Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Rebecca Kilgore was born September 24, 1949 and grew up in Waltham, Massachusetts honing her voice. By the age of thirty she left the East Coast for the West, settling in Portland, Oregon. She began her music career fronting an area swing band dubbed the Wholly Cats and recorded a 1982 LP titled Doggin’ Around. Following the group’s 1984 breakup, she formed her own unit, the Rebecca Kilgore Quintet, and quickly became a mainstay of the Northwest jazz scene. In 1989 she released the cassette-only I Hear Music.
She has recorded twenty-two albums as a leader, performing and/or recording a total of 21 with jazz pianist Dave Frishberg, trombonist Dan Barrett, tenor saxophonist Harry Allen, guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, BED, the Wholly Cats and numerous other musicians. In 2010 she was inducted into the Oregon Music Hall of Fame
Vocalist Rebecca Kilgore, who has been slated as one of the best interpreters of the Great American Songbook, continues to perform locally in her Northwest home as well as worldwide at jazz festivals, cruises and other venues.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Charles Bullock, known in the industry as Chick, was born on September 16, 1898 in Montana to immigrants from England.. He belonged to a select group of mostly freelance vocalists who sang the vocal refrains on hundreds of New York sessions, which included Smith Ballew, Scrappy Lambert, Irving Kaufman, Arthur Fields, and Dick Robertson. Some of these vocalists were also musicians leading bands, but their singing was more often featured.
Though he began his career in vaudeville and sang in movie palaces, he rarely performed live because his face was disfigured due to an eye disease. His career as a studio musician took off in the late 1920s, and in the 1930s he sang with musicians such as Duke Ellington, Luis Russell, Cab Calloway, Bunny Berigan, Bill Coleman, Jack Teagarden, Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey, Joe Venuti, and Eddie Lang.
Bullock’s recordings proved so popular that he used pseudonyms for some recordings, including the name Sleepy Hall. However, in the 1940s the World War II recording ban essentially ended Bullock’s career and he quit the music business in 1942. He moved to California in 1946 and took up real estate, opening his own company.
Chick was mostly associated with the ARC group of labels including Melotone, Perfect, Banner, Oriole, and Romeo. Many of his records were issued under the name Chick Bullock and his Levee Loungers.
Jazz and dance band vocalist Chick Bullock, who recorded some 500 tunes over the course of his career, transitioned on September 15, 1981, in California at the age of 82.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Senri Oe was born on September 6, 1960, in Fujiidera city, Osaka, Japan. He began playing piano at the age of three, and was trained by his junior high school teacher Yumi Nara, who would go on to become an acclaimed opera singer. After each of the lessons, Nara would encourage him to improvise, and eventually he began to compose.
Upon being introduced to music by The Carpenters, Captain & Tenille and Gilbert O’Sullivan, Oe decided to become a singer-songwriter. Soon after, Oe’s music repertoire expanded to include jazz musicians such as Chris Conor, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Winton Kelly, Miles Davis and Charlie Parker.
In 1975 at 15 Oe intended to study jazz but after participating in the final Yamaha Popular Song Contest POPCON, in 1980 he entered Kwansei Gakuin University majoring in economics while simultaneously beginning to pursue a professional music career. He formed his first band during his time at university, was scouted by Sony Music and signed to Epic Sony Japan in 1981. His pop career unexpectedly took off and he chose to put his jazz aspirations on hold.
At the New School for Jazz, in 2008 Senri moved to Manhattan, New Yorkand later He went on to start a prolific carrer as a pop singer/songwriter but in 2007 he began his serious study of jazz. After graduating from The New School for Jazz, he launched his jazz record label, Peace Never Die Records, in 2012. His jazz debut album was Boys Mature Slow the same year. As of 2021 he has released another six albums under the PND label.
