Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Walter Page Cavanaugh was born in Cherokee, Kansas on January 26, 1922 who began on piano at age nine and played with Ernie Williamson’s band in 1938–39 before moving to Los Angeles, California and joining the Bobby Sherwood band at age 20.

While serving in the military during World War II, he met guitarist Al Viola and bassist Lloyd Pratt, with whom he formed a trio. After the war’s end they performed together in the style of the Nat King Cole Trio, scoring a number of hits in the late 1940s, including The Three Bears, Walkin’ My Baby Back Home, and All of Me.

The trio appeared in the films A Song Is Born, Big City, Lullaby of Broadway with Doris Day and Romance on the High Seas, Day’s first film, in 1948. He recorded dozens of tracks with Doris Day, Frank Sinatra, Dinah Shore, June Christy, Mel Torme and other legendary singers.

In the early 1950s, Cavanaugh had a program, Page Pages You, on the short-lived Progressive Broadcasting System. Additionally, the trio played on Frank Sinatra’s radio program, Songs by Sinatra, and on The Jack Paar Show.

Cavanaugh played in Los Angeles, California nightclubs through the 1990s, both in a trio setting, with Viola for many years and as a septet, Page 7. He recorded with Bobby Woods & Les Deux Love Orchestra. He recorded for MGM, Capitol, RCA, Star Line, Tiara, and Dobre Records over the course of his career, releasing his final trio album, Return to Elegance, in 2006. Pianist Page Cavanaugh passed away on December 19, 2008 of kidney failure.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Joe Albany was born Joseph Albani on January 24, 1924 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Albany studied piano as a child and by 1943 he was working on the West Coast in Benny Carter’s orchestra. In 1946 he played with Charlie Parker and then 20-year-old Miles Davis.

Continuing to play, in 1957 recorded an album for Riverside with an unusual trio line-up with saxophonist Warne Marsh and Bob Whitlock on bass. omitting a drummer. Despite that, most of the 1950s and 1960s saw him battling a heroin addiction, or living in seclusion in Europe. He returned to jazz in the Seventies and played on more than ten albums. Modern and bebop pianist Joe Albany passed away of respiratory failure and cardiac arrest in New York City at the age of 63 on January 12, 1988.

was the focus of a 1980 documentary titled, Joe Albany… A Jazz Life. His daughter Amy-Jo wrote a memoir about her father called Low Down: Junk, Jazz, and Other Fairy Tales from Childhood. The book was adapted for the screen and released in 2014 as the biopic Low Down.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Michel Maurice Armand Warlop came into the world in Douai, France on January 23, 1911.  A child prodigy, he won every award and prize that existed for the violin in France before attaining the age of 18. he started his musical studies with his mother, a music professor, and entered the Conservatory of Douai, the second oldest in France, at age six.

There he studied with Victor Gallois who had won the Prize of Rome for composition in 1905. At age seven, he played his first public concert accompanied by his mother on the piano and by age eight in 1919 he played his first concert in Paris, to benefit victims of WW1. He transferred to the Conservatory of Lille around the age of 10 and started his studies on the university level at the Conservatory of Paris at age 13.

By mid-1939 Warlop began working permanently with the Raymond Legrand Orchestra, then got called up for military service in September 1939 and left Paris. Soon after hostilities started between Germany and France and he became a German prisoner of war but later released because of his tuberculosis. He returned to France late in February 1941.

Back in Paris, he took up his old chair in Legrand’s orchestra, recorded with the Jazz Dixit and his own string septet Septuor a Cordes from time to time. Both of these units were made up of other musicians in the Legrand organization. Warlop wrote and arranged almost all of the Septour’s music which was in a style that blended a classical string setting with Warlop’s jazz abilities. By 1942 he recorded his own Swing Concerto, however, Disques Swing did not issue it and it sat in the vaults until it was finally released on a CD in 1989.

