Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Emanuel Paul was born on February 2, 1904 in New Orleans, Louisiana. He did not begin playing music until late in his youth, picking up the violin at age 18 and then switched to banjo. In the middle of the 1920s he settled on the tenor saxophone, where his instrument often substituted for the baritone horn in a brass band.
Becoming a member of the Eureka Brass Band in 1940 and remained with them into the 1960s; he also played often with Kid Thomas Valentine from 1942 and recorded with Oscar Celestin, Emanuel Sayles, and the Olympia Brass Band. He led three recording sessions for the European Jazz Macon label in 1967. His sidemen on these records include Valentine, George Lewis, and Butch Thompson.
Tenor saxophonist Emanuel Paul, who was one of the first tenor saxophonists to hold regular work in the New Orleans jazz scene, passed away on May 23, 1988 in New Orleans.
More Posts: bandleader,history,instrumental,jazz,music,saxophone
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jim Lanigan was born on January 30, 1902 in Chicago, Illinois. Learning piano and violin as a child, he played piano and drums in the Austin High School Blue Friars before specializing on bass and tuba.
A member of the Austin High Gang, he played with Husk O’Hare in1925), the Mound City Blue Blowers and Art Kassel from 1926 to 1927, the Chicago Rhythm Kings, the Jungle Kings, and the 1927 McKenzie and Condon’s Chicagoans recordings.
From 1927 to 1931 he was with Ted Fio Rito and worked in orchestras for radio, including NBC Chicago. Performing sideman duties in the 1930s and 1940s with Jimmy McPartland, Bud Jacobson’s Jungle Kings, Bud Freeman, and Danny Alvin, he began to concentrate more on music outside of jazz at that time. He played with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1937 to 1948, and did extensive work as a studio musician.
Bassist and tubist Jim Lanigan, who never recorded as a leader, played reunion gigs for the Austin High Gang, passed away on April 9, 1983.
More Posts: history,instrumental,jazz,music,tuba
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Claude Abadie was born on January 16, 1920 in Paris, France. He was interested in New Orleans jazz and Chicago jazz from an early age, and formed his own ensemble in 1941 to play in the Dixieland-revival style. Boris Vian played in the group from 1943.
Soon after, Abadie’s ensemble included Claude Luter, Jef Gilson, Raymond Fol, and Hubert Fol. He founded a new ensemble in 1949, which included Jean-Claude Fohrenbach and Benny Vasseur, but quit music in 1952, not returning to performance until 1963.
In 1965 he formed a large ensemble to play contemporary jazz and among his sidemen was Paul Vernon. Clarinetist and bandleader Claude Abadie turned 100 on his birthday and passed away on March 29, 2020.
More Posts: bandleader,clarinet,history,instrumental,jazz,music
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Daniel Moses Barker was born on January 13, 1909 in New Orleans, Louisiana to a family of musicians, the grandson of bandleader Isidore Barbarin and nephew of drummers Paul Barbarin and Louis Barbarin. He took up the clarinet and drums before switching to a ukulele that his aunt got him, and then to banjo. One of Barker’s earliest teachers in New Orleans was fellow banjoist Emanuel Sayles, with whom he would record.
Barker began his career as a musician in his youth with his streetband, the Boozan Kings, and toured Mississippi with Little Brother Montgomery. 1930 saw him moving to New York City where he switched to the guitar. Through the decade he played with Fess Williams, Billy Fowler and the White Brothers, Buddy Harris, Albert Nicholas, Lucky Millinder, and Benny Carter in 1938. During his time in New York, he frequently played with West Indian musicians, who often mistook him for one of them due to his Creole style of playing.
From 1939 to 1946 he frequently recorded with Cab Calloway, and started his own group featuring his wife Blue Lu Barker after leaving Calloway. In 1945 he recorded with pianist Sir Charles Thompson, and saxophonists Dexter Gordon and Charlie Parker. In 1947 he was back with Lucky Millinder and Bunk Johnson. He returned to working with Al Nicholas in 1948 and in 1949 rejoined efforts with his wife in a group.
During the 1950s Danny was primarily a freelance musician, but did work with his uncle Paul Barbarin from 1954 to 1955. In the mid-1950s he went to California to record again with Albert Nicholas; performed at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival with Eubie Blake. In 1963 he was working with Cliff Jackson, and then in 1964 appeared at the World Fair leading his own group. Sometime in the early 1960s he formed a group he called Cinderella. The following year he returned to New Orleans and took up a position as assistant to the curator of the New Orleans Jazz Museum.
In 1970 he founded and led a church-sponsored brass band for young people ~ the Fairview Baptist Church Marching Band. The Fairview band launched the careers of a number of professional musicians who went on to perform in brass band and mainstream jazz contexts, including Leroy Jones, Wynton Marsalis, Branford Marsalis, Kirk Joseph, Nicholas Payton, Shannon Powell, Lucien Barbarin, Dr. Michael White and others. In later years the band became known as the Dirty Dozen Brass Band.
He played regularly at many New Orleans venues from the late 1960s through the early 1990s, in addition to touring. Beyond overcoming the obstacles of segregation, banjoist Danny Barker, who also sang and played guitar and ukulele, authored two books and was an amateur landscape artist; and who suffered from diabetes throughout most of his adult life, passed away from cancer in New Orleans on March 13, 1994 at age 85.
More Posts: bandleader,banjo,guitar,history,instrumental,jazz,music,ukulele,vocal
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Harry Roy was born Harry Lipman on January 12, 1900 in Stamford Hill, London, England, and began to study clarinet and alto saxophone at the age of 16. He and his brother Sidney formed a band which they called the Darnswells, with Harry on saxophone and clarinet and Sidney on piano. During the 1920s they performed in several prestigious venues such as the Alhambra and the London Coliseum, under names such as the Original Lyrical Five and the Original Crichton Lyricals. They spent three years at the Café de Paris, and toured South Africa, Australia, and Germany.
By the early 1930s, Harry was fronting the band under his own name, and broadcasting from the Café Anglais and the Mayfair Hotel. In 1935 he married Elizabeth Brooke, daughter of the white Rajah of Sarawak, with whom he appeared in two musical films, Rhythm Racketeer and Everything Is Rhythm.
During World War II, he toured with his band, Harry Roy’s Tiger Ragamuffins. He was at the Embassy Club in 1942, and a little later, toured the Middle East, entertaining troops. In 1948, Roy traveled to the United States but was refused a work permit, so returning to Britain, he reformed his band and scored a hit with his recording of Leicester Square Rag.
By the early 1950s the big band era had come to an end and his band split up, sending him drifting in and out of the music scene. That decade he ran his own restaurant, the Diners’ Club until it was destroyed by fire. By 1969 Harry returned to music, led a quartet in London’s Lyric Theatre’s show Oh Clarence and his own Dixieland Jazz Band residency during the summer at Sherry’s Dixieland Showbar in Brighton, but by then he was in failing health. Clarinetist and dance band leader Harry Roy passed away in London on February 1, 1971.
More Posts: bandleader,clarinet,history,instrumental,jazz,music