Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Louis Metcalf was born on February 28, 1905 in Webster Groves, Missouri. As a youth he first trained on the drums but switched over to cornet permanently. As a teenager in St. Louis, Missouri he played with Charlie Creath.
Moving to New York City in 1923 he participated in the fertile jazz scene there, playing with Willie The Lion Smith, Jelly Roll Morton, Benny Carter and King Oliver. In 1926, Duke Ellington hired Metcalf to play in his seminal orchestra, where his mellow tone contrasted with that of Bubber Miley. In the 1930s, he led his own bands and also joined Fletcher Henderson’s band.
1946 saw Louis moving to Montreal, Canada where he formed the International Band, the first to play the nascent bebop style in Canada. Under his leadership the Café Saint-Michel was the hub of the jazz scene in Montreal for a few years, with local musicians such as the young Oscar Peterson and visiting Americans Art Pepper, Fats Navarro and Sonny Rollins among others sitting in with the band.
A drug bust prompted Metcalf to return to New York City in 1951. He released an album titled I’ve Got The Peace Brother Blues in 1966, where he demonstrated that his style had indeed evolved since his days with Ellington.
Becoming less active after falling ill in 1968, trumpeter Louis Metcalf transitioned on October 27, 1981.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Joyce Breach was born in Alameda, California on February 27, 1944 and was raised in Kansas City, Missouri. She grew up listening to and admiring Rosemary Clooney, Doris Day, Peggy Lee, Judy Garland, Sarah Vaughan, Abbey Lincoln, and Frank Sinatra. She gleaned from their phrasing and inflections to develop her own indelible style.
After attending West Virginia University she settled in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where she made a name for herself in the ’80s and enjoyed a loyal following in Steel Town. Relocating to New York City, where she has made even bigger strides wowing audiences and reviewers at some of Manhattan’s top clubs.
She recorded her debut album Confessions in 1990 on Audiophile Records, and has gone on to record Lovers After All, Songbird, Nothing But Blue Skies, This Moment, Reel Songs, and Love Is the Thing. She has been featured on Loonis McGlohon & Friends’ A Christmas Memory.
As a songwriter Joyce often collaborates with pianist/arranger Keith Ingham and he usually accompanies her live appearances in the New York area, and has performed across the country. She continues to write, performa nd record.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Steve Grover was born February 26, 1956 in Lewiston, Maine and studied with jazz drummer and teacher Dick Demers. He studied at Berklee School of Music and the University of Maine, and landed a gig with guitarist Lenny Breau, working with him on and off for the next few years, learning the subtleties of small group interplay with a master musician.
In 1979, Grover attended a program at The Creative Music Studio, the music school run by Karl Berger, which had such visiting artists as Oliver Lake, Julius Hemphill, Lee Konitz, Bob Moses, and other musicians. At CMS, he was exposed to the concepts of artists from the world of jazz, new music, and world music.
The 1980s saw Steve team up with clarinetist Brad Terry, saxophonist Charlie Jennison and bassist John Hunter to form a group called The Friends of Jazz. The group played host to visiting artists like Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Tate, Gray Sargent and others while occasionally reconstituting itself with pianist Chris Neville, trombonist Tim Sessions, bassists John Lockwood and Tom Bucci, guitarist Tony Gaboury, and others.
In 1985, Grover composed his Blackbird Suite, a song cycle setting for the Wallace Stevens poem Thirteen Ways of Looking At a Blackbird. Further explorations of this piece continued into 1994, when Blackbird Suite won the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz/BMI Jazz Composers Competition. For the first time the music involved the vocalist Christine Correa and the pianist Frank Carlberg, who performed the piece at the Kennedy Center in 1994, as part of the Monk Institute’s competition. When a CD of the music was finally released in 1997, the reviews were excellent. Drummer and composer Steve Grover continues to compose, perform and record.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ryo Kawasaki was born February 25, 1947 in Kōenji, Tokyo during Japan’s recovery in the early post World War II period. His mother encouraged him to take piano and ballet lessons, and he took voice lessons and solfege at age four and violin lessons at five, and he was reading music before elementary school. As a grade scholar, he began a lifelong fascination with astronomy and electronics. When he was 10, he bought a ukulele and at 14 he got his first acoustic guitar. The album Midnight Blue by Kenny Burrell and Stanley Turrentine inspired him to study jazz.
