Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Todd Washington Rhodes was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky on August 31, 1899 and was raised in Springfield, Ohio. He attended the Springfield School of Music and the Erie Conservatory, studying as pianist and songwriter. After graduating in 1921, he began performing with drummer William McKinney in the jazz band McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, and played with Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins, Fats Waller, Rex Stewart, Doc Cheatham, and Don Redman.
Leaving McKinney’s Cotton Pickers in 1934, he lived and played in Detroit, Michigan from then on. He formed his own small group in 1943, expanding it into the Todd Rhodes Orchestra by 1946. The orchestra made its first recordings for Sensation Records in 1947.
Turning more towards rhythm and blues music, the band became known as Todd Rhodes & His Toddlers, and their recordings were distributed by the Vitacoustic label. His instrumental Blues for the Red Boy reached number 4 on the R&B chart late in 1948, and the following year Pot Likker, made number 3 on the R&B chart. “Blues for the Red Boy” was later famously used by Alan Freed as the theme song for his Moondog radio show; Freed referring to the song as “Blues for the Moondog” instead of its actual title.
With his Toddlers, Rhodes also recorded Your Daddy’s Doggin’ Around and Your Mouth Got a Hole in It. After signing with King Records in 1951, he also worked with Hank Ballard, Dave Bartholomew, and Wynonie Harris. He featured singers such as Connie Allen, who recorded “Rocket 69” in 1952. After she left the band in early 1952, her position was taken by LaVern Baker. Rhodes made his last recordings in the late 1950s.
Developing diabetes, which was untreated for several years, pianist, arranger and bandleader Todd Rhodes transitioned following the amputation of a leg in Inkster, Michigan on June 4, 1965, at the age of 65.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
William Stevens Bryant was born August 30, 1908 in Chicago, Illinois and while growing up took trumpet lessons to little success. His first job in entertainment was dancing in the Whitman Sisters Show in 1926. He worked in various vaudeville productions for the next several years, and in 1934 he appeared in the show Chocolate Revue with Bessie Smith.
In 1934, he put together his first big band, which at times included Teddy Wilson, Cozy Cole, Johnny Russell, Benny Carter, Ben Webster, Eddie Durham, Ram Ramirez, and Taft Jordan. They recorded six times between 1935 and 1938 with Bryant sings on 18 of the 26 sides recorded.
Once his ensemble disbanded, Bryant worked as an actor and disc jockey. He recorded R&B in 1945 and led another big band between 1946 and 1948. During September and October 1949, he hosted Uptown Jubilee, a short-lived all-Black variety show on CBS-TV, airing on Tuesday nights. In the 1950s he was the emcee at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York.
Bandleader, vocalist, and disc jockey Willie Bryant, known as the Mayor of Harlem, transitioned from a heart attack in Los Angeles, California on February 9, 1964.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Tony Crombie was born Anthony John Kronenberg on August 27, 1925 in London, England’s East End Jewish community. A self-taught musician, he began playing the drums at the age of fourteen. He was one of a group of young men from the East End of London who ultimately formed the co-operative Club Eleven bringing modern jazz to Britain. He went to New York with his friend Ronnie Scott in 1947, witnessing the playing of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, he and like-minded musicians such as Johnny Dankworth, and Scott and Denis Rose, brought be-bop to the UK. This group of musicians were the ones called upon if and when modern jazz gigs were available.
In 1948, Crombie toured Britain and Europe with Duke Ellington, who had been unable to bring his own musicians with him, except for Ray Nance and Kay Davis. Picking up a rhythm section in London, he chose Crombie on the recommendation of Lena Horne, with whom Crombie had worked when she appeared at the Palladium.
By 1956 Tony temporarily left jazz to set up a rock and roll band he called The Rockets, modeling themselves after Bill Haley’s Comets and Freddie Bell & the Bellboys. They released several singles for Decca and Columbia. He is credited with introducing rock and roll music to Iceland, performing there in 1957.
The next year the Rockets had become a jazz group with Scott and Tubby Hayes. During the following year, Crombie started Jazz Inc. with pianist Stan Tracey. During the Sixties he scored for television and film and established a residency at a hotel in Monte Carlo. He toured the UK with Conway Twitty, Freddy Cannon, Johnny Preston, and Wee Willie Harris.
