Daily Dose Of Jazz…
John Herndon Mercer was born November 18, 1909 into a prominent family Savannah, Georgia. He became known to the world simply as Johnny and liking music as a small child was exposed this parents singing, minstrels, vaudeville shows. Growing up with Black playmates and servants he gained further exposure to Black music listening to the fishermen and vendors, Black church music. Having no formal musical training he was singing in a choir by six and by eleven years old had memorized almost all of the songs he had heard and became curious about who wrote them.
Mercer’s talent was in creating the words and singing, he listened to Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Louis Armstrong, and with his natural sense of rhythm easily learned to dance from Arthur Murray. He attended Woodberry Forest boys prep school where he was a member of the literary and poetry societies, and the hop committee that booked musical entertainment on campus. He became the stamp of approval on all orchestra and new productions and quickly learned the powerful effect songs had on girls.
Though headed for Princeton University as a legacy, his hopes were dashed with the Great Depression but eventually escaped Savannah and moved to New York in 1928, when he was 19. Jazz and blues, were booming in Harlem and Broadway was bursting with musicals and revues from George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Irving Berlin. He got small acting parts, wrote lyrics, met Eddie Cantor who encouraged him and finally got a song, composed by Everett Miller, into the Garrick Gaieties in 1930. His first song was recorded by Joe Venuti and his New Yorkers.
At 20 he began hanging out with other songwriters to learn the trade, traveled to California on a lyric writing assignment for the musical Paris in the Spring, met Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong returned to New York and got a job as staff lyricist for Miller Music for a $25-a-week draw. He would go on to win a vocal position with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, then make his vocal recording debut with Frank Trumbauer’s Orchestra, and o apprentice with Yip Harburg on the score for Americana. But it was his chance pairing with Indiana-born Hoagy Carmichael that his fortunes improved dramatically with Lazybones, which became a hit one week after its first radio broadcast, and each receiving a large royalty check of $1250.
Mercer became a member of ASCAP and a recognized “brother” in the Tin Pan Alley fraternity alongside Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Cole Porter among others. As the demand for the stand alone song diminished he set his sights on Hollywood and landed a job with RKO and claiming his first big Hollywood song I’m an Old Cowhand from the Rio Grande was performed by Crosby in the film Rhythm on the Range in 1936. The demand for him as a lyricist took off and his second hit that year was Goody Goody followed by a move to Warner Brothers studio in 1937.
He would go on to write hits like Jeepers Creepers, You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby, Day In, Day Out, Fools Rush In, One for My Baby (and One More for the Road), That Old Black Magic and Come Rain or Come Shine, Skylark, In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening, as well as lyrics for the established instrumental hits Laura, Midnight Sun, Satin Doll and Autumn Leaves among others.
By the mid-1940s enjoyed a reputation as one of the premier Hollywood lyricists. With the advent of rock and roll in the 1950s and the transition of jazz into “bebop” Mercer’s natural audience and venues for his songs dwindled. He continued to write a string of hits for some MGM films, made occasional television appearances, teamed up with Henry Mancini and wrote the wrote the lyrics to Moon River, Days of Wine and Roses and Charade. He would go on to write I Wanna Be Around and Summer Wind and the lyrics for I Remember You which was the most direct expression of his feelings for the affair he had in 1941 with then 19-year old Judy Garland.
Over the course of his career Johnny would team up with Richard Whiting, Harry Warren and Johnny Mandel, have his lyrics recorded as part of Ella Fitzgerald’s Songbook series, received eighteen Oscar nominations, winning four for Best Song, founded Capitol Records, and helped establish the National Academy of Popular Music’s Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Diagnosed was an inoperable brain tumor, lyricist Johnny Mercer passed away on June 25, 1976 in Bel Air, California. Posthumously, the Songwriters Hall of Fame established the Johnny Mercer Award, he was honored with a postage stamp, received a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame, given tribute in the book and film Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, a statue was unveiled in Ellis Square in Savannah, and The Johnny Mercer Collections, including his papers and memorabilia, are preserved in the library of Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Marion Montgomery was born Marian Maud Runnells on November 17, 1934 in Natchez, Mississippi. She began her career in Atlanta, Georgia working clubs before moving on to Chicago, Illinois where singer Peggy Lee heard her on an audition tape and suggested she should be signed by Capitol Records. From the early to mid-1960 she released three albums for the label. During this early part of her career, she became Marian Montgomery, having previously gone by the nickname of Pepe, and eventually changing her name to Marion.
In 1965, she came to Britain to play a season with John Dankworth and met and married English pianist and musical director Laurie Holloway, thus beginning a long and productive association in which they both became very well known to British audiences. In the Seventies she became the resident singer on the British chat show hosted by Michael Parkinson.
By the 1980s she collaborated a series of concerts and albums with composer and conductor Richard Rodney Bennett. Her recording of the song Maybe the Morning was used by Radio Luxembourg to close out each evening broadcast, and when the station closed its doors.
