Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Nick LaRocca was born Dominic James LaRocca on April 11, 1889 in New Orleans, Louisiana to poor Sicilian immigrants. Attracted to the music of the brass bands in New Orleans as a child, he covertly taught himself to play the cornet against the wishes of his father who hoped his son would go into a more prestigious profession. From around 1910 through 1916 he was a regular member of Papa Jack Laine’s bands. A solid lead player with a strong lip allowed him to play long parades without let up or to play several gigs in a row on the same day.
In 1916 he joined Johnny Stein’s band to play a job in Chicago, Illinois, that subsequently became the Original Dixieland Jass Band and made their first commercially issued jazz recordings in New York City in 1917 that were hits, making them into celebrities. LaRocca led tours of England and the United States into the early 1920s, suffered a nervous breakdown. H retired from music until 1936 reuniting the ODJB for a successful tour and more recordings. He proclaimed that he and his band were the inventors of the now nationally popular swing music. Personality conflicts broke up the band again in 1937, and he again retired from music.
In the 1950s he wrote numerous vehement letters to newspapers, radio, and television shows, stating that he was the true and sole inventor of jazz music, damaging his credibility and provoking a backlash against him, his reputation and career. He donated his large collection of papers related to the O.D.J.B. to Tulane University in 1958 and worked with writer H.O. Brunn on the book The Story of the Original Dixieland Jass Band. Written during the Jim Crow era, he is acknowledge as an important figure, much in his own mind because he could not live with the thought that Negroes invented the music, in taking jazz from a regional style to international popularity, the leader of the most influential jazz band of the period from 1917 to 1921, and a good player in a very early jazz style on records.
Nick’s playing and recordings were an important early influence on such later jazz trumpeters as Red Nichols, Bix Beiderbecke and Phil Napoleon. His 1917 composition Tiger Rag is one of the most important and influential jazz standards of the twentieth century having some 136 cover versions by 1942 alone. It was covered by Louis Armstrong in several different versions throughout his career, while Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, The Mills Brothers, Frank Sinatra, Benny Goodman, Les Paul and Kid Ory also recorded important and influential cover versions of the jazz standard.
In 2006, his 1917 recording of Darktown Strutters Ball with the Original Dixieland Jass Band was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Cornetist Nick LaRocca, who was part of what is generally regarded as the first recorded jazz band, releasing the first jazz recording Livery Stable Blues in 1917, passed away on February 22, 1961 in New Orleans.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Barbara Lea was born Barbara Ann LeCocq on April 10, 1929 in Detroit, Michigan. A musical family, her musical heritage is traceable to a great uncle, Alexandre Charles LeCocq, an important nineteenth-century composer of French light opera. Her father changed their surname to Leacock and she shortened it to Lea when she began working professionally.
Boston was a hotbed of jazz in the late 1940s and early 1950s, allowing Lea to sing with major instrumentalists including as Marian McPartland, Bobby Hackett, Vic Dickenson, Frankie Newton, Johnny Windhurst and George Wein. She worked with small dance bands there before majoring in music theory at Wellesley College on scholarship. She also sang in the college choir, worked on the campus radio station and newspaper, and arranged for and conducted the Madrigal Group and brass choir concerts.
Barbara’s professional career started upon graduation with her early recordings for Riverside and Prestige. They were met with immediate critical acclaim that led to her winning the DownBeat International Critics’ Poll as the Best New Singer of 1956. She appeared in small clubs in New York and throughout the eastern U.S. and Canada, as well as on radio and TV.
With the near-demise of classic pop in the early 60s, Lea turned to the legitimate theatre, performing an impressive list of leading and feature roles in everything from Shakespeare to Sondheim. Moving to the West Coast received her M.A. in drama at Cal State Northridge and then returned to New York and taught speech at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and acting at Hofstra University.
By the 1970s, with the resurgence of interest in show tunes and popular standards, Lea performed on NPR’s “American Popular Song with Alec Wilder & Friends”, appeared in two shows featuring the songs of Willard Robison and Lee Wiley, and received lengthy features in the New Yorker magazine. With her singing career was renewed she would consistently play the JVC, Kool and Newport Jazz Festivals as well as cabarets and concerts.
Jazz singer Barbara Lea, who also sang Dixieland, swing and cabaret, passed away on December 26, 2011 in Raleigh, North Carolina from complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
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Marty Marsala was born on April 2, 1909 in Chicago, Illinois. He began his professional career playing drums for bands led by Joe Bananas and Red Feilen in Chicago. During the 1920s he switched to the trumpet and following years as a freelance musician in Chicago, he soon joined his brother Joe’s band in New York playing trumpet from 1936 to 1941. In 1937 and 1938 he also worked with Bob Howard and Tempo King.
