Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Henry Levine was born on November 26, 1907 in London, England but his family emigrated to the United States in 1908. In 1917, he heard Nick LaRocca with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and decided to become a musician and learn trumpet.
From 1925 he worked as a professional musician with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and from the mid-1920s in various studio bands with Nat Shilkret and Vincent Lopez. From 1927 he performed with the British bandleader Bert Ambrose, and also made recordings with Fred Elizalde in London.
Returning to the States he played with Cass Hagan and Rudy Vallee before working again as a studio musician. He was head of the NBC Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street Jazz Group, recording several sessions with them. After the end of the Second World War Levine worked as a director of radio, television and hotel orchestras.
In 1961 he went moved to Las Vegas, Nevada and retired in 1982. He has been lauded by Allmusic as an excellent lead trumpeter and effective soloist. Under his own name, he recorded a single with jazz standards such as Rockin ‘Chair and I’ve Found a New Baby for RCA Victor. British-American trumpeter Henry “Hot Lips” Levine passed away in May 1989.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Tyree Glenn was born William Tyree Glenn on November 23, 1912 in Corsicana, Texas. He played trombone and vibraphone with local Texas bands before moving to Washington, D.C. in the early Thirties. He performed with several prominent bands of the Swing Era, playing with Bob Young and Tommy Myles before moving to the West Coast.
While he was living out West, Tyree first played with groups headed by Charlie Echols followed by Eddie Barefield, Eddie Mallory and Benny Carter. By the end of the decade from 1939 to 1946 he played with Cab Calloway. He toured around Europe with Don Redman’s big band in 1946, then joined Duke Ellington until 1951 as a wah-wah trombonist in the Tricky Sam Nanton tradition and Ellington’s only vibraphonist, being well-featured on the Liberian Suite. After his time with Ellington he played with Howard Biggs’s Orchestra.
During the 1950s, Glenn did studiowork, led his quartet at the Embers, did some television, radio and acting work, and freelanced in swing and Dixieland bands. In 1953 he joined Jack Sterling’s New York daily radio show, with which he remained until 1963. During 1965–68, he toured the world with Louis Armstrong’s All-Stars, staying with the group until Armstrong passed in 1971.
He would go on to record with Louis Bellson, Gene Krupa, Buck Clayton, Clark Terry and during his last few years he led his own group, recording seven albums. Trombonist Tyree Glenn, was also a studio musician, actor and composer who penned Sultry Serenade, which was recorded by Duke Ellington and Erroll Garner, moved to Englewood, New Jersey where he passed away from cancer on May 18, 1974.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Colin Ranger Smith was born in London, England on November 20, 1934. Initially joining the Terry Lightfoot band in 1957, he moved on to playing with Cy Laurie, in 1958. He had a long tenure in the Acker Bilk band that began in 1959, taking a break in 1966 to sail across the Atlantic in a 45-foot ketch, rejoining Bilk in 1968. During that period he also worked at the same time in the band with saxophonist Tony Coe and the trombonist John Picard, as well as with Stan Greig’s London Jazz Big Band.
1977 saw Colin together with Picard, Ian “Stu” Stewart, Dick Morrissey and Charlie Watts. He played in the Bob Hall/George Green Boogie Woogie Band, an ad hoc band which would eventually become known as Rocket 88.
Other big bands he played with included those led by the American clarinettist Bob Wilber, and later the one led by Charlie Watts and the revisionist Midnite Follies Orchestra, Stan Greig’s Boogie Band and Brian Leake’s Sweet and Sour. From 1983 he played with the Pizza Express All Stars and, in 1992, returned to playing with Bilk.
Trumpeter Colin Smith was struck with congenital liver problems that sidelined him during the last years of his life, eventually passing away on March 29, 2004 in London.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Nobuo Tsukahara, better known as Nobuo Hara was born November 19, 1926 in Toyama, Japan. He played in a military band during World War II and in a Tokyo officer’s club after the war. Realizing classical music was not going to pay a living wage he ventured into jazz and joined the ensemble Sharps and Flats, taking leadership in 1952, a position he held for over six decades. This band helped to make jazz popular in Japan after WWII and they recorded copiously as well as appearing at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1967.
In 2007 at 80 years old he still the led Nobuo Hara and His Sharps and Flats, the 17-piece big band. Sharps and Flats have accompanied Chiemi Eri and included sidemen such as Norio Maeda, Shotaro Moriyasu, and Akitoshi Igarashi. Noted for their sweet rhythms and their swing they have continued to mesmerize audiences even today.
He has performed and/or recorded with Quincy Jones, Count Basie, Miles Davis, Sammy Davis Jr., Perry Como, Henry Mancini, Silvie Vartan, Nat King Cole, Yves Montand, Sarah Vaughan, Diana Ross, and the list goes on and on.
Saxophonist Nobuo Hara passed away from pneumonia on June 21, 2021 in Tokyo, Japan
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
William Christopher Handy was born on November 16, 1873 in a log cabin built by his grandfather in Florence, Alabama. Because his father believed musical instruments were tools of the devil, he purchased his first guitar without his parents’ permission, that he secretly saved for by picking berries and nuts and making lye soap. Upon seeing the guitar his father ordered him to return it, but also arranged short-lived organ lessons, moving on to learn to play the cornet. Secretly he joined a local band, purchased a cornet from a fellow band member and spent every free minute practicing it.
After working for a time on a “shovel brigade” at the McNabb furnace, in 1892 Handy travelled to Birmingham, Alabama, passed a teaching exam and began teaching. Finding the compensation too little, he quit, got a job in a pipe plant, put together a small string orchestra and taught musicians how to read music. He later organized the Lauzetta Quartet, ventured to St. Louis, Missouri and founding working conditions deplorable, so they disbanded.
Handy would go on to Evansville, Indiana, play the cornet in the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, join a successful band that performed throughout the neighboring cities and states and worked as a first tenor vocalist in a minstrel show, a band director, choral director, cornetist and trumpeter.
At the age of 23, he was the bandmaster of Mahara’s Colored Minstrels and over a three-year tour, they toured to Chicago, throughout Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Cuba and Alabama at the end. Weary of life on the road, he and his wife, Elizabeth, settled in his nearby hometown of Florence and he became a faculty member at Alabama and Mechanical University from 1900 to 1902.
W.C. traveled throughout Mississippi, listening to various styles of black popular music, and with his remarkable memory would recall and transcribe the music later. He rejoined the Mahara Minstrels, toured the Midwest and Pacific Northwest, and became the director of a black band in Clarksdale, Mississippi. By 1909 he and his band moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where the publication of his Memphis Blues sheet music introduced his style of 12-bar blues, credited as the inspiration for the foxtrot dance step. By the time he was 40, he had established his musical style, his popularity had greatly increased, he was a prolific composer and a successfully profitable music publisher.
He founded the Handy Record Company, gained widespread popularity with the Bessie Smith recording of his Saint Louis Blues with Louis Armstrong, published several books including an autobiography and went blind after a fall from a subway platform. He later suffered a stroke and on March 28, 1958, W. C. Handy, The Father of the Blues, passed away from bronchial pneumonia at Sydenham Hospital in New York City.
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