Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Clora Larea Bryant was born on May 30, 1927 in Denison, Texas to Charles and Eulila Bryant, the youngest of three children. As a young child she learned to play piano with her brother Mel, and was a member of a Baptist church choir. Her brother Fred left his trumpet when he joined the military, she picked it up and learned to play. In high school she played trumpet in the marching band.

She turned down scholarships from Oberlin Conservatory and Bennett College to attend Prairie View College in Houston, Texas starting in 1943. Bryant was a member of the Prairie View Co-eds Jazz Band which toured in Texas and performed at the Apollo Theater in New York City in 1944. Her father got a job in Los Angeles, CAlifornia and she transferred to UCLA in 1945, and where she first heard bebop on Central Avenue.

In 1946 she became a member of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, an all-female jazz band, earned her union card and dropped out of school. Dizzy Gillespie became her mentor and provided her with work. She joined the black female jazz band the Queens of Swing as a drummer, and went on tour with the band.

In 1951 she worked in Los Angeles as a trumpeter for Josephine Baker and Billie Holiday. The same year the Queens of Swing became the first women’s jazz group to appear on television and performed as The Hollywood Sepia Tones. Clora was called onto Ada Leonard’s all-girl orchestra show, however, racist directed calls to the station the engagement. In 1954 she briefly moved to New York because she had lost inspiration from playing in bands.

Bryant recorded her first and only album, Gal With A Horn, in 1957 before returning to the life of a traveling musician. She worked with Louis Armstrong and Harry James, toured with singer Billy Williams and around the world with her brother Mel, had a TV show in Australia and became the first female jazz musician to tour in the Soviet Union after writing to Mikhail Gorbachev.

After a heart attack and quadruple bypass surgery in 1996, Bryant was forced to give up the trumpet but she continued to sing. She also began to give lectures on college campuses about the history of jazz, co-edited a book on jazz history in Los Angeles titled Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles, and worked with children in Los Angeles elementary schools.

Trumpeter and vocalist Clora Bryant, who was the only female trumpeter to perform with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and was a member of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on August 25, 2019, after suffering a heart attack at home.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

James J. Snidero was born in Redwood City, California on May 29, 1958 and grew up in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Camp Springs, Maryland. He then attended the University of North Texas, performed in the One O’clock Lab band and then moved to New York City in 1981. Once there he recorded and toured with Jack McDuff from 1981 to 1982, then joined Toshiko Akiyoshi’s Jazz Orchestra in 1983 after she moved to New York.

Snidero was a working member of Frank Sinatra’s band from 1991 to 1995 and Eddie Palmieri’s band beginning 1994. He performed with the Frank Wess Sextet, the Mingus Big Band, and Walt Weiskopf. He has worked as a sideman for David Hazeltine, David Murray, Mike LeDonne, Joe Magnarelli, Maria Schneider, Mel Lewis, Jim Rotondi, Brian Lynch, Conrad Herwig, and Tom Varner.

He recorded and performed with his own quintet and over time had various musicians including trumpeters Brian Lynch, Tom Harrell and Tim Hagans; pianists Benny Green and Mulgrew Miller; double bassists Peter Washington and Dennis Irwin; and the drummers Billy Hart and Louis Hayes, Gene Jackson, and Adam Nussbaum.

As an educator Jim has held professor positions at the New School University, Indiana University and Princeton University. He has written five series of jazz etude books and produced courses in jazz improvisation and performance for The Jazz Conception Company.

Saxophonist Jim Snidero Snidero, who has recorded 27 albums as a leader and thirty-three as a sideman, continues to perform throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Arthur Herbert was born May 28, 1907 in Brooklyn, New York to Trinidadian parents. As a young man he worked in a silver and gold refinery while playing local gigs in New York nightclubs and hotels in his spare time. In 1935 he joined Eddie Williams’s band, and soon after started his own, the Rhythm Masters.

In the 1930s and 1940s he worked as a sideman with musicians such as Pete Brown, Coleman Hawkins, Hot Lips Page and Sidney Bechet. The 1950s saw Herbert in semi-retirement as a musician and started up his own pest extermination business. He played in various swing jazz revival ensembles, and toured with Lem Johnson in Poland in the 1960s.

Herbert taught his nephew, drummer Herb Lovelle, to read sheet music, something black musicians were then not held to know. He got his nephew his first gig with Hot Lips Page. He also taught drummer Shelly Manne, according to Herb Lovelle.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Chester Zardis was born on May 27, 1900, in New Orleans, Louisiana and played bass from a young age, studying without his disapproving mother’s knowledge under Billy Marrero of the Superior Orchestra. In his teens he was sent to the Jones Waif Home where he began playing with another of the Home’s residents, Louis Armstrong.

He joined Buddy Petit’s orchestra at age 16, and worked as a bassist in nightclubs and a tubist in brass bands in 1920s New Orleans. There he played with Kid Rena, A.J. Piron, Punch Miller, Kid Howard, Jack Carey, Fate Marable, and Duke Dejan’s Dixie Rhythm Band.

He was given the nickname “Little Bear” by riverboat bandleader Fats Pichon, a bandleader with whom Zardis played in the 1930s. During that decade he also played with Count Basie in New York City, and recorded with George Lewis and Bunk Johnson. During World War II he served in the Army, then worked briefly as a sheriff. Upon his return to New Orleans, he played with Andy Anderson, but quit music between 1954 and 1964.

When he returned to active performance, Chester played often at Preservation Hall with Lewis and Percy Humphrey among many others. He continued to be a fixture of the New Orleans jazz scene up until his death in 1990, including several international tours.

Double bassist Chester Zardis, who was regularly featured in documentaries including Liberty Street Blues, Chester Zardis: Spirit of New Orleans, and Three Men of Jazz,  died on August 14, 1990 in New Orleans.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Neil Richard Ardley was born in Wallington, Surrey, England on May 26, 1937. He attended Wallington County Grammar School and at the age of thirteen started learning the piano and later the saxophone. He studied chemistry at Bristol University, also playing both piano and saxophone in jazz groups, graduating in 1959 with a BSc.

Moving to London, England the next year he studied arranging and composing with Ray Premru and Bill Russo. He joined the John Williams Big Band as pianist, arranger and composer, and from 1964 to 1970 was the director of the New Jazz Orchestra. The band employed some of the best young musicians in London, including Ian Carr, Jon Hiseman, Barbara Thompson, Dave Gelly, Mike Gibbs, Don Rendell, and Trevor Tomkins.

The late 1960s saw Ardley begin composing, combining classical and jazz methods. The New Jazz Orchestra 1969 album Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe is considered a classic of British jazz. It includes arrangements of Nardis by Miles Davis and Naima by John Coltrane, and compositions by young writers associated with the orchestra – including Ardley, Michael Garrick, Mike Gibbs, Howard Riley and Mike Taylor.

His rich orchestrations were augmented in the 1970s by the addition of synthesisers. He began work on an all-electronic album in 1980 which fell through when his recording contract was suddenly terminated, but continued to play and compose, especially with Zyklus, the electronic jazz group he formed with composer John L. Walters, Warren Greveson and Ian Carr.

Neil went on to sing in local choirs in the later 1990s led him to start composing choral music, and to gig and record again with a slimmed down Zyklus consisting of himself, Warren Greaveson, and Nick Robinson

Composer and pianist Neil Ardley, who was an author of popular books on music, died in Bakewell, Derbyshire, England on February 23, 2004.

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