After working with the Will Hudson Orchestra, Marty then led a local band for a while before joining Chico Marx’s band from 1942 to 1943. The band was technically led by Ben Pollack but performed under Marx’s name.
Marsala served briefly in the Army from 1944 to the end of World War II. After his discharge he toured between San Francisco and Chicago playing Dixieland with his brother again as well as Miff Mole, Tony Parenti and Sidney Bechet. He became especially popular in California during these years. In 1955 he moved permanently to San Francisco and began leading his own groups and recording with Kid Ory and Earl Hines.
By the 1960s his health had deteriorated and he retired from performing in 1965, never recording under his own name. Swing trumpeter Marty Marsala, best known for his two decades working with is brother from 1926-46, passed away on April 27, 1975.
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Louis Albert Cottrell, Jr. was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on March 7, 1911. Raised in an upper class Creole musical family, his father Louis Cottrell Sr. was an influential drummer and cornetist Manny Perez was his godfather. Growing up around John Robichaux, A.J. Piron and Barney Bigard, the latter giving him lessons as well as studying under Lorenzo Tio, Jr.
He began his career in the 1920s with the Golden Rule Orchestra and by 1925 was playing with “Polo” Barnes. Louis would go on to work with Chris Kelly, Kid Rena, on the riverboat SS Island Queen with Lawrence Marrero’s young Tuxedo Brass Band and with Sidney Desvigne.
During this period he became a prominent union organizer, joining Don Albert’s orchestra soon after, recording an album with the orchestra in 1935 under the Vocalion label. Trying his hand at composing, with Lloyd Glenn and Albert wrote You Don’t Love Me (True) that became one of the hits of the R&B New Orleans era for bandleader Paul Gayten.
During the 40s he had an enduring collaboration with Paul Barbarin, played with Piron and Desvigne, formed and recorded for the first time as a leader in 1961 with the Louis Cottrell Trio for Riverside Records Living Legends series and with Barbarin revived the Onward Brass Band. His sideman duties led him to perform and record with Peter Bocage, Jim Robinson, Harold Dejan, Thomas Jefferson, Sweet Emma Barrett, Avery Kid Howard, Waldren Joseph, and Polo Barnes.
In 1971 Louis formed the Heritage Hall Jazz Band, leading that ensemble up until his death. Under his leadership the band rivaled Preservation Hall and with Blanche Thomas on vocals played Carnegie Hall in 1974. He went on to make several television appearances on the Perry Como and Mike Douglas shows, had a cameo and recorded Academy Award nominated Big Lip Blues for the soundtrack of 1978 film Pretty Baby.
Clarinetist and saxophonist Louis Cottrell died suddenly at his home after a short illness on March 21, 1978 at the age of 67. Fittingly, he was honored with a jazz funeral, as thousands assembled in a small Gentilly Catholic church to bid him farewell.
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Maxim Saury was born in Enghien-les-Bains, in the Val-d’Oise, France on February 28, 1928. The son of a professional violinist, Andrew “Kiki” Saury, he first took violin lessons between 1940 and 1942, but not suiting him, he turned to the clarinet.
In 1946, he joined the orchestra of Christian Azzi and the following year joined Claude Bolling before leaving in 1949 to mount a trio in 1951. Between 1955 and 1968, Saury played almost exclusively at Caveau de la Huchette in Paris, performed at all the major French jazz festivals including Cannes, Antibes, Nice and Juan-les-Pins.
Maxim represented the middle of French traditional jazz and was invited to perform on television shows and also appear in several films made in the late 1950s and early 1960s, particularly Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse, The Cheaters by Marcel Carne, My Uncle by Jacque Tati and Jacques Rozier’s Adieu Philippine.
Since the late 1960s, Maxim Saury performed regularly in concert in France and worldwide. In 2007, he was one of few performers selected for the four volume compilation The 100 Greatest Success of Saint-Germain-des-Prés , alongside Yves Montand, Boris Vian, Juliette Greco, Les Freres Jacques, Catherine Sauvage, Sidney Bechet, Marcel Mouloudji and Stephane Grappelli.
Clarinetist, conductor and arranger Maxim Suary, one of the symbols of revival of New Orleans jazz in Saint Germain-des-Pres during the Fifties and Sixties, passed away at the age of eighty-four, on November 15, 2012 at the Ambroise Pare Hospital in Boulogne-Billancourt, following heart problems.
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