Daily Dose Of Jazz…
John Aaron Lewis was born in LaGrange, Illinois on May 3, 1920 but was raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He learned classical music and piano from his mother starting at the age of seven, then continued his musical training at the University of New Mexico and also studied anthropology. He served in the Army stationed in France during World War II and during his three-year tour of duty he met and performed with Kenny Clarke. Together they formed a band and in the bop style, John composed and arranged.
After the war he went to New York where he found work in the 52nd Street clubs with Allen Eager, Hot Lips Page and others. This led to him joining dizzy Gillespie’s bop-style big band and further developing his skill as a composer and arranger while matriculating through the Manhattan School of Music. He soon returned to Europe on tour, remained a continued to write and study piano. By ’48 he was back in the States playing with Charlie Parker, Illinois Jacquet, Lester Young, Miles Davis and Ella Fitzgerald.
Lewis, vibraphonist Milt Jackson, drummer Kenny Clarke, and bassist Ray Brown had been the small group within the Gillespie big band that played their own short sets when the brass and reeds needed a break. This led to the foursome forming a full-time working group in 1950, known at first as the Milt Jackson Quartet. After replacing Brown with Percy Heath the name was changed to the Modern Jazz Quartet and assuming the role of musical director from 1954 to 1974, John oriented it toward a quiet, chamber style of music that found a balance between his gentle, almost mannered compositions and Jackson’s more elemental writing and playing.
Over a long and illustrious career, John directed the School of Jazz at the Music Inn, was musical director for the Monterey Jazz Festival from 1958 to 1982, taught at City College of New York and Harvard University, rejoined the re-formed MJQ, led his own sextet, founded the American Jazz Orchestra, participated in Re-Birth of the Cool, was involved in various Third Stream Projects all while continuing to teach, compose and perform.
John Lewis, conservative bop pianist, composer, arranger and musical director for the Modern Jazz Quartet passed away in New York City on March 29, 2001.
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Daily Dose OF Jazz…
Blossom Dearie was born April 28, 1924 in East Durham, New York and as a child she studied Western classical piano but switched to jazz in her teens. After high school Dearie moved to New York City to pursue a music career and began to sing in groups such as the Blue Flames with the Woody Herman Orchestra and the Alvino Rey’s Blue Reys before starting her solo career.
She moved to Paris in 1952 and formed a vocal group, the Blue Stars of Paris, which included Michel Legrand’s sister Christine and Bob Dorough. In 1954 the group had a hit in France with a French version of “Lullaby of Birdland”. The Blue Stars would later evolve into the Swingle Sisters. Interestingly, on her first solo album released two years later, she plays the piano but does not sing.
After returning to the U.S. Blossom, Dearie made her first six American albums as a solo singer and pianist for Verve Records in the late 1950s and early 1960s, mostly in a small trio or quartet setting. In 1962, she recorded a radio commercial for Hires Root Beer. Through the Sixties she recorded with orchestra, performed in supper clubs around New York, appeared at Ronnie Scott’s in London and recorded four albums in the UK.
After a period of inactivity, by the ‘’70s she established her own label, Daffodil Records, lent her voice to “Mother Necessity” and “Figure Eight” on “Schoolhouse Rock!” and she collaborated with Johnny Mercer on one of his final songs “My New Celebrity Is You”. Her voice and songs have been featured in such films as Kissing Jessica Stein, The Squid and the Whale, My Life Without Me and The Adventures of Felix.
Blossom Dearie, vocalist, pianist and one of the last remaining supper-club performers, continued to perform in clubs until shortly before she passed away on February 7, 2006 at age 84 in Greenwich Village, New York.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
James Peter Giuffre was born on April 26, 1921 in Dallas, Texas. A graduate of Dallas Technical High School and North Texas Teachers College, he first became known as an arranger for Woody Herman. He would become a central figure in West Coast jazz and cool jazz, and was a member of Shorty Roger’s groups before going solo. Giuffre played clarinet, as well as tenor and baritone saxophones, but eventually focused on clarinet.
