Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Carol Stearns Sudhalter was born on January 5, 1943 in Newton, Massachusetts and grew up in a musical family. Her father Albert played the alto saxophone in the New England area, a brother played baritone saxophone and one brother who played trumpet, cornet and wrote award-winning books on jazz.

In the early Sixties, Sudhalter began to play the flute while majoring in biology at Smith College. She continued to study flute with private teachers in Washington DC, New York, Boston, Israel, and Italy until 1978. She studied theory and Third Stream music with Ran Blake and Phil Wilson at the New England Conservatory of Music. From the 1970s on she has been teaching piano, saxophone, and flute privately, at Mannes College, and for the New York Pops Salute to Music Program.

1975 saw Carol deciding to take up the saxophone, and by 1978 relocated from Boston to New York City to join the first all-women Latin band, Latin Fever, produced by Larry Harlow. In 1986 she founded the Astoria Big Band, and she has performed with Sarah McLawler, Etta Jones, Chico Freeman, Jimmy McGriff, Duffy Jackson, and others around the New York jazz clubs, as well as domestic, Italian and British jazz festivals.

She initiated the Jazz Monday concerts at Athens Square Park between 1989 and 2001, along with several other local festivals in Queens where she resides.

A member of the Jazz Journalists Association, Sudhalter also has a chapter in Leslie Gourse’s Madame Jazz and in W. Royal Stokes’ Growing Up With Jazz. In 2012 she was nominated for the 2012 International Down Beat Readers’ Jazz Poll, and was voted 9th place in the category “Best Jazz Flutist”. She has recorded eight albums as a leader, one as a sideman, and the tenor and baritone saxophonist, flutist and pianist Carol Sudhalter continues to perform and educate.

More Posts: bandleader,composer,flute,history,instrumental,jazz,music,piano,saxophone

Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Harold “Geezil” Minerve was born in Havana, Cuba on January 3, 1922, and raised in Florida and began playing music at age 12. He played with drummer Jeff Gibson and vocalist Ida Cox early in his career, then worked as a freelance musician in New Orleans, Louisiana. Following stints with Clarence Love and Ernie Fields, Minerve served in the Army from 1943–46, then returned to play with Fields for a short time.

He worked with Buddy Johnson from 1949~1957, then with Mercer Ellington in 1960, Ray Charles from 1962 to 1964, and then worked as musical director for Arthur Prysock. In 1971 he joined the Duke Ellington Orchestra, filling Johnny Hodges’s spot after Hodges’s death. Minerve remained with the Ellington Orchestra until 1974, then returned to play with Mercer Ellington with the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

Following the success of the Broadway hit Sophisticated Lady when he played with the orchestra on stage and the touring company, Harold left for a brief time, playing with Ruth Brown’s Black and Blue Review in Paris, returning to Ellington in the Eighties. He did further freelance work later in the 1970s.

He would go on to work freelance in and around New York. Alto saxophonist, flutist, and clarinetist Harold Minerve passed away on June 4, 1992.

More Posts: clarinet,flute,history,instrumental,jazz,music,saxophone

Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Peter Herbolzheimer was born on December 31, 1935 in Bucharest, Romania and migrated from communist Romania to West Germany in 1951.Two years later he moved to the United States, settling in Michigan and enrolled in Highland Park High School in the graduating class of 1954. There, he was a staple in the musical choral groups and orchestra, and  accompanied several groups on guitar who often performed for various organisations and corporate functions around the Detroit area.

Returning to Germany in 1957 he took up the valve trombone, playing in numerous jazz cellar open mic groups. Peter attempted to return to Michigan, but his visa was denied, so for one year he studied at the Nuremberg Conservatory. In the Sixties he played with the Nuremberg radio dance orchestra and with Bert Kämpfert’s orchestra. He went on to play in the pit orchestra of Hamburg theater, then formed his Rhythm Combination and Brass for which he wrote most of the arrangements.

