Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bobby Rosengarden was born Robert Marshall Rosengarden on April 23, 1924 in Elgin, Illinois and began playing drums when he was 12, and later studied at the University of Michigan. After playing drums in Army bands in World War II, he moved to New York City and worked in several groups between 1945 and 1948 before becoming a busy studio musician.
He played in the orchestras at NBC-TV from 1949–1968 and ABC from 1969–1974 on The Steve Allen Show, The Ernie Kovacs Show, Sing Along With Mitch, Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show Band, and led the band for The Dick Cavett Show.
Through the years, Rosengarden was an active studio musician, recording with Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Skitch Henderson, Quincy Jones, Peter Nero, Gil Evans, Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, Benny Goodman, Moondog, Dick Hyman, Arlo Guthrie, Carmen McRae, Ben E. King, Harry Belafonte, Barbra Streisand, Jimi Hendrix, Stan Getz, Oliver Nelson, Jimmy Smith, Sylvia Syms, Milt Hinton, Derek Smith, Bob Wilber, Keny Davern, Walter Wanderley, Kai Winding and Tony Bennett.
In later years, Rosengarden was most often heard as the drummer with a variety of all-star, swing-oriented groups, including the Soprano Summit. Drummer Robert Rosengarden passed away from Alzheimer’s disease on February 27, 2007 in Sarasota, Florida, at the age of 82.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lou Stein was born on April 22, 1922 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. By 1942 he had joined Ray McKinley’s band in 1942. While serving military service he played with Glenn Miller’s Army Airforce Band stateside during World War II but never went overseas.
After the war, he worked with Charlie Ventura in 1946 and 1947 and became a session musician. Lou performed with the Lawson-Haggart Band, Benny Goodman, Sarah Vaughan, the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra, Louie Bellson, Red Allen, Coleman Hawkins, and Lester Young.
Recording as a bandleader, in 1957 Stein had a U.S. Top 40 hit with Almost Paradise, which peaked at No. 31 on the Billboard Hot 100. His cover version of Got a Match made the Cashbox Top 60 in 1958. His most famous composition was East of Suez.
He played with Joe Venuti and Flip Phillips from 1969 to 1972. From 1954 to 1994 he recorded sixteen albums as a leader and through the Fifties, he recorded with Louis Bellson, Woody Herman, Lee Konitz, Joe Newman, Charlie Parker, Cootie Williams. Pianist and composer Lou Stein, who was comfortable in swing, bop, Dixieland, and commercial settings, passed away on December 11, 2002.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Raymond Ventura was born on April 16, 1908 into a Jewish family in Paris, France and learned to play the piano as a child. By the time he turned 17 in 1925 he was the pianist for the Collegiate Five, which recorded as the Collegians for Columbia Records beginning in 1928 and then for Decca in the 1930s.
Later he led the Collegians and it became a dance orchestra resembling a big band. His sidemen included Alix Combelle, Philippe Brun, and Guy Paquinet. In the early Forties, Ray led a big band in South America and in France during the rest of the decade.
One of his band’s popular songs from 1936 was Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise in which the Marquise is told by her servants that everything is fine at home except for a series of escalating calamities. It was seen as a metaphor for France’s obliviousness to the approaching war.
Between 1931 and 1953 he appeared with his big band in four films, American Love, Beautiful Star, Women of Paris, and A Hundred Francs A Second. Pianist and bandleader Ray Ventura, who helped popularize jazz in France in the 1930s, March 29, 1979 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Kamil Běhounek was born on March 29, 1916 in Blatná, Czech Republic and was an autodidact on accordion, having learned to play by imitating recordings and BBC broadcasts. While studying law in Prague he began performing in clubs and recorded his first solo accordion date in 1936. By the late 1930s, he was working with the Blue Music Orchestra, Rudolf Antonin Dvorsky, Jiří Traxler, and Karel Vlach.
In 1943, he was forcibly compelled by the Nazis to go to Berlin and make arrangements for the bands of Lutz Templin and Ernst van’t Hoff. Upon returning to Czechoslovakia in 1945, he used some of these arrangements for his own band, then returned to Germany the following year, where he continued arranging for bandleaders such as Adalbert Luczkowski, Willy Berking, Heinz Schönberger, and Werner Müller.
He played with his own ensemble, including in Bonn, Germany and after 1948 he performed in West Germany at American soldiers’ clubs. Between 1968 and 1977 he recorded several albums of folk music but continued to play swing with his own groups. He also wrote an autobiography, Má láska je jazz (Jazz is my Love), which was published posthumously in 1986.
Bohemian accordionist, bandleader, arranger, composer, and film scorer Kamil Běhounek, who occasionally played tenor saxophone, passed away on November 22, 1983 in Bonn, Germany.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Chuck Wayne was born Charles Jagelka on February 27, 1923 in New York City to a Czechoslovakian family. As a boy, he learned banjo, mandolin, and balalaika. By the early 1940s he was playing in jazz bands on 52nd Street and after two years in the Army, he returned to New York City, joined Joe Marsala’s band, and settled in Staten Island until a 1991 move to New Jersey. He changed his musical style after hearing Charlie Parker, recording with Dizzy Gillespie in 1945. Frustrated with the difficulty of getting the sound he wanted, he considered switching to saxophone.
Wayne was a member of Woody Herman’s First Herd, the first guitarist in the George Shearing quintet, worked with Coleman Hawkins, Red Norvo, Bud Powell, Jack Teagarden, George Shearing, Lester Young, and Barbara Carroll. During the 1950s, he played with Tony Bennett, Gil Evans, Brew Moore, Zoot Sims, and George Wallington. In the Sixties, CBS hired him as a staff guitarist and for the next two decades, he played on Broadway, accompanied vocalists, and performed in guitar duos with Joe Puma and Tal Farlow.
He wrote Sonny in honor of Sonny Berman. Years later, Miles Davis took the song, renamed it Solar, and claimed he wrote it. His Butterfingers and Prospecting have been incorrectly attributed to Zoot Sims. Chuck was known for a bebop style influenced by saxophone players of his time and he developed a technique not widely adopted, and also developed a comprehensive approach to guitar chords and arpeggios.
Over the course of his career, he recorded eight albums as a leader beginning with his 1953 album The Chuck Wayne Quintet on the Progressive label. He worked as a sideman with Gil Evans, Anthony Perkins, Dick Katz, Duke Jordan, and Frank Wess, among others. Guitarist Chuck Wayne, one of the first jazz guitarists to learn bebop, passed away on July 29, 1997.
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