After the war many French musicians, singers and film stars were accused of supporting the enemy for appearing on German-controlled radio, playing for German troops or touring in Germany. Many were banned from working for various periods of time. Warlop had to sit out for two months and Legrand for one year. He never played again in Paris or recorded after this incident in 1945.

His tuberculosis had finally caught up with him along with his heavy consumption of alcohol and cocaine and violinist Michel Warlop, who preferred to tour as a jazz soloist and in small groups in the south of France, passed away at 36 on March 6, 1947 in Bagnères-de-Luchon, France. His last engagement was with Jimmy Réna’s small group at the Grand Hotel Superbagnières above Luchon, France in the Pyrenees Mountains near the border with Spain.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Eberhard Weber was born on January 22, 1940, in Stuttgart, Germany and began recording with several groups as a sideman in the early Sixties and released his first record under his own name The Colours of Chloë, in 1973.

From the early 1960s to the early 1970s, Weber’s closest musical association was with pianist Wolfgang Dauner. Their many mutual projects were diverse, from mainstream jazz to jazz-rock fusion to avant-garde sound experiments. During this period, Weber also played and recorded with pianists Hampton Hawes and Mal Waldron, guitarists Baden Powell de Aquino and Joe Pass, The Mike Gibbs Orchestra, violinist Stephane Grappelli, and many others.

Eberhard has released fourteen records under his own name, all under the ECM label. He has led collaborations with Gary Burton, Ralph Towner, Pat Metheny and Jan Garbarek. The mid-1970s saw Weber forming his own group, Colours, with Charlie Mariano, Rainer Brüninghaus and Jon Christensen. With John Marshall replacing Christensen they toured extensively and recorded two further records before disbanding.

Since the early 1980s, Weber has regularly collaborated with the British singer-songwriter Kate Bush, toured with Barbara Thompson’s jazz ensemble Paraphernalia, and by the Nineties touring slowed as did recording but he continued to perform until suffering a stroke in 2007, leaving him unable to play. Bassist Eberhard Weber was awarded the prestigious Albert Mangelsdorff-Preis in November 2009.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Spike Wells was born Michael Wells in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, Wells on the 16th of January 1946 and was a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral Choir School. He became interested in jazz after coming across a recording by Dizzy Gillespie, which he found very exciting. He took up playing drums in his early teens and later had lessons from former Miles Davis drummer Philly Joe Jones, who lived in London from 1967 to 1969 He was also very influenced by another of Davis’s drummers, Tony Williams. At Oxford University, Wells put together a quartet with tenor player Pat Crumly and pianist Brian Priestley that played with visitors including saxophonists Bobby Wellins, Tony Coe and Joe Harriott, and blues singer Jimmy Witherspoon.

In 1968 Wells began a Ph.D. course in philosophy at London University, living in a house that was also home to bass player Ron Mathewson, alto sax player Ray Warleigh, trombonist Chris Pyne and pianist Mick Pyne. Mathewson was then playing in the quartet of tenor player Tubby Hayes and asked Wells if he would be interested in joining the group. He arranged an audition with Hayes and guitarist Louis Stewart, at which time Tubby asked if they wanted the job. Wells abandoned his Ph.D. and became a professional musician.

As well as playing with Hayes, in both his quartet and his big band, until the saxophonist’s death in 1973, he spent a year in Humphrey Lyttelton’s band, and also worked with many visiting soloists at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, including Stan Getz, Roland Kirk, Art Farmer, Johnny Griffin and James Moody.

Qualifying as a solicitor, Wells then practiced law for 22 years, eventually working as an in-house legal adviser for Lloyds Bank. He became a deacon in the Church of England at 49, took early retirement from the bank, and took a stipend to curate at St Peter’s Church, Brighton. With music as well as ministry important to him, he went on to decline the stipend and now works as both a priest and a drummer. A selected discography has him recording fifteen albums with one as a leader titled Reverence in 2006.

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