Oe’s work towards composing for a drum-less trio was titled Collective Scribble, with saxophone, piano and upright bass. He has recorded as a leader with Sheila Jordan, Jon Hendricks, Theo Bleckmann and Lauren Kinhan. His Answer July was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Jazz Album category in 2017.
Pianist, composer, producer, actor, singer, and songwriter Senri Oe continues to compose, perform and stretch the realms of his jazz imagination, while writing and producing music for other artists and film soundtracks.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Hilde Hefte was born on September 1, 1956 in Kristiansand, Norway and received much of her musical education from the Barratt Due Institute of Music in Oslo, Norway with piano as primary and vocals as secondary instruments. She played saxophone and clarinet for ten years when she was young, apprenticing with her father who was saxophone teacher and musician. She also trained as an actor, landing numerous roles.
During a period of years she taught music at Agder musikkonservatorium before she started as a full-time musician. She released her debut solo album Round Chet’s Midnight in 1999 to great reviews, from song others Down Beat Magazine. Hefte went on to quickly release five more albums under her own name, and has written lyrics and composed music to both her own albums and for a host of other artists.
Never far from acting, Hilde continues her leading roles at the theatre, among others, the main role as Edith Piaf. She has written and arranged music for various local theatre productions. To date she has recorded eight solo albums as a leader highlighting the music of Chet Baker, Bill Evans and bossa nova, as well as an album with the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra and inclusion in the Putamayo compilation Brazil Around The World.
With already ten collaborative albums under her belt with no sign of stopping, vocalist Hilde Hefte founded and runs Norsk Jazzforlag in 2003 and the record label Ponca Jazz Records the following year.
Bestow upon an inquiring mind a dose of a Kristiansand vocalist to motivate the perusal of the genius of jazz musicians worldwide whose gifts contribute to the canon…
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Albert George Hibbler was born on August 16, 1915 in Tyro, Mississippi and was blind from birth. At the age of 12 he moved to Little Rock, Arkansas where he attended Arkansas School for the Blind where he joined the school choir. He went on to begin working as a blues singer in local bands before failing his first audition for Duke Ellington in 1935. However, after winning an amateur talent contest in Memphis, Tennessee, he was given his start with Dub Jenkins and his Playmates. He later joined the Jay McShann band in 1942, followed with replacing Herb Jeffries a year later and joining Ellington’s orchestra.
He stayed with Ellington for almost eight years, and featured on a range of Ellington standards, including Do Nothin’ Til You Hear From Me, I Ain’t Got Nothin’ But the Blues and I’m Just a Lucky So-and-So. Do Nothin’ lyrics were written specifically for him, reaching #6 on the Billboard pop chart and #1 for eight weeks on the Harlem Hit Parade in 1944.Considered undoubtedly the best of Ellington’s male vocalists, while with Ellington, he won the Esquire New Star Award in 1947 and the Down Beat award for Best Band Vocalist in 1949.
Leaving Ellington’s band in 1951 after a dispute over his wages, Al then recorded with various bands including those of Johnny Hodges and Count Basie, and for various labels including Mercury and Norgran. His biggest hit was Unchained Melody, which reached #3 on the US pop chart, sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc. Its success led to network appearances, including a live jazz club remote on NBC’s Monitor. His other hits were He, 11th Hour Melody, Never Turn Back and After the Lights Go Down Low.
In the late 1950s and 1960s, Hibbler became a civil rights activist, marching with protestors and getting arrested in 1959 in New Jersey and in 1963 in Alabama. The notoriety of this activism discouraged major record labels from carrying his work, but Frank Sinatra supported him and signed him to a contract with his label, Reprise Records. However, he made very few recordings after that, occasionally doing live appearances through the 1990s.
In 1971, he sang two songs at Louis Armstrong’s funeral. In 1972 he made an album, A Meeting of the Times, with another fiercely independent blind musician, the multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Baritone vocalist Al Hibbler transitioned on April 24, 2001 at Holy Cross Hospital in Chicago, Illinois at the age of 85.
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