Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Sue Raney was born on June 18, 1940 in McPherson, Kansas. The proverbial fruit did not fall far from the tree as her mother was a singer and a great, great aunt had been a performer in German opera. She started singing at age four and a year later was performing in public. Due to her young age no voice teacher could be engaged, mother took voice lessons herself and then passed down what she learned to Sue.
A professional before she was a teenager, Raney worked steadily in New Mexico when her family relocated and took several trips out to Los Angeles during a couple of summer vacations. She joined the Jack Carson radio show in 1954 in L.A. when she was barely 14. By age 17 was signed by Capitol Records to record her debut album, the Nelson Riddle-produced When Your Lover Has Gone, released in 1958.
Sue then appeared on Ray Anthony’s television program and became his band’s main vocalist. At 18 she started working as a single. She had already recorded for Phillips and then signed with Capitol, recording several middle-of-the-road jazz-influenced pop dates including her 1958 Nelson riddle-produced debut album “When Your Love Has Gone”.
In the 1960’s Raney often appeared on television variety shows, led her own group and became very active in the studios where her impressive voice helped sell products. After a hiatus in the 1970s, the jazz vocalist continued to record sporadically and by the early 1980’s, in addition to recording several jazz albums for Discovery Records, she began working as a voice teacher. Through the Nineties and into the new millennium she sang with the L.A. Voices, Supersax, the Bill Watrous Big Band and as a soloist, releasing “Heart’s Desire”, a 2006 tribute album to Doris Day and in 2011“Listen Here: Alone With Alan Broadbent”.
Over the course of fifty years vocalist Sue Raney has recorded twenty albums, performed music ranging from swinging jazz and ballads to cabaret, middle-of-the-road pop and jingles, and has remained active as a jazz educator and in the studios.
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From Broadway To 52nd Street
On The Town opened at the Adelphi Theatre on December 28, 1944 and ran for 463 performances. Leonard Bernstein composed the music and Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote the lyrics. The musical starred Betty Comden, Nancy Walker, Adolph Green, John Battles, S. Ono Osata and Chris Alexander.
The Story: Three sailors – romantic Gaby, down-to-earth Chip and clownish Ozzie are on shore leave in New York City. During a subway ride, Gaby falls in love with a picture of Miss Turnstiles. This event leads the guys on an adventure to find her. Roaming around the city as far as the museum of Natural History and Coney Island, the other two also find love. Nancy Walker plays the cab driver. From this play New York, New York and Some Other Time became jazz standards.
Jazz History: American involvement in World War II, which began on December 11th, 1941 marked a decline in the importance of big bands in popular music. Many musicians were sent to fight in the war, and those who remained were restricted by high taxes on gasoline. By the time the ban on recording was lifted, big bands had practically been forgotten, or had begun to be thought of as peripheral in relation to vocal stars such as Frank Sinatra.
The fall of the Big Band began on August 1, 1942 when the American Federation of Musicians initiated a strike against all major recording companies because of a disagreement over royalty payments. No union musician could record. The effects of the strike include the shrouding of the developments of bebop in mystery. There are few documents that can provide evidence of what the early forms of the music sounded like.
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From Broadway To 52nd Street
One Touch Of Venus hit the stage of the Imperial Theatre on October 7, 1943. Kurt Weill composed the music, with lyrics by Ogden Nash. The musical ran for 567 performances and starred John Boles, Kenny Baker, Ruth Bond and Mary Martin. One song, Speak Low, distinguished itself from the pack to become a jazz standard.
The Story: When Whitlaw Savory tells his barber, Rodney Hatch, that his statue of Venus is the most beautiful woman in the world, Hatch disagrees. After all, he is engaged to the most beautiful woman, Gloria. To prove his point, he places Gloria’s engagement ring on the marble, which promptly comes to life. The escapades of Venus and Hatch turn Manhattan upside down, with Savory, Gloria and her mother in pursuit. The fling destroys the Hatch/Gloria romance, so Hatch is disconsolate when Venus returns to stone. But as he is about to walk away, a young girl appears who is the image of Venus and Hatch is certain he has an engagement ring to fit her finger.
Broadway History: During the 1940s, Broadway began to lose its originality and drive. New dramatists were less numerous and Broadway began to face competition from television and movies. Some theaters were pulled down, and now theater no longer dominated Broadway.In the forties, 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, the street most associated with Times Square, began to look less and less like a theater district. The theater business was declining all over the city to the point where there were not enough productions to support the available playhouses. In comparison to the 264 productions in 1927-1928, the number dropped to 187 in 1930-1931, and only 72 in 1940-1941. Times Square had degenerated into a kind of carnival and sex bazaar. The Republic Theater, which was built by Oscar Hammerstein in 1900, became Billy Minsky’s burlesque house. Theaters all over the area were being torn down or turned into slums.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Dakota Staton was born on June 3, 1930 in the Homewood section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is also known by her Muslim name Aliyah Rabia. She studied music at the Filion School of Music. She regularly performed as a vocalist with the Joe Wespray Orchestra in the Hill district, a jazz hotspot.
Spending the next several years on the nightclub circuit she played Detroit, Indianapolis, Cleveland and St. Louis. While in New York she came to the attention of Capitol Records producer Dave Cavanaugh. Signing her, they released a series of albums that led to her winning Down Beat’s Most Promising New Comer award in 1955.
Dakota’s biggest hit was The Late, Late Show that went to #4 on the charts in 1957 garnered her international acclaim. The album was followed with In The Night with George Shearing, Dynamic and Dakota At Storyville.
In 1958, she wed Antiguan trumpeter Talib Ahmad Dawud, a Muslim and noted critic of Elijah Muhammad and by the mid-sixties relocated to England. Vocalist Dakota Staton continued to record semi-regularly, her recordings taking an increasingly strong gospel and blues influence until her death on April 10, 2007.
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From Broadway To 52nd Street
Two For The Show opened on Broadway at the Booth Theatre on February 8, 1940 and after 124 performances the curtain came down for its final descent on May 25, 1940. Directed by John Murray Anderson with the sketches directed by Joshua Logan and musical staging by Robert Alton, the original cast included later Hollywood notables as Eve Arden, Alfred Drake, Betty Hutton and Keenan Wynn.
The Story: This was a revue with several sketches being performed such as “The Age Of Innocence” and “Cookery” written by Richard Hadyn. There were two other revues in this series, all conceived and directed by John Murray Anderson: One for the Money (February 4, 1939-May 27, 1939), and Three to Make Ready (March 7, 1946-December 14, 1946). The most notable song introduced in the show was “How High The Moon” which subsequently has been recorded by many jazz artists, becoming a well-known standard
Jazz History: Bebop or bop is a style of jazz characterized by fast tempo, instrumental virtuosity and improvisation based on the combination of harmonious structure and melody. It was developed in the early to mid-1940s and first surfaced in musicians’ argot sometime in the first two years of American involvement in WWII.
The origins of the term “bebop” has been debated by numerous authorities and researchers usually stated to derive from nonsense syllables or vocables used in scat singing, and is supposed to have been first attested in 1928. However, some researchers speculate that it was a term used by Charlie Christian because it sounded like something he hummed along with his playing.Yet, Dizzy Gillespie’s version of the story relates that the audiences coined the name after hearing him scat the then-nameless tunes to his players and the press ultimately picked it up, using it as an official term: “People, when they’d wanna ask for those numbers and didn’t know the name, would ask for bebop.”
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