Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Milt Bernhart was born on May 25, 1926 in Valparaiso, Indiana and began on tuba but switched to trombone in high school. At 16 he worked in Boyd Raeburn’s band and later had some gigs with Teddy Powell. After time in the Army he worked, off and on, with Stan Kenton for the next ten years. In 1955 Bernhart recorded his first album as a leader. In 1986 he was elected President of the Big Band Academy of America.
Although known as mild-mannered or humorous, he spent a brief period with Benny Goodman, who brought out his ire. He indicated working with Goodman was “the bottom” of his first 23 years of life, except for basic training in the Army. He called Goodman a bore and claimed he did nothing about the treatment Wardell Gray faced at a segregated club in Las Vegas and he even alleges that he quit because Goodman publicly humiliated Gray in front of an audience.
The West Coast jazz trombonist recorded more than a hundred albums as a sideman working with Maynard Ferguson, Henri Rene, Shorty Rogers, Pete Rugolo, Howard Rumsey, Lalo Schifrin, Chet Baker, Sammy Davis Jr., June Christy, Astrud Gilberto, Peggy Lee, Johnny Mandel, and Henry Mancini among numerous others.
He recorded with Frank Sinatra, supplying the solo in the middle of Sinatra’s 1956 recording of I’ve Got You Under My Skin conducted by Nelson Riddle. Trombonist Milt Bernhart passed away from congestive heart failure at the Adventist Health in Glendale, California at the age of 77 on January 22, 2004.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Gianni Basso, born in Asti, Italy on May 24, 1931 studied music in the busy northern city of Turin, where his childhood friend Oscar Valdambrini was a homeboy. A fascination for American jazz, their meeting was a case of a tenor saxophone and trumpet finding each other. This led to all manner of musical possibilities, most notably the easy-to-maneuver-and-feed small combo.
He started his career shortly after World War II, first as a clarinetist, then switched to the saxophone in the Forties performing in Germany and Belgium in Raoul Falsan’s Big Band. By the beginning of the next decade, he was established as a commercial “GB” or “general business” player in Milan, but one with a steady presence at jazz events, including some of the early Italian attempts at post-fascist festivals.
From about 1954, a collaboration with trumpeter and composer Oscar Valdambrini began that resembled the relationship between Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. The partners’ group was without a doubt the most popular jazz band in Italy in the ’50s, accompanying many touring stars such as Billie Holiday, Lionel Hampton, Gerry Mulligan, Slide Hampton, and Chet Baker. His style became so developed that the Verve label signed him and Sarah Vaughan immediately recruited him for her 1984 album The Mystery of Man.
The late ’70s saw Basso founding the band Saxes Machine and fronting the Gianni Basso Big Band. In his senior years he settled into the comfort of the Rome studio scene, still playing in clubs and enjoying his growing historical stature on the European jazz scene that included free jazz fans.
Tenor saxophonist Gianni Basso, whose playing was influenced by Stan Getz and Sonny Rollins, passed away on August 17, 2009.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bill Barber was born John William Barber on May 21, 1920 in Hornell, New York. He started playing tuba in high school and studied at the Juilliard School of Music. After graduating, he traveled west to Kansas City, Missouri, where he played with the Kansas City Philharmonic and various ballet and theatre orchestras.
Joining the United States Army in 1942, he played in Patton’s 7th army band for three years. After the war, he started playing jazz, joining Claude Thornhill’s big band where he became friends with trombonist Al Langstaff, pianist Gil Evans and saxophone player Gerry Mulligan in 1947. Barber was one of the first tuba players to play in a modern jazz style, playing solos and participating in intricate ensemble pieces.
Barber became a founding member of Miles Davis’s nonet in 1949 in what became known as the Birth of the Cool recording sessions. He then worked in the theatre pit orchestras of The King and I, Paradiso, and the City Center Ballet. He joined up with Davis and Gil Evans in the late 1950s to record the albums Sketches of Spain, Miles Ahead and Porgy and Bess. Barber also played tuba on John Coltrane’s album Africa/Brass released in 1961.
Completing a master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music and became an elementary school music teacher at Copiague, New York. He continued to play where possible including with the Goldman Band. In 1992, he recorded and toured with a nonet led by Gerry Mulligan, reworking material from Birth of the Cool.
From 1998 to 2004 he was part of The Seatbelts, New York musicians who played the music of the Japanese anime Cowboy Bebop. Over the course of his career, he recorded with Art Blakey, Bob Brookmeyer, Kenny Burrell, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Urbie Green, Gigi Gryce, Slide Hampton, and Pete Rugolo. Tubist Bill Barber, who was also known as Billy Barber, passed away from heart failure on June 18, 2007 in Bronxville, New York.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Mike Zwerin was born in New York City on May 18, 1930, where he studied at the High School of Music and Art. He began leading bands in his teens, employing several up-and-coming musicians. He went on to attend the Univerity of Miami and after graduation, he went into his father’s business, the Capitol Steel Corporation.
