Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Chuck Wayne was born Charles Jagelka on February 27, 1923 in New York City to a Czechoslovakian family. As a boy, he learned banjo, mandolin, and balalaika. By the early 1940s he was playing in jazz bands on 52nd Street and after two years in the Army, he returned to New York City, joined Joe Marsala’s band, and settled in Staten Island until a 1991 move to New Jersey. He changed his musical style after hearing Charlie Parker, recording with Dizzy Gillespie in 1945. Frustrated with the difficulty of getting the sound he wanted, he considered switching to saxophone.
Wayne was a member of Woody Herman’s First Herd, the first guitarist in the George Shearing quintet, worked with Coleman Hawkins, Red Norvo, Bud Powell, Jack Teagarden, George Shearing, Lester Young, and Barbara Carroll. During the 1950s, he played with Tony Bennett, Gil Evans, Brew Moore, Zoot Sims, and George Wallington. In the Sixties, CBS hired him as a staff guitarist and for the next two decades, he played on Broadway, accompanied vocalists, and performed in guitar duos with Joe Puma and Tal Farlow.
He wrote Sonny in honor of Sonny Berman. Years later, Miles Davis took the song, renamed it Solar, and claimed he wrote it. His Butterfingers and Prospecting have been incorrectly attributed to Zoot Sims. Chuck was known for a bebop style influenced by saxophone players of his time and he developed a technique not widely adopted, and also developed a comprehensive approach to guitar chords and arpeggios.
Over the course of his career, he recorded eight albums as a leader beginning with his 1953 album The Chuck Wayne Quintet on the Progressive label. He worked as a sideman with Gil Evans, Anthony Perkins, Dick Katz, Duke Jordan, and Frank Wess, among others. Guitarist Chuck Wayne, one of the first jazz guitarists to learn bebop, passed away on July 29, 1997.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Frederick Katz was born on February 25, 1919 in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York City and was classically trained. He studied under Pablo Casals and performed with several symphony orchestras. He was a child prodigy on both the cello and piano and performed in public as a teenager and was drawn to the music of Manhattan nightclubs and to folk music. During World War II he conducted concerts and wrote musical revues for the U.S. Seventh Army. He was a member of the National Symphony Orchestra.
Katz was a member of drummer Chico Hamilton’s quintet, one of the most important West Coast jazz groups of the 1950s. His arco cello defined the chamber jazz focus of Chico Hamilton’s Quintet and the group quickly gained popularity. The Chico Hamilton Quintet, including Katz, appeared in the film noir The Sweet Smell of Success in 1957, starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, where Katz was described in passing as the Quintet’s primary composer. Katz and Hamilton wrote a score for the film which was ultimately rejected in favor of one by Elmer Bernstein.
As a leader Fred recorded several albums, wrote and conducted the arrangements for singer Carmen McRae’s 1958 album Carmen For Cool Ones, and recorded with Dorothy Ashby, Pete Rugolo, Ken Nordine and Paul Horn. He scored nineteen films and television shows including A Bucket of Blood, The Wasp Woman, Creature from the Haunted Sea and The Little Shop of Horrors. Later in his career, Katz became a professor of ethnic music in the Anthropology Department at California State University, Fullerton and California State University, Northridge, where he taught world music, anthropology and religion for over 30 years. One of his students was John Densmore, drummer of The Doors.
Cellist and composer Fred Katz, who was one of the earliest jazz musicians to establish the cello as a viable improvising solo instrument, passed away on September 7, 2013, in Santa Monica, California.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Harry Dial was born on February 17, 1907 in Birmingham, Alabama who became one of the classic drummers of the early jazz world. His specialty was keeping time behind artists known for their fun and pep. In fact, a glance at Dial’s discography is something like a partial scan of the most entertaining albums of all time, because such a list would surely include sides by two guys named Louis, Armstrong and Jordan, as well as Fats Waller and Ella Fitzgerald.
Harry was a solid, energetic drummer who pushed the beat forward without cluttering the airspace. His use of the sock cymbal and his fat, marching band snare drum sound are often imitated. He was also one of the rare breeds of singing drummers, the vocal side of his talents usually only exposed when he was in charge of the band. He was allowed to make comments on records with Fats Waller, the best example of which is the introduction to the upbeat Don’t Let It Bother You.