In the early 1960s, Crombie’s friend, Victor Feldman, passed one of his compositions to Miles Davis, who recorded the piece on his album Seven Steps to Heaven. The song, “So Near, So Far”, has been recorded by players including Joe Henderson, who named a tribute album to Miles Davis using the title.
Over the next thirty years, Crombie worked with many American jazz musicians, including Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Illinois Jacquet, Joe Pass, Mark Murphy and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis.
After breaking his arm in a fall in the mid-1990s he stopped playing the drums, but continued composing until his death. Drummer, pianist, vibraphonist, bandleader and composer Tony Crombie, was regarded as one of the finest English jazz drummers and bandleaders, transitioned on October 18, 1999, aged 74.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
George Abel Van Eps was born on August 7, 1913 in Plainfield, New Jersey into a family of musicians. His mother was a classical pianist, his father was a ragtime banjoist and sound engineer and his three brothers were musicians. He began playing banjo at eleven years old but after hearing Eddie Lang on the radio, he devoted himself to guitar. By thirteen, in 1926, he was performing on the radio.
Through the middle of the 1930s, he played with Harry Reser, Smith Ballew, Freddy Martin, Benny Goodman, and Ray Noble. Van Eps moved to Los Angeles, California and spent most of his remaining career as a studio musician, playing on many commercials and movie soundtracks.
In the 1930s, he invented a model of guitar with another bass string added to the common six-string guitar. The seven-string guitar allowed him to play bass lines below his chord voicings, unlike the single-string style of Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt. He called his technique “lap piano”, as it anticipated the fingerpicking style of country guitarists Chet Atkins and Merle Travis and inspired jazz guitarists Bucky Pizzarelli, John Pizzarelli, and Howard Alden to pick up the seven-string.
Dixieland had a following in Los Angeles during the 1940s and 1950s, and he played in groups led by Bob Crosby and Matty Matlock and appeared in the film Pete Kelly’s Blues. He played guitar on Frank Sinatra’s 1955 album. In The Wee Small Hours.
Playing guitar into his eighties, he built a career that lasted over sixty years. Swing and mainstream guitarist George Van Eps, who recorded eleven albums as a leader and thirty~two as a sideman, transitioned from pneumonia on November 29, 1998 in Newport Beach, California at the age of 85.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Thomas Robert Talbert was born on August 4, 1924 in Crystal Bay, Minnesota and grew up listening to big band music on the radio. He learned to play piano before he became a composer. He got started as a band leader when he was drafted in the Army in 1943, becoming composer for a military band at Fort Ord, California, performing for War Bond drives throughout California.
In the late 1940s he led his own big band on the West Coast, much of his work foreshadowing what became known as West Coast jazz. During the decade in Los Angeles he worked with Johnny Richards, Lucky Thompson, Dodo Marmarosa, Hal McKusick, Al Killian, Art Pepper, Steve White and Claude Williamson…….
Moving to New York in the early 1950s after being denied a recording contract in Los Angeles, California he worked with Marian McPartland, Kai Winding, Don Elliott, Johnny Smith, Oscar Pettiford, Herb Geller, Joe Wilder, Eddie Bert, Barry Galbraith, Aaron Sachs and Claude Thornhill. In 1956, Talbert recorded two records that would become his best known works, Wednesday’s Child and Bix Duke Fats, which gained him fleeting fame.
When rock and roll eclipsed jazz in popularity, in 1960 he moved to his parents’ home in Minnesota. He tried his hand at cattle ranching in Wisconsin but eventually moved back to Los Angeles and a musical career in 1975. As a sideman he recorded with the Boyd Raeburn Orchestra, Johnny Richards, and Patty McGovern.
In addition to composing for TV and movie studios, he became involved in music education, and set up a foundation to help talented young musicians, with one of the first recipients in 1996 was Maria Schneider.
Pianist, composer and band leader Thomas Talbert, who recorded eighteen albums as a leader, transitioned on July 2, 2005 in Los Angeles.
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