In high school, he began hanging out at coffee-houses that featured live music, formed a jazz ensemble and built an electronic organ that served as a primitive synthesizer. By the time he was 16, his band was playing professionally in cabarets and strip joints. Although he continued to play music regularly, he attended Nippon University, majored in physics and earned his Bachelor of Science Degree. He also did some teaching and contest judging at the Yamaha musical instrument manufacturer’s jazz school. Additionally, he worked as a sound engineer for Japanese Victor Records and BGM/TBS Music, where he learned mixing and editing.
He recorded his first solo album for Polydor Records when he was 22. And was voted the No. 3 jazz guitarist in a Japanese jazz poll. He spent most of the next three years working as a studio musician on everything from advertising jingles to pop songs including countless radio and TV appearances. He recorded his second album for Toshiba when he was 24. He played with B.B. King at a blues festival and also met George Benson and they jammed for five hours at Kawasaki’s house.
Moving to New York City in 1973 he was offered an immediate gig with Joe Lee Wilson playing at the Lincoln Center as part of the Newport Jazz Festival. Soon Ryo was jamming regularly as part of the loft scene and was invited to play with Bobbi Humphrey. A few months later Gil Evans invited him to join The Gil Evans Orchestra which was then working on a jazz recording, The Gil Evans Orchestra Plays the Music of Jimi Hendrix. He would go on to record on Evan’s There Comes a Time. He became the guitarist in the Chico Hamilton Band, made his debut U.S. album, Juice, in 1976 for RCA and was one of the first Japanese jazz artists to sign with a major label in the States.
He explored Music of India, recorded with Dave Liebman and toured European jazz festivals with Joanne Brackeen as a piano/guitar duo and they recorded a pair of albums. In the mid-1980s, Kawasaki drifted out of performing music in favor of writing music software for computers. He also produced several techno dance singles, formed his own record company called Satellites Records, and later returned to jazz-fusion in 1991.
He continued to release albums up to 2017 and had two retrospective Ep’s released spanning years of 1976~1980 and 1979~1983. Guitarist and keyboardist Ryo Kawasaki transitioned on April 13, 2020 in Tallinn, Estonia at the age of 73.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Leslie Richard Condon born February 23 1930 in Kennington, London, England of Irish stock, took up the trumpet in his late teens. Largely self-taught, he worked with local dance bands before doing his national service, when he played for the Eager Beavers at RAF Wroughton, Wiltshire.
Turning professional in 1952, he played with the usual round of palais bands and then took to the sea as a member of Geraldo’s Navy. Working as a musician on Cunard liners crossing the Atlantic allowed him to worship at the feet of the great exponents of bebop on New York’s 52nd Street. Originally a conventional jazz player, like others of the second wave of modernists he was bowled over by bebop, forging an eloquent style of his own, building on what he knew of Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro and Miles Davis.
In 1954, he became a founder member of British bebop pioneer Tony Crombie’s new band, playing alongside trumpeter Jimmy Deuchar and trombonist Ken Wray. Despite having little formal musical education, he was a valued composer and arranger, contributing to the Crombie band book and recording with the drummer for Decca in 1955. He also began to record and solo regularly with bands led by Vic Lewis and Hayes, before joining drummer Tony Kinsey’s successful quintet.
Condon was among the local players added to form Woody Herman’s (Anglo-American) Herd when the veteran US bandleader toured the UK in 1959. He formed a rewarding friendship with Herman’s lead trumpeter Reunald Jones, formerly a key member of the Count Basie orchestra.
He went on to have a year-long association with Jamaican alto-saxophonist Joe Harriott, famous for his pursuit of “free form” jazz alongside his more structured pieces. He went on to work with a dazzling array of local movers and shakers, recording with the Hayes and Tracey big bands and performing with just about every other significant jazz modernist of the day. An active studio musician, he played for radio and television shows, recorded with singer Georgie Fame and appeared on the Beatles’ Revolver album. His theatre work included a two-year stint with the musical show Bubbling Brown Sugar and a visit to South Africa in 1981, accompanying the singer Jack Jones.
Dental problems forced Condon to cease playing the trumpet in 1990, after which he confined himself to playing the piano at home, composing and studying music. Trumpeter Les Condon, one of the modern players, transitioned on October 30 2007.
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