Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lil Hardin Armstrong was born Lillian Hardin on February 3, 1898 in Memphis, Tennessee and grew up with her grandmother learning hymns, spirituals and classics on the piano, but she was drawn to pop music and later blues. Her initial piano instruction came from her third grade teacher, Miss Violet White, followed by enrollment in Mrs. Hook’s School of Music, but it was while attending Fisk University that she was taught a more acceptable approach to the instrument.
In 1918, Lil moved to Chicago and landed a job as a sheet music demonstrator at Jones Music Store for $3 a week. Shortly afterward bandleader Lawrence Duhé offered her $22.50 she joined him. From cabaret to the De Luxe Café to Dreamland playing behind Alberta Hunter and Ollie Powers. Replace by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, he asked her to stay, which led to an engagement in San Francisco, back to Chicago playing eventually with Oliver again.
Hardin met Louis Armstrong when Oliver sent for him and subsequently were married in 1924. She took him shopping and taught him how to dress more fashionably, and finally convinced him to strike out on his own. Moving to New York City he joined Fletcher Henderson, while she stayed in Chicago with Oliver and then leading her own band.
Hardin, Armstrong, Kid Ory, Johnny St. Cyr and Johnny Dodds comprised the Hot Five recordings for Okeh Records. She would go on to record sessions with the same group as a leader for Vocalion, Columbia Records and New Orleans Wanderers. In the late 1920s Hardin and Louis parted ways and she formed a band with a cornet player she considered Louis equal, Freddie Keppard. In the 1930s, she sometimes billed herself as Mrs. Louis Armstrong, led an All Girl Orchestra, then a mixed-sex big band, which broadcasted nationally over the NBC radio network.
The same decade she recorded a series of sides for Decca Records as a swing vocalist, recorded with Red Allen, and back in Chicago collaborated with Joe Williams, Oscar Brown Jr., Red Saunders and Little Brother Montgomery. Throughout the rest of her career she continued to perform and record, and began writing an autobiography that she never completed. A month after attending Louis’ funeral in New York City, she was performing at a televised memorial concert for Louis, Lil Hardin Armstrong collapsed at the piano and died on the way to the hospital.
Pianist, composer, arranger, singer and bandleader Lil Hardin Armstrong, second wife and recording collaborator of Louis Armstrong in the 1920s, passed away on August 27, 1971. Her compositions have been sampled and revived by many and was inducted into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame in 2014.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
James P. Johnson was born James Price Johnson on February 1, 1894 in New Brunswick, New Jersey and was also known as Jimmy Johnson. A move to San Juan Hill, where Lincoln Center stands today, and subsequent move uptown by 1911, exposed him to the musical experience of New York City’s bars, cabarets and symphonies and listening to Scott Joplin attributed to his early influences. With perfect pitch and excellent recall he was soon able to pick out on the piano tunes that he had heard.
Johnson got his first job as a pianist in 1912, left school to pursue his career in music. From 1913 to 1916 Johnson spent time studying the European piano tradition with Bruto Giannini, spending the next four to five years studying other pianists and composing his own rags. In 1914, he met Willie “The Lion” Smith and became best friends. By 1920 he had gained a reputation as a pianist on the East coast on a par with Eubie Blake and Lucky Roberts, making dozens of piano roll recordings and recording for the Perfection, Artempo, Rythmodik, QRS and Aeolian labels.
James was a pioneer in the stride playing of the jazz piano. He developed into the favorite accompanist of Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith. He continued to compose and record during the 1920s and 1930s he recorded on W. C. Handy’s Black Swan label as well as Columbia. He branched out and became musical director for the revue Plantation Days, went to Europe with the show that toured for five years and made it to Broadway.
By the Depression Era his career slowed down somewhat and he found it difficult to adapt to the new swing era music gaining popularity. In the late 1930s Johnson slowly started to re-emerge with the revival of interest in traditional jazz, but suffering a stroke in 1940 took him out of the action until 1942 when he began to record, with his own and other groups with Eddie Condon, Yank Lawson, Sidney de Paris, Sidney Bechet, Rod Cless and Edmond Hall. He went on to record for jazz labels Asch, Black and White, Blue Note, Commodore, Circle and Decca, perform with Louis Armstrong and was a regular guest on the rudi Blesh This Is Jazz broadcasts.
He would teach Fats Waller his Carolina Shout composition, Duke Ellington learned it note for note from his piano roll and the tune became a right of passage for every contemporary pianist. Considered the last major rag pianist and the first major jazz pianist he became the bridge between the two styles. His influence led to the emergence of Art Tatum, Donald Lambert, Louis Mazetier, Pat Flowers, Cliff Jackson, Hank Duncan, Claude Hopkins, Count Basie, Ellington, Don Ewell, Jimmy Guarnieri, Dick Hyman, Dick Weststood, Ralph Sutton, Joe Turner, Neville Dickie, Mike Lipskin and Butch Thompson.
Pianist and composer James P. Johnson, who composed the Roaring Twenties theme song Charleston, along with If I Could be With You One Hour Tonight, and whose music has appeared in countless films, passed away on November 17, 1955 at age 61.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Percy Gaston Humphrey was born January 13, 1905 in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was the son of clarinetist Willie Eli Humphrey and the younger brother of clarinetist Willie and trombonist Earl. He learned the musical basics of New Orleans jazz from his grandfather “Professor” Jim Humphrey.