Her final studio recording was That Lady from Natchez, released in 1999 and continued to perform including a sold-out three weeks at London’s Pizza on the Park two months before her death. Never categorizing herself purely as a jazz singer, rather simply as a singer of various styles who left the world a catalogue of two-dozen albums, vocalist Marion Montgomery passed away on July 22, 2002 in Bray, Berkshire, England after a ten-year battle with lung cancer.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Audrey Morris was born in Chicago. Illinois on November 12, 1928 and developed her piano and vocal skills growing up in the Windy City. She got her start in the music business in the early to mid-’50s during which time she recorded her first two albums. Her debut album Bistro Ballads was released in 1954 followed up by her sophomore project The Voice of Audrey Morris two years later in 1956.
Opting to work her hometown Audrey’s delicate piano and forceful voice played to any intimate Chicago club or bistro crowd well into the wee hours of the morning. Her reputation grew for bucking the current taste for bawdy chanteuses and she cultivated a repertoire of obscure, understated material.
Not much was heard from Morris throughout the 1960s and ’70s, but she returned in the Eighties, this time with her own record label, Fancy Faire. She began releasing albums once more from 1984’s to 1997 that included Afterthoughts, Film Noir, Look at Me Now and Round About.
During her career she worked with bassist Johnny Pate, drummer Charles Walton, conductor, arranger and pianist Marty Paich, trumpeter Stu Williamson and guitarist Bill Pitman. Audrey has been touted as one of the great female saloon singers, ranked alongside Chris Connor and Jeri Sothern.
Pianist and vocalist Audrey Morris continued to perform well into the new millennium and has indelibly left her mark on that Windy City by the lake.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lester William DeMerle was born on November 4, 1946 in Brooklyn , New York and studied drums and percussion from 1960 to 1965 with Bob Livngstone in New York, then music theory and harmony with Alf Clausen . At 16 he was jamming with Lionel Hampton and in 1966 he played with the Lee Castle led Dorsey band.
1967 found Les with Randy Brecker and Arnie Lawrence in the first band formation called Sound 67. By the late 1960s he joined with Joe Farrell and Lee Konitz in New York. By 1971 Les was moving to Los Angeles,California where he founded the band Transfusion, that became the house band at the Cellar Theatre. He also played with Michael Brecker, Eric Marienthal, David Benoit and Raul De Souza. In 1974 he joined Harry James at the Newport Jazz Festival and stayed for 12 years.
He recorded with the Heath Brothers on the album Smilin’ Billy Suite / A Day in the Life in 1976 on the Strata-East label, worked with Bunk Gardner and in the 1980s he worked on albums with his wife Bonnie Eisele. DeMerle has led big bands and made a series of albums on the Origin label including a tribute album to the classic Blue Note Records, Hittin’ the Blue Notes.
Les DeMerle is one of the few drummers who sings. He has accompanied Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan, Mel Tormé and Eddie Jefferson. He continues to perform, record and tour.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz..
Jay Clayton was born on October 28, 1941, in Youngstown, Ohio as Judith Colantone and after studying at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio she ventured to New York City and took lessons from Steve Lacy. Together with her husband, percussionist Frank Clayton, she presented Jazz at the Loft in their home around 1967. Among the featured musicians Sam Rivers, Cecil McBee, Joanne Brackeen, Dave Liebman, Larry Karush, Pete Yellin, Hal Galper, Jeanne Lee, Bob Moses, Junie Booth, John Gilmore, and Jane Getz.
Earning her own reputation as an avant-garde singer, Jay developed her personal wordless vocabulary. Her pioneering vocal explorations placed her at the forefront of the free jazz movement and loft scene in the 1970s, where she counted among the first singers to incorporate poetry and electronics into her improvisations. She performed and recorded with Muhal Richard Abrams, John Fischer’s Interface, Byron Morris’s Unity and for a long time she was a member of the Steve Reich ensemble. She was one of the first singers to record composer John Cage’s vocal music.
Clayton’s own performance dates appear under the heading the Jay Clayton Project, while she titles her work with other esteemed vocalists Different Voices. She co-leads a trio, Outskirts, with drummer Jerry Granelli and saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom. She has more than 40 recordings to her credit, Clayton has appeared alongside Bud Shank, Charlie Haden, Kirk Nurock, Stanley Cowell, Lee Konitz, Julian Priester, George Cables, Gary Bartz, Gary Peacock, Fred Hersch, Jeanne Lee, Lauren Newton, Urszula Dudziak, and Bobby McFerrin.
As an educator, in 1971 Jay began leading her own workshops, partly together with Michelle Berne and Jeanne Lee. By 1981 onwards she taught at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington for 20 years. In addition to that tenure, she taught for several semesters at New York’s City College, at Graz in Austria, Berlin, Cologne and Munich. She developed the vocal program for the Banff Center in Canada, which she co-taught with fellow vocalist Sheila Jordan. The two are also teaching together at Vermont Jazz Workshop and at Jazz in July at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has taught masterclasses to the Manhattan School of Music and the Peabody Conservatory.
In 2001 her book, Sing Your Story: A Practical Guide for Learning and Teaching the Art of Jazz Singing, was published. She was the first artistic director for the first ever Women in Jazz Festival, served as a consultant for ABC Cable’s Women in Jazz, and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer, and Chamber Music America. Vocalist Jay Clayton continues to perform, record and tour.
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