DailyDose Of Jazz…
Leonard Ware was born in Richmond, Virginia on December 28, 1909. He went to college at the Tuskegee Institute and learned to play the oboe.
By 1938 Ware was playing electric guitar on recordings by Sidney Bechet. He then started working with Jimmy Shirley, who was one of the first groups to have two electric guitarists.
In December 1938, he played at Carnegie Hall with the Kansas City Six alongside Lester Young and Buck Clayton. 1939 saw him recording Umbrella Man with Benny Goodman. He performed in a trio during the 1940s and recorded as a leader in 1947. Leonard also recorded with Don Byas, Albinia Jones, Buddy Johnson, and Big Joe Turner.
Ware was the co-composer of Hold Tight, which he recorded with Bechet and I Dreamt I Dwelt in Harlem with Jerry Gray and Buddy Feyne, which was recorded by Glenn Miller and The Delta Rhythm Boys in 1941.
Dropping out of music a few years later, guitarist Leonard Ware, who was one of the first American jazz guitarists to play electric guitar, died at the age of 64 on March 30, 1974.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jim Hession was born on December 10, 1947 in Pasadena, California, where he studied piano with composer Oscar Rasbach. By the time he turned twenty he was a fixture in the traditional jazz scene, with his incredibly accurate two-handed piano style. He was a founding member of the Maple Leaf Club, receiving his degree in composition from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where he studied under Paul Chihara and Lalo Schifrin.
Jim met and began recording with Eubie Blake and while recording with Eubie Blake in New York City he began exploring more contemporary jazz venues, while retaining his handle on traditional jazz styles like ragtime, stride and boogie-woogie.
He met his future wife Martha while they were attending UCLA, where she was studying piano and voice. She began singing professionally with Jim and started a professional association with the Walt Disney Company in 1967 until relocating to the Gulf Coast in 2003.
Over the years they have performed with such luminaries as Teddy Wilson, Al Hirt, Bob Crosby, Johnny Guarnieri, Max Morath, Shelton Brooks, Gregory Hines, Savion Glover, and Disney songwriters the Sherman Brothers. They have acquired an incredible knowledge of the history of American music and hold 85,000+ pieces, one of the largest privately-held collections of original sheet music in the United States.
They have lectured at many colleges and educational venues across the country. The couple have performed as a jazz duo, headlined the American Jazz Quintet, appeared on television, produced stage shows, and historical lectures. Pianist Jim Hession and Martha Hession continue to bring a level of talent and versatility not often found on the music scene.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Joseph Francis Lamb was born of Irish parents on December 6, 1887 in Montclair, New Jersey. The youngest of four children, he taught himself to play the piano and admired the early ragtime publications of Scott Joplin. His first known works were Meet Me At The Chutes and Idle Dreams, at the age of 13 in 1900, but they are unpublished and assumed lost.
During his teenage years while living in Toronto, Canada he published several march and waltz compositions for Harry H. Sparks Music Publisher. Most notable were The Lilliputian’s Bazaar, Celestine Waltzes, and Florentine. Most were published after he left Canada
Lamb dropped out of St. Jerome’s College in 1904 to work for a dry goods company. He met Joplin in 1907 while purchasing the latest Joplin and Scott sheet music in the offices of John Stark & Son. It was there that Joplin was impressed with Lamb’s compositions and recommended him to ragtime publisher John Stark. Stark published Lamb’s music for the next decade, starting with Sensation.
Joseph’s twelve rags published by Stark from 1908 to 1919 can be divided into two groups: the “heavy” rags are incorporated with Joplin’s melody–dominated style and Scott’s expansive use of the keyboard registers. The “light” rags with the cakewalk tradition show the narrow-range melodies inspired by Joplin.
He went on to work as an arranger for the J. Fred Helf Music Publishing Company and in 1914 became an accountant for L. F. Dommerich & Company. When popular music interest shifted from ragtime to jazz Lamb stopped publishing his music, playing and composing only as a hobby.
Composer Joseph Lamb, who was the only non-African American of the Big Three composers of classical ragtime, the other two being Scott Joplin and James Scott, died of a heart attack in Brooklyn, New York at age 72 on September 3, 1960.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Tony Jackson was born Antonio Junius Jackson an epileptic on October 25, 1882 into a poor Black family of freed slaves in Uptown New Orleans, Louisiana. His twin brother died at fourteen months of age. Showing musical talents at a young age by 10 he constructed a crude properly tuned harpsichord out of junk in his backyard. He played hymns he heard in church and soon the neighborhood was offering the use of their pianos and reed organs to practice on. This led to his first musical job at age 13, when he began playing piano during off hours at a Tonk run by bandleader Adam Olivier.
Jackson became the most popular and sought after entertainer in the red light district Storyville. Able to remember and play any tune he had heard once and was hardly ever stumped by obscure requests. His singing voice was also exceptional, and he was able to sing operatic parts from baritone to soprano range. He became a mentor to Jelly Roll Morton.
Tony wrote many original tunes, a number of which he sold rights to for a few dollars or were simply stolen from him; some of the old time New Orleans musicians said that some well known Tin Pan Alley pop tunes of the era were actually written by Jackson.
Well dressed always with a pearl gray derby, checkered vest, ascot tie with a diamond stickpin, with sleeve garters on his arms to hold up his cuffs as he played. This became a standard outfit for ragtime and barrelhouse pianists.
Moving to Chicago, Illinois hoping to have more of an influence on his career. Jackson was a resident performer at the De Luxe and Pekin Cafes in the city. In his later years his voice and dexterity were impaired by disease, syphilis or cirrhosis of the liver in addition to chronic epilepsy. Pianist, singer, and composer Tony Jackson died on April 20, 1921.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Sylvester Lewis was born on October 19, 1908 in Kansas City, Missouri and played locally as a college student around the city in the 1920s. His first major tour was with a traveling revue called Shake Your Feet, where he met Herbie Cowens. This meeting led to him joining the Cowens group, playing at the Rockland Palace in New York City in 1928.
He recorded with Jelly Roll Morton in New York the same year. After a stint with Aubrey Neal in 1929, Lewis joined Claude Hopkins’s band, playing with him from 1930 to 1936 and recording with him extensively between 1932 and 1935.
Leaving Hopkins, he performed in Billy Butler’s orchestra for the theater show Rhapsody in Black and played in Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake’s Shuffle Along in 1941. Sylvester led his own band for troop tours of the Pacific during World War II, and recorded with Roy Eldridge in 1946 after his discharge.
He began studying the Schillinger system in the late 1940s, but gave up music entirely after 1949 and spent the rest of his life working for the New York City Subway.
Trumpeter Sylvester Lewis died in 1974 in New York City.
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