For more than thirty years he was leader of the Eureka Brass Band founded by trumpeter Willie Wilson and played alongside Willie Parker, John Casimir and George Lewis. After Wilson got ill, Alcide Landry, Joseph “Red” Clark and Dominique “T-Boy” Remy each temporarily led the group until 1946 when Percy took over until the demise of the band in 1975. He also played in the band of pianist Sweet Emma Barrett.
For years he led his own jazz band Percy Humphrey and His Crescent City Joymakers. He played regularly at Preservation Hall from its opening in the early Sixties until shortly before his death. He traveled and performed internationally with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band as well as his own bands.
As a leader and sideman of the various groups he recorded prolifically with Pax, Alamac, Folkways, Jazzology and Sounds of New Orleans. A 1951 album, New Orleans Parade, features Humphrey with trombonists Charles “Sunny” Henry and Albert Warner and saxophonist Emmanuel Paul. Their 1962 sessions, Jazz at Preservation Hall, Volume 1: the Eureka Brass Band of New Orleans, on Atlantic Records with his borhter Willie, Kid Sheik Cola, Pete Bocage, Alber Warner and Oscar “Chicken” Henry, Emanuel Pail, Wilbert “Bird” Tilman, Josiah “Cie” Frazier and Robert “Son Fewclothes” Lewis.
After 1975, Percy revived the name occasionally for festival performances and other appearances. Trumpeter and bandleader Percy Humphrey continued to lead his own band until his passing in New Orleans on July 22, 1995 at the age of ninety .His last gig was at the annual New Orleans jazz festival in April, three months before his death.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Dr. Michael White was born on November 29, 1954 in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is a classically trained clarinetist who began his jazz musical career as a teenager playing for Doc Paulin’s Brass Band in New Orleans. He was a member of an incarnation of the Fairview Baptist Church Marching Band.
Kid Sheik Colar, discovered him after hearing him onstage performing in Jackson Square in the French Quarter. He began working with the musician regularly following the encounter. A staunch jazz traditionalist, he can be heard on Wynton Marsalis’s 1989 album The Majesty of the Blues. Wynton also appears on White’s 1990 album titled “Crescent City Serenade”, along with Wendell Brunious and Walter Payton.
Michael has led several bands in the New Orleans area, and has accompanied various artists on other recording projects. Since 1979 he has played in the Young Tuxedo Brass Band. During the 1980s he led a band called The New Orleans Hot Seven.
In 1981, White founded The Original Liberty Jazz Band with the express intent of preserving the musical heritage of New Orleans. They perform an end-of-year concert at the Village Vanguard every year since the early 1990s, and in 2006 with former Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton in attendance they performed at Tulane University commencement.
Putting on his education cap Michael is also a college professor who formerly taught Spanish, now teaches African-American Music at Xavier University, holds the Rosa and Charles Keller Endowed Chair in the Humanities of New Orleans Music and Culture. As a continuing component of his performances he also serves as guest director at several Jazz at Lincoln Center concerts relating to traditional New Orleans jazz.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Eddie Lang was born Salvatore Massaro on October 25, 1902 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He first took violin lessons for 11 years and while in school he became friends with Joe Venuti, with whom he would work for much of his career. By the time he was 16 he was playing violin, banjo and guitar professionally. He worked with various bands in the Northeast United States, worked in London between late 1924 to early 1925, and then settled in New York City.
By 1927 Lang was being featured along with cornetist Bix Beiderbecke on the recording of Singin’ the Blues by Frankie Trumbauer and His Orchestra. Between the two trading licks and soloing this session became a landmark jazz recording of the decade. 1929 saw him joining Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra and performing in the movie King of Jazz. The following year he played guitar on the original recording of the jazz and pop standard Georgia On My Mind recording with Hoagy Carmichael and His Orchestra with Joe Venuti and Bix Beiderbecke.
Eddie would leave Whiteman’s band with Bing Crosby and as his accompanist was back in the movies with Big Broadcast. Switching gears to play blues he recorded under the pseudonym Blind Willie Dunn on a number of blues records with Lonnie Johnson. Over the course of his short career he composed some three-dozen songs and recorded with the bands of Joe Venuti, Frank Signorelli, Adrian Rollini, Roger Wolfe Kahn, Jean Goldkette, in addition to doing a large amount of freelance radio and recording work.
Guitarist Eddie Lang, who was one of the three major innovators of jazz guitar and who influenced future guitarists, such as Django Reinhardt, passed away following a tonsillectomy in New York City on March 26, 1933 at the age of thirty. He had been urged by Crosby to have the tonsillectomy so that he might have speaking parts in Crosby’s films. His voice was chronically hoarse, and it was hoped that the operation would remedy this.
His recording of Singin’ The Blues with Frankie Trumbauer and His Orchestra was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and has been placed on the U.S. Library of Congress National Recording Registry. He has been inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame, is one of the ASCAP Jazz Wall of Fame inductees.
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