Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Joseph P. Muranyi was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio on January 14, 1928 and studied with Lennie Tristano, however, he was primarily interested in early jazz styles such as Dixieland and swing. After playing in a United States Army Air Forces band, he moved to New York City in the 1950s and attended the Manhattan School of Music and Columbia University.
During the 1950s he played under Eddie Condon, collaborating with Jimmy McPartland, Max Kaminsky, Yank Lawson, Bobby Hackett, and Red Allen. During that decade he also played with the Red Onion Jazz Band, Danny Barker, and Wingy Manone.
1963 saw him playing with The Village Stompers, a Dixieland band that reached the pop charts with its song Washington Square. From 1967 to 1971 he was the clarinetist with the Louis Armstrong All-Stars. After initially struggling to pronounce Muranyi’s Hungarian family name, Armstrong introduced him on stage as “Joe Ma Rainey”, to Muranyi’s own amusement. Following this stint, he played with Roy Eldridge, World’s Greatest Jazz Band, Cozy Cole, Lionel Hampton, Herman Autrey, Wild Bill Davison, Zutty Singleton, and others.
He worked extensively as a record producer and wrote liner notes for hundreds of albums. Clarinetist, producer, writer and critic Joe Muranyi, who was also an enthusiastic vocalist and played both soprano and tenor saxophone, passed away in Manhattan, New York on April 20, 2012.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Allen Eager was born in New York City on January 10, 1927 and grew up in the Bronx. He could read at the age of three, learned to drive at the age of 9 with the help of his mother after she caught him driving a garbage truck near the hotels that his parents owned in the Catskill Mountains. He took clarinet lessons with David Weber of the New York Philharmonic at the age of 13. He briefly played with Woody Herman at the age of 15, and at the same age, he took heroin for the first time.
By sixteen he was playing in Bobby Sherwood band, then went on to play with Sonny Dunham, Shorty Sherock, and Hal McIntyre. Eager was then with Herman again for a year in 1943, Tommy Dorsey, and Johnny Bothwell in 1945. After World War II he became a regular on the 52nd Street in New York City leading his own ensemble from 1945–47. His recording debut as a leader was for Savoy Records in 1946 with pianist Ed Finckel, bassist Bob Carter, and drummer Max Roach.
Influenced by Lester Young, his playing style on tenor saxophone was, along with contemporary saxophonists Zoot Sims, Stan Getz, Al Cohn and others. Adopting the musical forms pioneered in bebop, he also adopted the drug dependency of a lot of the bebop players in the 1940s. Allen was a member of several bands led by black musicians including Coleman Hawkins, Fats Navarro, Tadd Dameron and Charlie Parker and recorded with trumpeter Red Rodney for Keynote Records in 1947.
He would go on to play with Gerry Mulligan, Terry Gibbs in 1952, and shortly after with Buddy Rich. He then briefly abandoned music and drugs, becoming a ski and horse riding instructor. In the Fifties, he returned to again led his own ensemble as a saxophonist, frequently playing with Howard McGhee. He lived in Paris for a couple of years, then returned to the U.S. in 1957, Eager recorded The Gerry Mulligan Songbook under Mulligan’s leadership, which was his last recording for 25 years.
After this, he essentially retired from jazz, pursuing skiing, competitive auto racing, and LSD experiments with Timothy Leary. In the late Sixties he settled in Florida with his family, played with Frank Zappa in the 1970s, and in 1982 Eager made a comeback with an album for Uptown Records, entitled Renaissance. He toured with Dizzy Gillespie in 1983, and with Chet Baker. Tenor and alto saxophonist Allen Eager passed away from liver cancer on April 13, 2003 in Daytona Beach, Florida.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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