Daily Dose Of Jazz…
William Clarence Eckstine was born on July 8, 1914 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania but grew up in Washington, DC of Prussian and African American heritage. He began singing at the age of seven, entering amateur talent shows while dreaming of a football career that was sidelined when he broke his collarbone. Focusing on music he worked his way west to Chicago, joining Earl Hines’ Grand Terrace Orchestra as vocalist and occasionally trumpeter from1939 – 1943. During his tenure he made a name for himself through the Hines band’s radio shows with such jukebox hits as “Stormy Monday Blues” and his own “Jelly Jelly”.
Eckstine formed the first bop big band in 1944 making it a fountainhead for young musicians who would reshape jazz by the end of the decade, including Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Charlie Parker, Fats Navarro and Sarah Vaughn, with Tadd Dameron and Gil Fuller were among the band’s arrangers. Billy hit the charts often during the mid-’40s, with Top Ten entries including “A Cottage For Sale” and “Prisoner of Love”.
Breaking down barriers throughout the Forties as a leader of the original bop big band and as the first romantic black male in popular music, Mr. B, as he was affectionately known, went solo in 1947. His seamless transition to string-filled balladry saw him recording more than a dozen hits by the end of the decade and winning numerous awards from Esquire, Down Beat and Metronome magazines. His 1950 appearance at New York’s Paramount Theatre greatly surpassed Sinatra’s audience draw at the same venue.
Over the course of the next two decades Billy appeared on every major television variety show from Ed Sullivan to Nat King Cole, Jack Paar, Steve Allen, Joey Bishop, Flip Wilson and Playboy After Dark. After a long series of hit tunes and recordings by the 70’s Billy’s recordings came sparingly although he still performed before adoring audiences throughout the world. He made his final Grammy-nominated recording singing with Benny Carter in 1986.
Billy Eckstine, vocalist, bandleader, trumpeter, valve trombonist and guitarist passed away on March 8, 1993, at age 78, in his hometown of Pittsburgh.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lloyd “Tiny” Grimes was born on July 7, 1916 in Newport News, Virginia and began his career playing drums and one-fingered piano. In 1938 he took up the electric 4-string tenor guitar and two years later joined the Cats and a Fiddle as guitarist and singer. 1943 saw him as part of the Art Tatum Trio making a number of recordings and this early configuration recorded some of the more interesting early examples of Tiny Grimes’ guitar work.
After leaving Tatum, Grimes recorded with his own groups in New York and he recorded with a long list of leading musicians, including Billie Holiday. He made four recordings with Charlie Parker that are considered excellent examples of early bebop jazz: “Tiny’s Tempo”, “Red Cross”, “Romance Without Finance” and “I’ll Always Love You”. He was to become one of the 52nd Street regulars during this period.
Towards the end of the decade Tiny scored a hit on a jazzed up version of “Loch Lomond”. His band was billed as Tiny “Mac” Grimes and the Rocking Highlanders, appearing in kilts and included top tenor sax man Red Prysock and big-voiced baritone singer Screaming Jay Hawkins. Grimes continued to lead his own groups into the later 1970’s recording for Prestige in a series of strong blues-based performances with Coleman Hawkins, Illinois Jacquet, Pepper Adams, Roy Eldridge, Earl Hines and others of note.
With Paul Williams he co-headlined the first “Moondog Coronation Ball”, promoted by Alan Freed in Cleveland, Ohio on March 21, 1952, often claimed as the first rock and roll concert. It is also generally considered he played on the first rock and roll record with a group called The Crows one-hit wonder “Gee”.
Tiny Grimes, a jazz and R&B guitarist most noted for playing a four-string electric tenor guitar, passed away on March 4, 1989.
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From Broadway To 52nd Street
Annie Get Your Gun rose its curtain for the first time at the Imperial Theatre on May 16, 1946. Irving Berlin composed the music for its stars Ethel Merman and Ray Middleton. The show set a record with a run of one thousand, one hundred and forty-seven performances. From the musical came three tunes that entered into the jazz lexicon – Anything You Can Do, There’s No Business Like Show Business and They Say It’s Wonderful.
