Daily Dose Of Jazz…
John Lurie was born on December 14, 1952 in Minneapolis, Minnesota and was raised with his brother and sister in New Orleans, Louisiana and Worcester, Massachusetts.
In high school, he played basketball and harmonica and jammed with Mississippi Fred McDowell and Canned Heat in 1968. He briefly played the harmonica in a band from Boston, Massachusetts but soon switched to the guitar and eventually the saxophone.
After high school, he hitchhiked across the country to Berkeley, California. Moving to New York City in 1974, he briefly visited London, England where he performed his first saxophone solo at the Acme Gallery.
In 1978 John formed the Lounge Lizards with his brother Evan Lurie on piano. The two of them were the only constant members in the band through numerous lineup changes. In the early 1990s he formed a smaller group, the John Lurie National Orchestra and their work was heavily improvised.
By the early Nineties he was composing the theme to Late Night with Conan O’Brien with Howard Shore, which was also used when O’Brien hosted on The Tonight Show. He has written scores for over 20 movies, including Get Shorty, for which he received a Grammy Award nomination. As an actor he has starred, acted or made cameos in nineteen films and numerous television shows.
Saxophonist, painter, actor, director, and producer John Lurie has suffered debilitating ill health since 2000 with initially baffling neurological symptoms, and from symptoms attributed to chronic Lyme disease. The illness prevents him from acting or performing music, so he spends his time painting. His art has been shown in galleries and museums around the world. His 1980s NYC memoir, The History of Bones, was published by Penguin Random House in 2021.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Paul Desmond was born Paul Emil Breitenfeld on November 25, 1924 in San Francisco, California. His father was a pianist, organist, arranger, and composer who accompanied silent films in movie theaters and produced musical arrangements for printed publication and for live theatrical productions. He started his study of clarinet at the age of twelve and continued while at San Francisco Polytechnic High School. During high school he developed a talent for writing and became co-editor of his high school newspaper.
As a freshman at San Francisco State College he began playing alto saxophone, however, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he spent three years in the Army band stationed in San Francisco. After his discharge in 1946 he legally changed his name to Desmond. Working in the San Francisco Bay Area as a backing musician, occasionally with Dave Brubeck.
Following a breakup and a reunion with Brubeck, the quartet became especially popular with college-age audiences, often performing in college settings like on their ground-breaking 1953 album Jazz at Oberlin at Oberlin College. The group played until 1967, when Brubeck switched his musical focus from performance to composition and broke the unit up. During the 1970s Desmond joined Brubeck for several reunion tours, with Brubeck’s sons Chris, Dan and Darius.
He worked several times during his career with baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, guitarist Jim Hall, Chet Baker, and Ed Bickert. Alto saxophone and composer Paul Desmond, who was one of the most popular musicians to come out of the cool jazz scene, passed on May 30, 1977, not of his heavy alcohol habit but of lung cancer, the result of his longtime heavy smoking.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Tommy Stewart was born November 19, 1939 in Gadsden, Alabama. He attended Industrial High in Birmingham, Alabama where John T. “Fess” Whatley trained him along with Erskine Hawkins, Dud Bascomb, Paul Bascomb, and Sun Ra. Alvin “Stumpy” Robinson, the band director at Washington Jr High School, was also influential in his development.
Enrolling at Alabama State College and having no way to pay tuition, the problem solved itself when he joined the Bama State Collegians, a dance band that made enough money to fund Stewart’s way through four years of college. He attended Alabama State University, where he directed the Bama State Collegians. Later, he studied jazz arranging at the Eastman School of Music and studied arranging under John Duncan, a classical composer and teacher at Alabama State University.
As an educator he began his teaching career at Fayette High School in St. Clair County Alabama, 1961 to 1963. Moving to Atlanta, Georgia in 1969 he taught in Fayetteville, Georgia, worked for Morris Brown College doing band arrangements and taught jazz and arranged for the Morehouse College band. He also taught band classes at West End High School in Birmingham, Alabama from, and taught A Survey of Popular Music at Georgia State University.
During the 1970s, he worked with Gladys Knight & the Pips, The Tams, Johnnie Taylor, Jackie Moore, King Floyd, Z. Z. Hill, and The Stylistics. He toured as musical director for Johnnie Taylor and for Ted Taylor and went on to record disco in the Seventies with Final Approach, Cream De CoCo, Tamiko Jones, Moses Davis, and his own album.
In 1990, he co-founded the African American Philharmonic Orchestra with founder and conductor John Peek. He moved from Atlanta to Birmingham in 1992. He was a member of the Magic City Jazz Orchestra, Cleveland Eaton, the Alabama All-Stars, the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame All-Stars, and Ray Reach and Friends, continues to be involved in music. In 1988, he was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame. At 81, trumpeter, arranger, composer, and record producer Tommy Stewart remains involved in the music industry.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Satoshi Inoue 井上智 was born on November 12, 1956 in Kobe, Japan and studied at Kyoto’s Fuji School of Music from 1979 to 1981. Between 1981-1988, he led his own groups in Japan.
Moving to New York City in 1989 he studied at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music where he met Jim Hall, who has been on the faculty of the university since his senior year.
Over the years, Inoue has toured with jazz greats such as James Moody, James Williams, Cecil Bridgewater, Frank Foster, Slide Hampton, Barry Harris, Jimmy Heath, Arnie Lawrence, Jack McDuff, Junior Mance, Jon Faddis, Akira Tana, The Clayton Brothers and Toshiko Akiyoshi.
His own band has gigged at New York’s top jazz venues, and for twelve years, Inoue has brought American musicians to Japan to conduct fall tours for concerts and workshops, including the Big Apple in Nonoichi festival. His lectures on jazz standards appear monthly in a Japanese jazz magazine called Jazz Life.
Guitarist Satoshi Inoue, who performed together on Hall’s widely used instructional video collection called Jazz Guitar Master Class Volumes 1&2, continues to compose, record and perform.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Malcolm Mitchell was born in London, England on November 9, 1926 and was originally taught by Ivor Mairants. In 1947 he was teaching jazz guitar when he formed The Trio with pianist Johnny Pearson and bassist Lennie Bush. At the BBC Maida Vale studios the trio would broadcast live on a Saturday morning.
1948 saw Mitchell become the first British musician to play with Duke Ellington and earn money for doing so. In 1933 the Duke of Windsor had insisted on sitting in on drums with the Ellington Band when it visited Britain but he didn’t get paid for it. Mitchell’s debut with Ellington was equally eccentric in its way.
Throughout the 40s and into the 50s the brutish Musicians’ Union, in tandem with the all-powerful fraternity, Ministry of Works, had a rule which banned American musicians from playing in England. In 1948 the Dizzy Gillespie and Spike Jones Orchestras had to cancel projected tours and the only way Ellington was able to work there was as a variety act without his band. He played piano at the London Palladium and music halls in nine other cities with his trumpeter Ray Nance, allowed in as a dancer and thus “Showbiz”, and his singer Kay Davis weren’t banned. The Union presumably didn’t regard them as musicians.
While the Union Ban was in place the Mitchell Trio, now with Johnnie Valmore Pearson on piano and Teddy Broughton on bass, accompanied other bewildered Americans variety artists including Hoagy Carmichael and Maxine Sullivan when they toured England. During those years he toured eight weeks in Sweden with Stephane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt.
His Mitchell Trio, with pianist Johnny Pearson and Teddy Broughton on bass, became well known supporting U.S. jazzmen and singers touring in the UK. Guitarist, bandleader and educator Malcolm MItchell passed away in Bognor Regis, England on March 9, 1998.
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