This big band had an international lineup of eight brass with saxophonist Herb Geller, Allan Botschinsky, Art Farmer, Dusko Goykovich, Palle Mikkelborg, Ack van Rooyen and Jiggs Whigham. The rhythm section had Dieter Reith, Philip Catherine, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, Bo Stief, Alex Riel, Grady Tate, and Nippy Noya. In the late 1970s the band toured successfully with a “jazz gala” program featuring guest stars such as Esther Phillips, Stan Getz, Nat Adderley, Gerry Mulligan, Toots Thielemans, Clark Terry, Albert Mangelsdorff, Dianne Reeves and Chaka Khan.

The Seventies and Eighties had Herbolzheimer writing music for the opening of the 1972  Olympic Games in Munich, won the International Jazz Composers Competition 1974 in Monaco and was the arranger and conductor and led his orchestra for virtually every major German television network and accompanied visiting American musicians such as Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, Sammy Davis, Jr., Dizzy Gillespie and Al Jarreau.

Between 1987 and 2006 he was the musical director of Germany’s national youth jazz orchestra, the Bundes Jazz Orchester, conducted regular workshops and clinics for big band jazz and was chosen as the music director, arranger and conductor of the European Jazz Band, which toured throughout Europe until 2009. Trombonist and bandleader Peter Herbolzheimer passed away at age 74 in Cologne, Germany on March 27, 2010.

More Posts: trombone

Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Clyde Lee McCoy was born on December 29, 1903 in Louisville, Kentucky into one of the families in the Hatfield-McCoy feud. He begun mastering the trumpet when he was without formal instruction, after the family moved to Portsmouth, Ohio in 1912. This would lead to performing regularly at church, school affairs and on the Cincinnati riverboats five years later, becoming one of the youngest musicians on the river at age 14.

In 1920 he auditioned with an untried band for a gig at the Whittle Hotel and Spa in Knoxville, Kentucky. Approved by the owner and the patrons the two week job lasted two months and the Clyde McCoy Orchestra was officially launched. In Chicago, Illinois he performed his song Sugar Blues at the Drake Hotel in 1930 and his solo rendition of the song would garner him national radio exposure for the band and a recording contract with Columbia Records, selling in excess of fourteen million copies internationally by the time of Clyde’s retirement in 1985.

The Clyde McCoy Orchestra would have a long and successful run at various hotels, sign a five-year recording contract with Decca Records, recorded frequently for Associated Transcriptions during the Depression and the sessions were used for delayed radio broadcasts. Following the ASCAP recording ban in 1941 that halted recording of all songs composed by its members, Clyde recorded for LangWorth Transcriptions in New York as well as Mercury, Capitol, and Vocalion Records.

Trumpeter Clyde McCoy, who developed the signature “wah-wah” sound in the late 1920s by fluttering a Harmon mute in the bell of his trumpet and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6426 Hollywood Boulevard, passed away from complications of Alzheimer disease on June 11, 1990 at the age of 86 in Memphis, Tennessee.

More Posts: trumpet

Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Ralph Marterie was born on December 24, 1914 in Acerra, near Naples, Italy and first played professionally at age 14 in Chicago, Illinois. In the 1940s, he played trumpet for various bands. His first job as a bandleader was courtesy of the US Navy during World War II, after which he was hired by the ABC Radio network. With his reputation built from these broadcasts, he secured a recording contract with Mercury Records.

In 1953 his big band recorded a version of Bill Haley’s Crazy, Man, Crazy, which reached #13 on the Billboard jockey chart and #11 on Cashbox in June, 1953. His recordings of Pretend and Caravan also made the Top 10 with the latter selling over a million copies and was awarded a gold disc. His biggest success on the U.S. charts was a cover of Skokiaan in 1954. In 1957, he had success with Tricky and Shish-Kebab. 

Big band leader Ralph Marterie, who composed Dancing Trumpet, Dry Marterie, and Carla, passed away on October 10, 1978, in Dayton, Ohio.

More Posts: trumpet