Daily Dose Of Jazz…
René Marie was born René Marie Stevens on November 7, 1955 in Warrenton, Virginia. With the encouragement of her children, the jazz vocalist and songwriter started her professional musical career in 1997 at the age of 42.
Performing at Washington D.C.’s Blues Alley in 1999, René signed with the MaxJazz label out of St. Louis and released four albums to critical acclaim and her sophomore project “Vertigo” received a coronet ranking by the “Penguin Guide to Jazz”, a distinction given to less than 85 other recordings in jazz history.
Her work often combines contrasting songs such as “Dixie” and the anti-lynching “Strange Fruit” on Vertigo or Ravel’s Bolero with Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne” on Live at Jazz Standard.
Attracting controversy and national attention in 2008, René substituted the lyrics of “The Star-Spangled Banner” with “Lift Every Voice and Sing” when invited to sing the national anthem at a civic event in Denver. This arrangement of the national anthem forms part of the titular suite of Marie’s 2011 CD, “The Voice of My Beautiful Country” on the Motema Music label.
René Marie specializes in writing her own music, and she comments on the fact that this is not the norm in jazz in one of her songs, “This for Joe,” after a club manager who got mad at her for singing originals. Her 8th release, Black Lace Freudian Slip, maintains the tradition.
She followed that project by steering away from tradition with a rare tribute album to Eartha Kitt, her latest titled “I Want To Be Evil”. Vocalist Rene Marie continues to record, perform and tour worldwide.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Joseph Raymond Conniff was born on November 6, 1916 in Attleboro, Massachusetts, learned to play trombone from his father and learned music arranging from a course book.
Post World War II he joined the Artie Shaw big band writing many of his arrangements. Hired by Mitch Miller, head of A&R at Columbia Records, Ray became the house arranger. During this period he worked with Rosemary Clooney, Johnny Mathis, Frankie Laine, Marty Robbins and Johnny Ray among others. In 1955 Ray wrote a top 10 arrangement for Don Cherry’s “Band of Gold” that sold more than a million copies.
From 1957 to 1969 Conniff arranged and recorded as a leader and sideman for Columbia and their subsidiary label Epic, became a bandleader and had 28 albums in the American Top 40, created the Ray Conniff Singers, toured Europe, was the first American popular artist to record in Russia and stepping out of his element he produced a couple of light jazz albums sans vocals.
Conniff’s most famous album was his 1966 release of “Somewhere My Love” written to the tune Lara’s Theme from the 1965 film Dr. Zhivago. It featured the 12 female and 13 male Ray Conniff Singers. The album went platinum, hit the top of the American and European charts and grabbed a Grammy Award.
The next three decades were equally lucrative for Ray recording mainly out of Los Angeles and finding fame touring Latin and South America. He recorded an average of two instrumental and one vocal album a year and sold over 70 million albums worldwide. He continued to record and perform until his death on October 12, 2002 in Escondido, California.
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Hollywood On 52nd Street
As Time Goes By is a now a jazz classic song that was originally written by Herman Hupfeld in 1931. However, it didn’t become most famous until it appeared in the 1942 romantic drama film Casablanca. Based on the un-produced stage play “Everybody Comes To Rick’s”, it was sung by the character Sam played by Dooley Wilson. The song was voted No. 2 on the AFI’s 100 Years…100 Songs Special, commemorating the best songs in film. It was used as a fanfare for Warner Bros. Pictures since 1999 and was the title and theme song of the 1990s British comedy series As Time Goes By.
The movie starred Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid the film also featured Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Dooley Wilson.
The Story: Set during World War II, it focuses on a man torn between, in the words of one character, “love and virtue”. He must choose between his love for a woman and helping her Czech Resistance leader husband escape the Vichy-controlled Moroccan city of Casablanca to continue his fight against the Nazis.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ranee Lee was born October 26, 1942 and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She performed as a singer while in high school and after graduation she began her professional career as a dancer, and during the Seventies began playing drums and saxophone with various touring groups in the U.S. and Canada.
Settling in Montreal she turned to the stage starring in Lady Day as Billie Holiday, winning a Dora Mavor Moore Award and singing took over her past musical endeavors. She began recording and released her first album Deep Song in 1989 with bassist Milt Hinton and Oliver Jones followed up with her sophomore project Jazz On Broadway with Red Mitchell.
Over the years with numerous releases Ranee has become one of Canada’s most popular jazz vocalists and was named a member of the Order of Canada in 2006, the second highest order of merit. Her music appears in the animated short film, Black Soul, and has won a 2010 Juno Award for her album Ranee Lee Lives Upstairs.
An accomplished author, Lee has written children’s books, has performed on stage, television, film and jazz festivals, has sat on the faculty of the University of Laval in Quebec City for seven years and The Schulich School of Music of McGill University. She continues to record, perform and tour.
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Hollywood On 52nd Street
Never on Sunday is the theme song written by Manos Hadjidakis and Billy Towne for the 1960 Greek black-and-white film. The signature song became a hit and bestowed an Academy Award for Best Song on composer Hadjidakis. It stars Melina Mecouri and Jules Dassin and gently submerges the viewer into the Greek culture with music, dance and language through subtitles.
The Story: Ilya, a self-employed, free-spirited prostitute who lives in the port city of Piraeus and Homer, an American tourist from Middletown, Connecticut and a classical scholar enamored with all things Greek. Homer feels Ilya’s life style typifies the degradation of Greek classical culture and attempts to steer her onto the path of morality. It constitutes a variation of the Pygmalion story.
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