Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Barbara Lea was born Barbara Ann LeCocq on April 10, 1929 in Detroit, Michigan. A musical family, her musical heritage is traceable to a great uncle, Alexandre Charles LeCocq, an important nineteenth-century composer of French light opera. Her father changed their surname to Leacock and she shortened it to Lea when she began working professionally.
Boston was a hotbed of jazz in the late 1940s and early 1950s, allowing Lea to sing with major instrumentalists including as Marian McPartland, Bobby Hackett, Vic Dickenson, Frankie Newton, Johnny Windhurst and George Wein. She worked with small dance bands there before majoring in music theory at Wellesley College on scholarship. She also sang in the college choir, worked on the campus radio station and newspaper, and arranged for and conducted the Madrigal Group and brass choir concerts.
Barbara’s professional career started upon graduation with her early recordings for Riverside and Prestige. They were met with immediate critical acclaim that led to her winning the DownBeat International Critics’ Poll as the Best New Singer of 1956. She appeared in small clubs in New York and throughout the eastern U.S. and Canada, as well as on radio and TV.
With the near-demise of classic pop in the early 60s, Lea turned to the legitimate theatre, performing an impressive list of leading and feature roles in everything from Shakespeare to Sondheim. Moving to the West Coast received her M.A. in drama at Cal State Northridge and then returned to New York and taught speech at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and acting at Hofstra University.
By the 1970s, with the resurgence of interest in show tunes and popular standards, Lea performed on NPR’s “American Popular Song with Alec Wilder & Friends”, appeared in two shows featuring the songs of Willard Robison and Lee Wiley, and received lengthy features in the New Yorker magazine. With her singing career was renewed she would consistently play the JVC, Kool and Newport Jazz Festivals as well as cabarets and concerts.
Jazz singer Barbara Lea, who also sang Dixieland, swing and cabaret, passed away on December 26, 2011 in Raleigh, North Carolina from complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Art Van Damme was born on April 9, 1920 in Norway, Michigan. He began playing the accordion at age nine and started classical study when his family moved to Chicago, Illinois in 1934. By 1941 he joined Ben Bernie’s band as an accordionist and adapted Benny Goodman’s music to the instrument.
From 1945 to 1960 Art worked for NBC, performing on The Dinah Shore Show, Tonight, The Dave Garroway Show and other radio and TV shows with Garroway. He recorded 130 episodes of the 15-minute The Art Van Damme Show for NBC Radio.
Van Damme toured Europe and was popular with jazz audiences in Japan, regularly winning the domestic Down Beat Reader’s Poll for his instrument. Over the course of his career he recorded and released four-dozen albums for Capitol, Columbia, Harmony, BASF, Pausa, Finlandia, MPS record labels.
Retiring to Roseville, California, he continued to perform almost to the end of his life. Ill with pneumonia for several weeks, accordionist Art Van Damme passed away on February 15, 2010 at the age of 89.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Eiji Kitamura 北村 英治 was born on April 8, 1929 in Tokyo, Japan. Devoting himself to clarinet, he was playing while still an undergrad at Keio University at in Tokyo. He made his debut at the age of 22.
Kitamura built a following in his country performing regularly on his television program. He first came to prominence in the United States at the 20th Anniversary Jam Session of the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1977. His following in Japan was built previous to this on his regular television program.
An interpreter of traditional jazz, the clarinetist prefers this genre over modern jazz. Much of his influence in his playing came from the swing of Benny Goodman and Woody Herman. He has recorded some two-dozen albums or more albums including a series of albums with Teddy Wilson as well as for CBS Sony, Concord and various Japanese labels over the course of his career.
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Marty Marsala was born on April 2, 1909 in Chicago, Illinois. He began his professional career playing drums for bands led by Joe Bananas and Red Feilen in Chicago. During the 1920s he switched to the trumpet and following years as a freelance musician in Chicago, he soon joined his brother Joe’s band in New York playing trumpet from 1936 to 1941. In 1937 and 1938 he also worked with Bob Howard and Tempo King.
After working with the Will Hudson Orchestra, Marty then led a local band for a while before joining Chico Marx’s band from 1942 to 1943. The band was technically led by Ben Pollack but performed under Marx’s name.
Marsala served briefly in the Army from 1944 to the end of World War II. After his discharge he toured between San Francisco and Chicago playing Dixieland with his brother again as well as Miff Mole, Tony Parenti and Sidney Bechet. He became especially popular in California during these years. In 1955 he moved permanently to San Francisco and began leading his own groups and recording with Kid Ory and Earl Hines.
By the 1960s his health had deteriorated and he retired from performing in 1965, never recording under his own name. Swing trumpeter Marty Marsala, best known for his two decades working with is brother from 1926-46, passed away on April 27, 1975.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Kathy Stobart was born Florence Kathleen Stobart in the coastal town of South Shields, England on April 1, 1925. She first learned piano and alto saxophone as a child. After picking up her brother’s tenor saxophone and a month’s trial, she first played in Don Rico’s all-girl band at the age of 14 and then locally in Newcastle.
It wasn’t until her joining the Peter Fielding ballroom orchestra that her interest in jazz peaked. She met saxophonists Keith Bird and Derek Neville, who were then stationed at a local RAF camp. They bought her ten jazz records for my 17th birthday and Bird painstakingly took her through various harmonic exercises and saw to it that she succeeded him when he vacated a quartet job in London in late 1942.
Moving to London in the 1940s she began playing with Denis Rose, Ted Heath and Jimmy Skidmore. Later in the decade Stobart played with Art Pepper and Peanuts Hucko. Before the end of the Forties she played with and had a brief marriage with Art Thompson.
She toured with Vic Lewis in 1949 and led her own group in early 1950s, among its members was Derek Humble, Dill Jones and Bert Courtley, whom she married in 1951 until his death in 1969. Throughout the 1950s and 60s Kathy went into semiretirement to raise her family.
Returning to performing, from 1969 to 1977 she played with Humphrey Lyttelton. Following this she led her own groups, with Harry Beckett, John Burch and Lennie Best among others. Aside from this she played with Johnny Griffin, Al Haig, Earl Hines, Buddy Tate, Zoot Sims, Marian McPartland and Dick Hyman.
From 1992 she was paying with Lyttelton again adding flute, clarinet and baritone saxophone to her arsenal of instruments. Tenor saxophonist Kathy Stobart, who held lengthy teaching assignments at City Literature Institute in London, passed away on July 5, 2014.
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