles Davis-Gil Evans Big Band. Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Tony Curtis, Woody Allen, Judy Garland, Tony Bennett and Rod Stewart.

Since 2006, vibraharpist, drummer, percussionist, xylophonist and marimba player Tommy Vig, who has won several awards,   has been performing concerts with his wife, appearing on radio and television, and recording albums.

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Buddy Clark was born Samuel Goldberg on July 26, 1912 in Dorchester, Massachusetts, He made his big band singing debut in 1932 as a tenor, with Gus Arnheim’s orchestra, but was not successful. Singing baritone he gained wider notice in 1934 with Benny Goodman on the Let’s Dance radio program. From 1936 to 1938 he performed on the show Your Hit Parade.

In the mid-1930s he signed with Vocalion Records, having a top-20 hit with Spring Is Here. He continued recording, appearing in movies, and dubbing other actors’ voices until he entered the military, but did not have another hit until the late 1940s. In 1946 he signed with Columbia Records, scoring his biggest hit with the song Linda. 1947 saw hits for Clark with How Are Things in Glocca Morra?”, Peg O’ My Heart, An Apple Blossom Wedding, and I’ll Dance at Your Wedding. A duet with Doris Day, Love Somebody, sold a million recordsand reaching #1 on the charts. Through the Forties decade he had nine more chart hits untilhis death.

Vocalist Buddy Clark, who was a popular crooner during the big band era, passed away in a plane crash on Beverly Boulevard in West Los Angeles, California on October 1, 1949.

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Walter Barnes was born on July 8, 1905 in Vicksburg, Mississippi but grew up in Chicago, Illinois. He studied under Franz Schoepp and attended the Chicago Musical College and the American Conservatory of Music.

Leading his own bands from the early 1920s, he also played with Detroit Shannon and his Royal Creolians. After Shannon’s retinue became dissatisfied with his leadership, Barnes took control of this group as well. He played mostly in Chicago, though the band did hold a residency at the Savoy Ballroom in New York City as well. His band recorded in 1928-29 for Brunswick Records.

He toured the American South in the 1930s to considerable success, touring there yearly and  by 1938 the ensemble grew to sixteen members. Around this time, Barnes also worked as a columnist for the Chicago Defender newspaper, and used his position to advertise his own tours and promote other entertainers on the same touring trail to Black audiences. Barnes is thus credited as an early originator of what was known as the “Chitlin’ Circuit”; a network of entertainment venues where it was safe and acceptable for Black entertainers to perform.

Barnes was one of the victims of the Rhythm Club Fire in Natchez, Mississippi, on April 23, 1940. When the club caught fire, he had the group continue playing the song “Marie” in order to keep the crowd from stampeding out of the building. All of the band members except for drummer Walter Brown and bassist Arthur Edward were among the 201 victims of the fire.

Clarinetist, saxophonist and bandleader Walter Barnes, whose death was repeatedly immortalized in song, passed away on April 23, 1940.

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