His first trio in 1957 consisted of Giuffre, guitarist Jim Hall and double bassist Ralph Pena, later replace by Jim Atlas. With minor hit with Giuffre’s “The Train and the River” featured on a television special The Sound of Jazz, he was matched with Pee Wee Russell for a leisurely jam session. When Atlas left the trio, Jimmy replaced him with valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer. By 1961, Giuffre formed a new trio with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow and exploring free jazz hushed and quiet focus more resembling chamber music. The trio’s early ‘60s explorations of melody, harmony and rhythm are still as striking and radical as any in jazz.
Throughout the ‘60s Giuffre, Bley and Swallow eventually explored wholly improvised music, several years ahead of the free improvisation boom in Europe. By the early 1970s, Giuffre formed a new trio and utilized different instrumentation configurations as he ventured into electric and synthesizers. During this decade he headed the jazz ensemble at New York University, taught private lessons in saxophone and music composition. This continued through the ‘90s at the New England Conservatory of Music.
Jimmy Giuffre, who continually wrote creative and unusual arrangements and who was most notable for his development of forms of jazz which allowed for free interplay between the musicians, anticipating forms of free improvisation, passed away in Pittsfield, Massachusetts on April 24, 2008 of pneumonia, just two days shy of his 87th birthday.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Milton “Shorty” Rogers was born Milton Rajonsky on April 14, 1924 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He worked first as a professional trumpeter with Will Bradley and Red Norvo. For two years beginning in 1947 he worked extensively with Woody Herman and then from 1950 to1951 he played with Stan Kenton.
Rogers appeared on Shelly Manne’s 1954 album “The Three and the Two” along with Jimmy Guiffre, later recording with Guiffre showing his experimental side, resulting in an early form of avant-garde jazz. Settling in Los Angeles in the early fifties, by 1953 he was recording as a leader with RCA through 1962 that incorporated avant-garde, cool jazz and the “hot” style of Count Basie, who was a great inspiration for him.
Shorty’s composer credits include Mr. Magoo cartoon “Hotsy Footsy” and the Looney Tune “Three Little Bops”, scored the Brando film “The Wild One” and the Sinatra vehicle “The Man With The Golden Arm”. Becoming better known for his skills as a composer and arranger than as a trumpeter in the early ‘60s he stopped performing on trumpet, left the jazz scene and concentrated on writing for television and film for many years.
In 1982, he returned to the trumpet and jazz and by the 1990s formed a Lighthouse All Stars group with Bud Shank, Bill Perkins and Bob Cooper. Trumpeter, composer and arranger Shorty Rogers, a figurehead in the West Coast era of “cool jazz” passed away on November 7, 1994.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Marian McPartland was born Margaret Marian Turner on March 20, 1918 in Windsor, England. A musical prodigy from the time she could sit at a piano at age three, she pursued classical studies on piano and violin at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. However, much to the dismay of her family, she developed a love for American jazz and musicians such as Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Teddy Wilson, and Mary Lou Williams among many others.
By 1938, despite her family’s efforts to keep her at Guildhall, Marian left to join Billy Mayerl’s Claviers, a four-piano vaudeville act, performing under the stage name of Marian Page. The group toured throughout Europe during WWII entertaining Allied troops where she met and performed with Jimmy McPartland, and later married, moving to the United States.
1944 saw the McPartlands in New York with Marian forming her own trio and enjoying an 8-year engagement at the Hickory House bringing drummer Joe Morello into the fold. After many years of recording for labels such as Capitol, Savoy, Argo, Sesac, Time, and Dot, in 1969 she founded her own record label, Halcyon Records, before having a long association with the Concord Jazz label.
Marian launched a weekly radio program that featured recordings and interviews with guests in 1964 on WBAI-FM in New York City. This series paved the way for the NPR program Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz that began on June 4, 1978 and is the longest-running cultural program on NPR as well as being one of the longest-running jazz programs ever produced on public radio.
A master at adapting to her guest’s musical styles and having a well-known affinity for beautiful and harmonically rich ballads, McPartland also has recorded many tunes of her own. Her compositions include “Ambiance”, “There’ll Be Other Times”, “With You In Mind”, “Twilight World”, and “In the Days of Our Love”.
Marian a participated in 60 years of jazz evolution, was awarded a Trustees’ Lifetime Achievement Award Grammy for her work as an educator, writer, and host of Piano Jazz, and was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2010. Pianist and composer Marian McPartland passed away on August 20, 2013 of natural causes at her home in Port Washington, New York. She was 95 years old.
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