Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Louie Bellson was born Luigi Paulino Alfredo Francesco Antonio Balassoni on July 6, 1924 in Rock Falls, Illinois. He started playing drums at three years of age and at 15 pioneered the double-bass drum set-up. By 17 he triumphed over 40,000 drummers to win the Slingerland National Gene Krupa contest and graduated from high school in 1939.
1943 saw Bellson performing with Benny Goodman and Peggy Lee in the film “The Powers Girl” followed two more by the decade’s end. Between 1943 and 1952, he performed with Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Harry James and Duke Ellington, for whom he composed “Skin Deep” and “The Hawk Talks”. In 1952 he married Pearl Bailey, leaving Ellington to be her musical director, a union that lasted 38 years until her death in 1990.
Through the 1950s and 1960s, Louie performed with Jazz At The Philharmonic or J.A.T.P., Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Count Basie, again with Duke Ellington and Harry James, as well as appearing on several Ella Fitzgerald studio albums.
Equally adept as a big band or small group drummer, Bellson recorded extensively and led his own big and small bands, occasionally maintaining separate bands on each coast. His sidemen have included Blue Mitchell, Don Menza, Larry Novak, John Heard, Clark Terry, Pete and Conte Candoli and Snooky Young.
Louie Bellson, composer, arranger, bandleader and jazz educator passed away from Parkinson’ s disease on February 14, 2009.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Butch Miles was born Charles J. Thorton, Jr. on July 4, 1944 in Ironton, Ohio. He began playing snare drum at the age of 9 and went on to major in music at West Virginia State University from 1962–1966. After his matriculation he toured with the Iris Bell Trio.
Miles joined the Count Basie Orchestra in 1975 and the association lasted for four years and then returned for ten years from 1997–2007. He led his own group, Jazz Express, in the 1980s and ’90s.
Besides performing with the Count Basie Orchestra, Butch has played with Dave Brubeck, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis Jr., and Frank Sinatra among others as well as hitting the stage of the Newport and Montreux Jazz Festivals.
HE cites Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa and Jo Jones as favorite drummers and is currently a professor in the School of Music at Texas State University-San Marcos.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Earle Warren was born on July 1, 1914 in Springfield, Ohio. He was the primary alto saxophonist and occasional singer in the Basie orchestra in its formative years and its heyday, from 1937 to the end of the 1940s. After the break-up of Basie’s 1940s band, in 1949, he worked with former Basie trumpeter, Buck Clayton.
Earle also played some rock´n roll working for Alan Freed in Alan Freed’s Christmas Jubilee, December 1959, which was the very last big Alan Freed show before payola put an end to the legendary Freed. He also appeared in the 1970s jazz film of Count Basie and his band, “Born to Swing”.
In his later years, Warren performed often at the West End jazz club at 116th and Broadway in New York City, helming a band called The Countsmen, which also featured fellow former Basie-ite Dicky Wells on trombone and Peck Morrison on bass. He lived part of the time in Switzerland where he fathered a child in a May/September romance. Alto saxophonist Earle Warren passed away on June 4, 1994.
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George Gruntz was born in Basel, Switzerland on June 24, 1932. The young pianist won prizes at Zurich Jazz Festivals and in 1958 was pianist with the International Youth Band at the Newport Jazz Festival. While there he accompanied, among others Louis Armstrong and in an instant became famous.
George went on to work with jazz musicians Phil Woods, Roland Kirk, Don Cherry, Chet Baker, Art Farmer, Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin and Mel Lewis to name a few. From 1972 to 1994 he served as artistic director for the JazzFest Berlin, composed his first opera, founded the Piano Conclave and the George Gruntz Concert Jazz Band and moderated the TV music series “All You Need Is Love”.
An accomplished arranger and composer, having been commissioned by many orchestra and symphonies, he is also an organist, harpsichordist and keyboardist with more that three dozen albums to his credit. He continued to compose, arrange, record and perform until his death on January 10, 2013.
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Benny Payne was born on June 18, 1907 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and began playing piano when he was 12, working as an organist at a Philadelphia church as a teenager. His professional career started in 1926, working locally and with Wilbur Sweatman’s band for six months in 1928.
Fats Waller gave him some unofficial lessons; they recorded two piano duets in 1929. Payne worked as accompanist for singer Elizabeth Welch, was a member of the Blackbirds of 1929 show and toured Europe, appeared in Hot Chocolates and accompanied Gladys Bentley.
His foremost claim to fame was as Cab Calloway’s regular pianist during the singer’s prime years from 1931 until he had to join the Army in late 1943, then again after the war until ’46. Although he did not solo much, he was a major asset to the group and gave the big band stability in addition to contributing to the solid rhythm section.
He worked with Pearl Bailey, led his own trio and then started working in 1950 started a long relationship as pianist and musical director for lounge signer Billy Daniels until the singer’s death. In 1964, Payne appeared on Broadway in a revival of “Golden Boy” with Daniels and Sammy Davis, Jr.
He primarily performed in the cabaret world, led only one recording session as a leader for Kapp Records in 1955. Pianist Benny Payne retired and settled in Los Angeles, passing away on January 2, 1986.
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