Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Roy Kral was born on October 10, 1921 in Cicero, Illinois. His sister was the renowned vocalist Irene Kral. Urged by his mother, he took classical piano lessons as a young boy but by the 1930s abandoned them to teach himself to play jazz piano by mimicking what he heard while listening to the radio under his blanket after bedtime.

During World War II, Kral served in the Army as an arranger for the Army band. After service he moved to Chicago, Illinois and joined the George Davis Quartet. As a pianist and singer for Charlie Ventura’s band, Bop for the People, in 1948 ç Kral agreed to write a new arrangement of the 1919 pop song I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles. He added a bebop sensibility and scat singing to a rather insipid pop standard, transforming it into a cool, jazzy tune and their first hit.

Meeting Jackie Cain at eighteen and just out of high school and his initial impression was not her singing until he heard her. Their voices were an octave apart and their partnership was cemented when they married in 1949 and became the duo Jackie and Roy, recording nearly 40 albums in 56 years. Coming to prominence during the bebop era they combined bebop singing with cabaret creating a very polished sound of pop, jazz and Latin music, all inflected with a jazz sensibility. The duo produced hits like Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most, You Inspire Me, and It’s A Lovely Day Today.

Pianist and vocalist Roy Kral, one half of one of the most important vocal groups in jazz, passed away at 80 of congestive heart failure on August 2, 2002 in Montclair, New Jersey. 

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Lee Wiley was born in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma on October 9, 1908. At fifteen, she left home to pursue a singing career, moving to New York City to perform on radio stations. However, her career was interrupted by a horseback riding fall that temporarily sidelined her due to blindness but recovered. At 19 she became a member of the Leo Reisman Orchestra, with whom in 1931 she recorded three songs: Take It From Me, Time On My Hands, and her composition Got The South In My Soul.

Lee began her radio career at KVOO in Tulsa, Oklahoma on the Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt program on NBC in 1932, and was featured on Victor Young’s radio show in 1933. Throughout the summer of 1936, she had her own show, Lee Wiley, on CBS.

In 1939 she recorded eight Gershwin songs on 78s with a small group for Liberty Music Shop Records. The set sold well and was followed the next year by the music of Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart, Harold Arlen, and the music of Vincent Youmans and Irving Berlin.

She sang with Paul Whiteman, and the Casa Loma Orchestra. A collaboration with composer Victor Young resulted in several songs for which Wiley wrote the lyrics, including Got The South In My Soul and Anytime, Anyday, Anywhere. In 1963, Bob Hope Theater on NBC-TV presented “Something About Lee Wiley, where Piper Laurie portrayed her in the episode, which was produced by Revue Studios.

Vocalist Lee Wiley, active from the 1930 through the 1950s, passed away on December 11, 1975.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Gerald Asher Moore was born in London, England on October 8, 1903. He spent the years between 1922-1939 working freelance in London, playing at movie palaces and nightclubs.

Among the clubs he worked in the Twenties and Thirties were Sherry’s, the Empress Rooms, Chez Rex Evans, Bag o’ Nails, 43 Club, and Mema’s. His first live appearance on BBC radio in 1936 was heralded in The Radio Times with a listing as Britain’s King of Swing.At the end of the decade he worked with Buddy Featherstonhaugh, and inthe Forties with Adelaide Hall and with Vic Lewis.

Working in Europe late in the 1940s, he played in Germany with Max Geldray, at the Paris Jazz Fair with Carlo Krahmer, and at the Palm Beach Hotel in Cannes, France. Moore played with Harry Gold and Laurie Gold in 1954-57 and worked as a pianist on the Queen Mary and Caronia into the 1960s.

From the mid-1960s pianist Gerry Moore played in London clubs until he passed away on January 29, 1993 in Twickenham, southwest London.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

George Girard was born October 7, 1930 in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana and in  high school he studied music under Johnny Wiggs and  immediately after graduating in 1946 he became a professional musician. He played and toured with the bands of Johnny Archer and Phil Zito before co~founding the band The Basin Street Six, made up mostly of friends he had grown up with, including clarinetist Pete Fountain.

The band got a regular gig at L’Enfant’s Restaurant in New Orleans, as well as regular television broadcasts over WWL. The band started receiving favorable national attention, but being dissatisfied with it, broke up the band in 1954 and founded his own band, George Girard & the New Orleans Five. Landing a residency at the Famous Door in the French Quarter, he recorded for several labels, and got a weekly broadcast on CBS’s affiliated local radio station WWL.

His ambitions to make a national name for himself were thwarted when he became ill and had to give up playing in 1956. Trumpeter George Girard, known for his great technical ability, passed away from colon cancer in New Orleans, Louisiana on January 18, 1957. He was twenty-six.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Tord Gustavsen was born on October 5, 1970 in Oslo, Norway and raised in rural Hurdal, Akershus where he grew up playing church music. He attended the University of Oslo with a degree in psychology before going to the Trondheim Musikkonsevatorium studying jazz for three years. Graduate school saw him with a degree in musicology at the University of Oslo, where he was a guest teacher of jazz piano and theory.

Signed to ECM Records, between 2003 and 2007 the Tord Gustavsen Trio released three albums and in 2005 won the Nattjazz prize. A later ensemble released the album Restored, Returned was recorded in 2009, which was awarded with Spellemannsprisen, the Norwegian Grammy. The quartet went on to release The Well,  Extended Circle and play the Montreal Jazz Festival in several different configurations.

He has recorded as a session musician, and guested on friends’ albums, as well as collaborative projects. Pianist Tord Gustavsen continues to be highly interested in psychology and has written a lengthy thesis on the paradoxes of improvisation. He continues to express his music through performance and recordings.

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