Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Marcus Printup was born on January 24, 1967 in Conyers, Georgia. His first musical experiences hearing the fiery gospel music his parents sang in church and didn’t discover jazz until he was a senior in high school.
He is a versatile musician who started playing trumpet in the fifth grade, played funk as a teenager, and while attending the University of North Florida on music scholarship, won the “International Trumpet Guild Jazz Trumpet Competition”, and was a member of a ten-piece group called “Soul Reason for the Blues”. In 1991 he met pianist Marcus Roberts, his mentor to this day, who introduced him to Wynton Marsalis, and was induction into the Jazz @ Lincoln Center Orchestra two years later.
Marcus has performed and/or recorded with Betty Carter, Dianne Reeves, Eric Reed, Cyrus Chestnut, Wycliffe Gordon, Carl Allen, Marcus Roberts among many others, not to mention a few of his projects as a leader, Song for the Beautiful Woman, Hub Songs, The New Boogaloo, Bird of Paradise, London Lullaby and his most recent, Desire.
Printup’s screen debut was in the 1999 movie “Playing By Heart” and also recorded on the film’s soundtrack. He tours annually with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, spending one-third of his year touring world wide, and nourishes his educator side by teaching youth and experienced musicians and contributing to several camps annually.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Marilyn Mazur was born on January 18, 1955 of Polish and African American descent in New York but grew up on Denmark from the age of six. Primarily a self-taught percussionist and drummer, she got a degree in percussion at the Royal Danish Academy of Music.
From 1975, Mazur has worked as a percussionist with various groups, among others, the group Six Winds with Alex Riel. She has performed with such notables as Niels-Henning Orsted Pederson, Jan Garbarek, Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Wayne Shorter Jeanne Lee and Palle Mikkelborg to mention a few.
By 1989, Marilyn founded her band Future Song, a sextet with her husband Klavs Hovman. A second project, Percussion Paradise, brought together percussionists Benita Haastrup, Lisbeth Diers and Birgit Løkke.
Marilyn Mazur is also a composer, pianist, dancer and bandleader and has been selected by Down Beat in 1989, 1990 and 1995 as a “percussion talent deserving wider recognition”. In 2001, she was awarded the Jazzpar Prize, the world’s largest international jazz prize. She continues to record, perform and tour.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ira Gitler was born December 18, 1928 in Brooklyn, New York and grew up listening to swing bands in the late 1930s and 1940s, before discovering the new music of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. In the early 1950s, he worked as a producer for many recording sessions of Prestige Records and is credited with coining the term “sheets of sound” in the late 1950s, to describe the playing of John Coltrane.
Ira was the New York editor of Down Beat magazine during the 1960s and has written for Metronome Magazine, Jazz Times, Jazz Improv, Modern Drummer, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Village Voice, Playboy, World Monitor and New York Magazine along with international publications Swing Journal in Japan, Music Jazz – Italy, Jazz Magazine, France.
Gitler was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974, received a Lifetime Achievement Awards by the New Jersey Jazz Society in 2001, and by the Jazz Journalists Association in 2002.
He is a jazz historian and journalist best known for “The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz, co-authored with Leonard Feather. He has written hundreds of liner notes for jazz recordings since the early 1950s and is the author of dozens of books about his two passions, jazz and ice hockey.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Raymond Stanley Noble was born on December 17, 1903 in Brighton, England and studied music at the Royal Academy. He became the leader of the HMV Records studio band, known as the New Mayfair Dance Orchestra that featured popular vocalist Al Bowlly and many musicians of the top hotel bands.
The Bowlly/Noble recordings achieved popularity in the United States, however, union bans prevented Noble from bringing British musicians to America so he arranged for Glenn Miller to recruit American musicians. Bowlly returned to England but Noble continued to lead bands in America, moving into an acting career portraying a stereotypical upper-class English idiot in films like Top Hat and Slumming On Park Avenue. He also played the “dense” character in love with Gracie Allen, or with his orchestra in an Edgar Bergen vehicle. Noble also provided music for many radio shows of the times like The Charlie McCarthy Show. His last major success as a bandleader came with Buddy Clark in the late 1940s.
Ray Noble arranged hits in the 1930s such as “Easy to Love”, “Mad About the Boy”, “Paris in the Spring”, wrote both lyrics and music for now jazz standards “Love Is The Sweetest Thing”, “Cherokee”, “The Touch of Your Lips”, “I Hadn’t Anyone Till You” and “The Very Thought Of You” and co-wrote “Goodnight, Sweetheart” and “You’re So Desirable”, recorded by Billie Holiday, Teddy Wilson and in 1990 by Robert Palmer.
Ray Noble, bandleader, composer, arranger, pianist, singer and actor passed away on April 3, 1978 at the age of 74.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Curtis DuBois Fuller was born in Detroit, Michigan on December 15, 1934 to Jamaican parents who died when he was very young and raised in an orphanage. He took up the trombone while in Detroit and became friends with schoolmates Paul Chambers and Donald Byrd and also knew Tommy Flanagan, Thad Jones and Milt Jackson.
After two years of army service ending in 1955, where he played in a band with Chambers and the Adderley brothers, Fuller joined the quintet of another Detroit musician, Yusef Lateef. By 1957 the quintet moved to New York and Curtis recorded his first sessions as a leader for Prestige Records.
Alfred Lion of Blue Note Records heard him playing with Miles Davis in the late Fifties and featured him as a sideman on record dates led by Sonny Clark and John Coltrane. His work on Trane’s “Blue Train” album is probably his best-known recorded performance. This was followed with four Fuller led dates for Blue Note.
Over his career Curtis has worked with Slide Hampton, Bud Powell, Jimmy Smith, Wayne Shorter, Abbey Lincoln, Lee Morgan, Hank Mobley, Blue Mitchell and Joe Henderson, and that’s the very short list. He performed with Dizzy Gillespie’s band, toured with Count Basie, was the sixth Jazz Messenger with Art Blakey in 1961, was the first trombonist to hold membership in the Art Farmer-Benny Golson Jazztet, and has recorded for Savoy, Epic, Impulse, Status, Challenge, Timeless and Capri among others and his latest album, “Down Home” on Capri.
In addition to continuing to perform and record, he was a faculty member of the New York State Summer School of the Arts – School of Jazz Studies. Trombonist Curtis Fuller passed away on May 8, 2021.
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