The Story: Annie Oakley is poor but happy country girl and an infallible shot. This sharpshooting lands her in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. She falls in love with rival sharpshooter Frank Butler, who tells her the girl that he marries must be a dainty thing, which Annie is not. It seems the only thing they can agree on is that when folks talk about love it’s wonderful. A shooting match is arranged between the two, Sitting Bull tells her that to win her man she must lose the match. Although Annie boast anything you can do I can do better, she loses the match anyway and the man.
Broadway History: Though Broadway was becoming less of an industry and more of a loose array of individuals, in the next four years this would have positive aspects. America would soon fall prey to increasing intolerance and political persecution but Broadway would continue to express unorthodox opinions without fear of government retaliation. Broadway would lose some of its scope but retain its liveliness and joyfulness in an increasing corporate environment. In a country that now required conformity, Broadway preserved a sense of freedom of speech and action, ideals on which this nation was founded. This was no less rewarded with the establishment of the private club of the “blockbuster musical” has offered entry to only a chosen few that have had more than a thousand performances. The first to join this esteemed club is this weeks feature Annie Get Your Gun.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Della Reese was born Delloreese Patricia Early on July 6, 1931 in Detroit, Michigan to an African-American steelworker and Cherokee cook. At age 6 she began singing in church becoming an avid Gospel singer. Her mother would take her to the movies on weekends to see the portrayals of glamorous life by Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and Lena Horne, whereupon afterwards she would act out scenes from each movie. By 1944 she was directing the young people’s choir, nurturing her acting and her obvious musical talent.
She was often chosen on radio, as a regular singer and by age thirteen she was hired to sing with Mahalia Jackson’s Gospel group. Upon entering Cass Technical High School in Detroit, attending with Edna Rae Gillooly, later known as movie star Ellen Burstyn, Reese was a brilliant, no-nonsense student. She continued touring with Mahalia and with higher grades she was the first in her family to graduate from high school in 1947, at only 15.
After graduation Della formed her own gospel group called the Meditation Singers but her mother’s death and father’s illness interrupted her singing and education at Wayne State University. Taking odd jobs as a truck driver, dental receptionist and even elevator operator she continued to perform in clubs but realizing her name was too long for the marquee, shortened it to Della Reese.
Della’s career has spanned more than half a century and during that time she has taken her gospel roots and added jazz, pop and R&B. Her string of singles topped or landed in the top 10 of all the music charts at one time or another. She was voted Most Promising Singer in 1957 by Billboard, Cashbox and other magazines, following with her biggest hit at the time “Don’t You Know?” that would become her early career signature song.
She has received four Grammy nominations, recorded numerous albums, played Vegas for nine years, toured worldwide, ventured into acting on stage, film and television successfully with “Touched By An Angel”, has been a game show panelist, talk show host, spokeswoman for the American Diabetes Association, has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and is an ordained minister.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born June 30, 1917 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Descended from African, European and Native American heritage, her family belonged to what W.E.B. DuBois called “The Talented Tenth”, the upper stratum of middle-class, well-educated blacks.
Her father, Edwin “Teddy” Horne, a numbers kingpin, left the family when she was three and moved to the Hill District in Pittsburgh while her actress mother, Edna Scottron, travelled extensively with a black theatre troupe leaving Lena to be mainly raised by her grandparents. Throughout her formative years she travelled with her mother, lived in Fort Valley and Atlanta, Georgia with a final move back to New York in her teens.
Horne joined the mike chorus of the Cotton Club at 16 becoming a nightclub performer before moving to Hollywood, where she had small parts in numerous movies, and more substantial parts in the films “Cabin in the Sky” and “Stormy Weather. Due to the Red Scare and her left-leaning political views, Horne found herself blacklisted and unable to get work in Hollywood.
Returning to her roots as a nightclub performer, Horne took part in the March of Washington in August 1963, and continued to work as a performer, both in nightclubs and on television, while releasing well-received record albums. She announced her retirement in March 1980, but the next year starred in a one-woman show, “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music”, which ran for more than three hundred performances on Broadway and earned her numerous awards and accolades. She continued recording and performing sporadically into the 1990s, disappearing from the public eye in 2000. Lena Horne died on May 9, 2010 in New York City of heart failure.
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