At the age of 18, while on his summer holidays from the University of Miami, he was spotted by Miles Davis at Minton’s in Harlem, while sitting in with Art Blakey. He was immediately drafted into the rehearsal band for what would become immortalized as Birth of the Cool, while the regular trombonist Kai Winding was indisposed. Also present were Gerry Mulligan, Max Roach, and Lee Konitz. His contribution, in particular, his solo on the track Move, can be heard on The Complete Birth of the Cool. A few muddy recordings exist of radio broadcasts by the band during Zwerin’s time in it, which gave him a lifelong reputation as a jazz musician lucky enough to have been at the cutting edge of a new movement.
Abandoning his musical life for much of the 1950s and after a spell in France, he returned to New York in 1958 and played the trombone in several big bands. Among his other recordings are Getting Xperimental over U, and Mack the Knife, an album of Kurt Weill songs that he produced and arranged himself. He also appears on Archie Shepp’s 1968 album The Magic of Ju-Ju.
Before moving permanently to Europe in 1969, he was a jazz critic for the Village Voice and focusing on journalism, writing for Down Beat, Rolling Stone, and Penthouse before joining the Herald Tribune. Zwerin’s move to London, England in 1969 and then to Paris, France in 1972, would be his home for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, he kept his hand in as a trombonist throughout the 1980s, working with his fellow expatriate Hal Singer and with the guitarist Christian Escoudé. In 1988 he toured with the Charles Mingus Big Band, having played briefly with the Swiss bandleader George Gruntz and played with the French fusion band Telephone.
Zwerin’s lasting claim to fame, however, is, perhaps, not his trombone playing but his book La Tristesse de Saint Louis: Swing Under the Nazis (1985). He spent two years researching it, traveling across France, Austria, Poland and Germany to interview survivors and unearthing the story of how jazz was banned by the Nazis as degenerate music, and yet somehow survived as what Zwerin called a metaphor for freedom.
Cool and progressive jazz trombonist and bass trumpeter Mike Zwerin passed away on April 2, 2010 after a long illness in Paris at the age of 79.
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Requisites
You Get More Bounce with Curtis Counce! is a studio album by bassist Curtis Counce recorded on October 8 & 15, 1956, April 27, May 13 and September 3, 1957, at Contemporary Studios in Los Angeles, California and subsequently released on the Contemporary Records label. The music falls somewhere between hard bop and cool jazz and Counce contributed two original compositions to the recording, Complete and Counceltation. The producer for the sessions was Lester Koenig.
Track Listing | 44:39 All compositions by Curtis Counce except as indicated
- Complete ~ 5:51
- How Deep Is the Ocean? (Irving Berlin) ~ 6:35
- Too Close for Comfort (Jerry Bock, Larry Holofcener, George David Weiss) ~ 5:36
- Mean to Me (Fred E. Ahlert, Roy Turk) ~ 4:31
- Stranger in Paradise (Alexander Borodin, George Forrest, Robert Wright) ~ 7:03
- Counceltation ~ 6:01
- Big Foot (Charlie Parker) ~ 9:02
- Curtis Counce ~ bass
- Jack Sheldon ~ trumpet
- Harold Land ~ tenor saxophone
- Carl Perkins ~ piano
- Frank Butler ~ drums
You Get More Bounce With Curtis Counce | by Eddie Carter
Simply stated, this is a superb album by bassist Curtis Counce and his quintet. Counce’s group was one of the better and more resilient bands on the West Coast during the late fifties. As a cohesive unit, the quintet’s interaction throughout the album delivers handsomely on the seven selections that make up this enjoyable set. The album opener is Counce’s Complete which begins with an impressive discussion between the rhythm section ahead of the melody. How Deep Is The Ocean? Is the ageless 1932 standard by Irving Berlin is a perfect vehicle for an affectionate performance by Land who adapts the song as easily as if it was originally created for jazz with a breathtakingly beautiful tenor sax reading of the melody and lead solo, anchored by Sheldon’s imaginative lyricism in support. Too Close For Comfort, the 1956 popular song by Jerry Bock, Larry Holofcener and George Weiss began life on Broadway in the musical production of Mr. Wonderful that year and has been recorded by an A-list of musicians and vocalists too numerous to mention. The 1929 popular song, Mean To Me by Fred Ahlert and Roy Turk has long been praised by critics as a “head of the class” standard for jazz musicians and vocalists to improvise.
Side Two opens with a bop-flavored midtempo rendition of Stranger In Paradise, the popular song from the 1953 musical, Kismet, written by Alexander Borodin, George Forrest, and Robert Wright. Counceltation, the second original by Counce and the title of the 1972 reissue of this album, due in part to the “original cheesecake cover” which enough people found offensive enough for Contemporary Records to replace it with a photo of the artist and his bass in an outdoor setting. The quintet returns to hard-bop on the album’s closer, Big Foot by Charlie Parker which gives everyone a chance to speak their piece on a lively joyride.
If you already own this album you know what to do. If you’re adding it to your collection, place the record on the turntable, drop the stylus, or slide the cd in the drive, crack open your favorite beverage, sit back and settle in to enjoy seven of the best sounding jazz cuts by The Curtis Counce Group that are spontaneous, soulful swinging at its best!
Source: Jazztracks by Eddie Carter | Excerpt: 1/2019 | atlantaaudioclub.org
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