Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Hadda Brooks was born Hattie L. Hapgood on October 29, 1916 in Los Angeles, California. Raised in the Boyle Heights area by her parents who had migrated from the South her mother, Goldie Wright, was a doctor and her father, John Hapgood, a deputy sheriff, but it was her grandfather, who introduced her to theater and the operatic voices of Amelita Galli-Curci and Enrico Caruso. In her youth she formally studied classical music with an Italian piano instructor, Florence Bruni, with whom she trained for twenty years.
She attended the University of Chicago, later returned to Los Angeles, becoming to love the subtle comedy of black theater and vaudeville entertainer and singer Bert Williams. She began playing piano professionally in the early 1940s at a tap-dance studio owned by Hollywood choreographer and dancer Willie Covan. For ten dollars a week, she played the popular tunes of the day while Covan worked with such stars as Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and Shirley Temple.
Preferring ballads to boogie-woogie, Brooks worked up her style by listening to Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, and Meade Lux Lewis records. Her first recording, the pounding Swingin’ the Boogie, for Jules Bihari’s Modern Records, was a regional hit in 1945, and her most famous song Out of the Blue, the title track to the film of the same name she appeared in on the recommendation of Benny Goodman.
She went on to begin singing with the encouragement Charlie Barnet, and recorded her first vocal recording You Won’t Let Me Go, played the small part of a lounge piano player in films, and was the second Black woman to host her own television show in 1957 with The Hadda Brooks Show after The Hazel Scott Show on DuMont in 1950. She toured Europe, Australia
In the 1970s, she commuted to Europe for performances in nightclubs and festivals, but performed rarely in the United States, living for many years in Australia and Hawaii. Retiring from music for sixteen years, she resurfaced to open Perino’s in Los Angeles and clubs in San Francisco and New York City as well as resuming her recording career. She continued appearing in films throughout the rest of her career, received the Pioneer Award from the Smithsonian and the Los Angeles Music Awards honored her with the Lifetime Achievement Award.
Pianist, vocalist and composer Hadda Brooks, who got her name from Jules Bihari, passed away Los Angeles, following open-heart surgery at age 86 on November 21, 2002.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Gabrielle Goodman was born on October 23, 1964 in Baltimore, Maryland and raised in a musical family. Her mother was a classical singer and her father was a jazz trombonist. She attended Peabody preparatory school and briefly Oberlin College before transferring to the Peabody Institute Conservatory, where she studied until graduating in 1990 under the direction of Alice Gerstl Duschak and Gordon Hawkins.
As a protege of Roberta Flack she began her international performance career as a backing singer for the singer in the mid-1980s and continued to tour and record with the legend for several years opening for Miles Davis, Ray Charles, the Crusaders and among others in Japan, Switzerland and Brazil.
Her first break as a solo recording artist came when she was lead singer on producer Norman Connors 1988 album Passion on Capitol Records. She later recorded two albums Travelin’ Light and Until We Love on the JMT/Verve label with German producer Stefan Winter that feature her with Kevin Eubanks, Christian Mcbride, Gary Bartz, Gary Thomas, and Terri Lyne Carrington. Gabrielle has gone on to work with Walter Beasley, David Bunn, Tony Bunn, Patrice Rushen, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Michael Bublé, Patti Labelle, Nona Hendryx, Jennifer Hudson, Mary J. Blige, Freddie Jackson, Brian Ferry, Chaka Khan and the late George Duke.
As an educator she has held the position of associate professor of voice at Berklee College of Music and in-between vocalist Gabrielle Goodman continues to record and perform.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Herb Jeffries was born Umberto Alexander Valentino on September 24, 1913 in Detroit, Michigan of mixed heritage. Never knowing his father who died in World War I and grew up in a rooming house in a mixed neighborhood without encountering severe racism as a child. Showing great interest in singing and intensely musical from boyhood, during his formative teenage years he was often found hanging out with the Howard Buntz Orchestra at various Detroit ballrooms. After the Wall Street Crash of 1929, he dropped out of high school to earn a living as a singer.
