Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jake Hanna was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts on April 4, 1931 and first performed in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the house drummer at Storyville nightclub in Boston, Massachusetts for a number of years in the 1950s and 1960s. Through the decades beginning in the late Fifties he played with Toshiko Akiyoshi, Maynard Ferguson, Marian McPartland, and Woody Herman’s Orchestra.
He appeared with the Mort Lindsey Orchestra on Judy Garland’s multi Grammy Award-winning 1961 live album, Judy at Carnegie Hall. He did extensive work as a studio musician both in and out of jazz, including an eleven year period from 1964 to 1975 as the drummer for the big band of the Merv Griffin Show. Jake recorded several albums with Carl Fontana for Concord Jazz in the mid-1970s and also played in Supersax. Later in his career he did much work as a sideman for Concord.
Drummer Jake Hanna transitioned from complications from blood disease on February 12, 2010 in Los Angeles, California at the age of 78.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Russ Spiegel was born March 30, 1962 in Los Angeles, California, and raised in Santa Monica, California. His family was musical as he has an older sister who plays the bluegrass fiddle, a pianist and composer brother and a father who is an avid amateur jazz trumpeter.
A fan of pop radio as a youngster, Russ discovered rock music as he entered his teens. Picking up the electric guitar he took lessons at a local music store, eventually buying a Fender Stratocaster. He started jamming with area musicians, which led to forming a rock cover band. Finishing high school in Frankfurt, Germany he enrolled in the University of Maryland that had a campus in Munich, Germany. While there, he formed a progressive-rock band, joined a local R&B and soul unit, and began learning jazz standards. In 1982 Spiegel returned to the U.S. to complete his bachelor’s degree at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, earning a degree in philosophy.
In 1986 had Spiegel in Boston, Massachusetts on scholarship at Berklee College of Music. Upon completion of his studies, he relocated to Germany in 1988 where he gradually made contacts in the music world. He began playing on military bases and at local jazz clubs and festivals. During a stint in Paris, France he formed a quartet called Guitar Hell, which toured widely in France and Germany. He soon found himself in demand as a guitarist and electric bassist with various European big bands, jazz ensembles, and blues groups.
Around the same time, Russ joined the band of German jazz organist Barbara Dennerlein and toured Europe with her before receiving the coveted Jazz Scholarship by the city of Frankfurt for his contributions to the city’s artistic scene.
In 2001 Spiegel returned to the U.S. settled in New York City and studied under teachers Adam Rogers, Paul Bollenback, Ben Monder and John Patitucci, receiving his master’s degree in jazz performance from the City College of New York.
In 2008 his Jazz/North Indian classical fusion ensemble, Sundar Shor, undertook a tour of India under the auspices of the American Center, and it has toured widely in Europe as well. Guitarist Russ Spiegel continues to perform and record.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Eric “Big Daddy” Dixon was born on March 28, 1930 in New York City, New York. Although he played bugle as a child,he switched to the tenor saxophone at the age of 12. Following a stint as a musician in the US Army from 1951 to 1953 he played in groups that sometimes included Mal Waldron, with whom he would later record.
In 1954, he played with Cootie Williams and the following year with Johnny Hodges. In 1956, he performed and recorded with Bennie Green and also took up the flute.
The late Fifties had him spending four years in the house band led by Reuben Phillips at the Apollo Theatre in New York. At the end of the decade he toured Europe and recorded with the Cooper Brothers.
He also worked with Paul Gonsalves, Ahmed Abdul-Malik, Oliver Nelson, Quincy Jones, Jack McDuff, Joe Williams, Frank Foster, and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, but is probably best known for his tenure in Count Basie’s band, which lasted almost two decades. Dixon continued to play in the ghost band after Basie’s death.
Tenor saxophonist, flautist, composer, and arranger Eric Dixon, who has been credited on as many as 200 recordings, transitioned on October 19, 1989 in New York City.
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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..
Moreira Chonguiça was born in Maputo, Mozambique on February 13, 1977. On completing his schooling he attended the University of Cape Town to further his music studies, graduating from the South African College of Music with a degree in jazz performance. He also graduated cum laude and holds an honours degree in Ethnomusicology.
In 2010 he started a jazz festival, Morejazz, in Maputo, where artists are invited to play at the festival and also hold master-classes at the Eduardo Mondlane University in the city. That same year his group, The Moreira Project, opened the Standard Bank Jazz Festival in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape. He collaborated with Manu Dibango on the album M & M, which was released in 2017.
His philanthropy extends to renovating schools, conducting workshops, poetry projects about HIV/Aids, inmate music programs to encourage reform, and works with road safety and family planning groups. Saxophonist Moreira Chonguiça continues to record, perform and pursue various philanthropic endeavors.
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