Dial’s career as a bandleader included a series of sides for Vocalion beginning in 1930. The group, whose recordings included the deadly “Poison,” was known as Harry Dial’s Blusicians, and included players such as banjoist Eursten Woodfork, trumpeter Shirley Clay, and the fine alto saxophonist Lester Boone. Some of this material has been reissued on the compilation Chicago 1929-1930: That’s My Stuff.
He was already recording with Armstrong around this time and began cutting tracks with Waller as a member of Fats Waller’s Rhythm before the middle of that decade. It might have taken him an additional ten years to master the art of playing the maracas since he seemed to find a way to include the delicate shakers on just about every funny style of music he played with Jordan beginning in the mid-’40s when he joined the Tympany Five.
In the late ’40s, he took another crack at recording under his own name, producing “Prince’s Boogie” for Decca with one of the earliest versions of the catchy “Diddy Wah Diddy” on the flipside. Dial liked to write as well, beginning with a song entitled “Don’t Play Me Cheap,” recorded by the famous Armstrong. His songs were also recorded by the merely infamous, a category that would not exist if it didn’t include a singer named Bea Booze, who cut Dial’s “Catchin’ as Catch Can” for Decca in 1942.
Many years later, the drummer published his All This Jazz About Jazz: The Autobiography of Harry Dial. The dapper, suave musician would have felt it important that he is most certainly not the Harry Dial who made it into the Guinness Book of World Records by claiming to have gone 78 years without bathing. Drummer Harry Dial passed away on January 25, 1987 in New York City.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Howard Riley was born on John Howard Riley on February 16, 1943 in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England. He began learning the piano at the age of six and started playing jazz as early as the age of 13. He studied at the University of Wales from 1961 to 1966, then Indiana University, and finishing up at York University in 1970). While studying he played jazz professionally, with Evan Parker (1966) and then with his own trio (1967–76), with Barry Guy on bass and Alan Jackson, Jon Hiseman, and Tony Oxley for periods on drums.
He worked with John McLaughlin in the late Sixties, the London Jazz Composers Orchestra and Oxley’s ensemble through the Seventies to 1981. He and Guy worked in a trio with Phil Wachsmann from 1976 well into the 1980s and played solo piano throughout North America and Europe. He played in a quartet, with Guy, Trevor Watts, and John Stevens, did duo work with Keith Tippett, with Jaki Byard, and with Elton Dean. From 1985 he worked in a trio with Jeff Clyne and Tony Levin.
Pianist and composer Howard Riley who worked in jazz and experimental music idioms continues to teach at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and Goldsmiths, University of London, where he has taught since the 1970s.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Nathan Tate Davis was born on February 15, 1937 in Kansas City, Kansas and eventually would travel extensively around Europe after World War II. He moved to Paris in 1962 but would return to the U.S. by 1969, holding a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University and was a professor of music and director of jazz studies at the University of Pittsburgh, an academic program that he helped initiate.
He was the founder and director of the University of Pittsburgh Annual Jazz Seminar and Concert, the first academic jazz event of its kind in the United States. He also helped to found the university’s William Robinson Recording Studio as well as establish the International Academy of Jazz Hall of Fame located in the school’s William Pitt Union and the University of Pittsburgh-Sonny Rollins International Jazz Archives.
One of Davis’ best known musical associations was heading the Paris Reunion Band from 1985 to1989, which at different times included Nat Adderley, Kenny Drew, Johnny Griffin, Slide Hampton, Joe Henderson, Idris Muhammad, Dizzy Reece, Woody Shaw, and Jimmy Woode. He also toured and recorded with the post-bop ensemble leading Roots which he formed in 1991. He composed various pieces, including a 2004 opera entitled Just Above My Head.
He retired as director of the Jazz Studies Program at Pitt in 2013. Davis also served as the editor of the International Jazz Archives Journal. Over the course of his career, he recorded eighteen albums as a leader.
Multi-instrumentalist Nathan Davis, who played the tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, and flute, and was awarded the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation’s BNY Mellon Jazz Living Legacy Award at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, passed away in Palm Beach, Florida on April 8, 2018 at the age of 81.
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