He began performing in a local speakeasy where he caught the attention of Louis Armstrong, who gave the teenager a note of recommendation for Erskine Tate at the Savoy Ballroom in Chicago, Illinois. Knowing that Tate fronted an all-black band, Jeffries claimed to be a Creole, and was offered a position as a featured singer three nights a week. Later he toured with the Earl Hines Orchestra through the Deep South.
The 1940s and 1950s saw Herb record for a number of labels, including RCA Victor, Exclusive, Coral, Decca, Bethlehem, Columbia, Mercury and Trend. His album Jamaica, recorded by RKO, is a concept album of self-composed calypso songs. He often used makeup to darken his skin in order to pursue a career in jazz and to be seen as employable by the leading all-black musical ensembles of the day.
He also starred in several low-budget race Western feature films aimed at black audiences from 1937 to 1939, Harlem on the Prairie, Two-Gun Man from Harlem, Rhythm Rodeo, The Bronze Buckaroo and Harlem Rides the Range. He also acted in several other films and television shows billed as Herbert Jeffrey, Herbert Jeffries or the Sensational Singing Cowboy.
Singer and actor Herb Jeffries, who was the only Black singing cowboy star in Hollywood has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, was inducted into the and a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars, passed away on May 25, 2014 in Los Angeles, California.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Dottie Dodgion was born Dorothy Rosalie Giaimo on September 23, 1929 in Brea, California. Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area as a child, she sang in the band led by her drummer father and as a teenager sang with Charles Mingus. She began playing drums in the 1950s though she was discouraged by her husband Monty Budwig, but receiving encouragement to play from Jerry Dodgion, she subsequently divorced Budwig to marry Dodgion.
She worked with Carl Fontana in Las Vegas, Nevada toward the end of the decade and then relocated to New York City in 1961. There she played in Benny Goodman’s ensemble for about a week, then moved on to work with Marian McPartland and Eddie Gomez, Billy Mitchell and Al Grey, Wild Bill Davison, and Al Cohn and Zoot Sims over the course of the 1960s. In the early 1970s she worked with Ruby Braff and Joe Venuti, then played alongside her husband in Germany with Walter Norris and George Mraz.
Dottie and Jerry separated in the late Seventies and she moved to p style=”text-align: justify;”>Washington, D.C. for a time, where she was musical director for the club The Rogue and Jar. After moving back to New York City she worked in the 1980s with Melba Liston, George Wein, Michael and Randy Brecker, Frank Wess, Jimmy Rowles, Carol Sloane, Pepper Adams, Tommy Flanagan, Roland Hanna, Sal Nistico, Herb Ellis, Chris White, Bob Cranshaw, Joe Newman, and Harold Danko. After returning to the Bay Area in 1984 she played regularly at the Monterey Jazz Festival.
Drummer and singer Dottie Dodgion stopped being active in jazz at age 87. She died five years later on September 17, 2021, in a hospice in Pacific Grove, California, after suffering a stroke.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Champian Fulton was born on September 12, 1985 in Norman, Oklahoma to a jazz trumpeter father whose friends were Clark Terry and Major Holley. At five she took piano lessons from her grandmother and after trying trumpet and drums, she returned to piano and singing. When her father was hired to run the Clark Terry Institute for Jazz Studies, the family moved to Iowa. She went to jazz summer camp, where she founded the Little Jazz Quintet.
One of her early influences was Dinah Washington, particularly the album For Those in Love, which she played often as a young girl. She also admired Sarah Vaughan, Nat King Cole, Sonny Clark, Red Garland, Hampton Hawes, Wynton Kelly, Thelonious Monk, and Art Tatum.
Fulton graduated from high school in 2003, then attended State University of New York at Purchase, where she studied with trumpeter Jon Faddis.[4] After graduating, she moved to New York City to pursue a career as a pianist and vocalist. She has performed at various venues playing with Jimmy Cobb, Scott Hamilton, Frank Wess, Lou Donaldson, and Louis Hayes.
She has worked with the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Litchfield Jazz Camp and Rutgers University. In late 2015, she joined the faculty of the Jazz Arts Academy in association with the Count Basie Theatre Education Department to offer workshops in jazz vocals and jazz piano during the summer. In 2014 she received the Rising Star Female Vocalist Critics Poll from Down Beat Magazine. As a leader she has recorded eight albums and continues to perform and record.