Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Vincent Lopez was born of Portuguese immigrant parents in Brooklyn, New York City on December 30, 1895. By 1916 he was leading his own dance band in New York City. Five years later his band began broadcasting on the new medium of entertainment radio, giving listeners a weekly 90-minute show on Newark, New Jersey station WJZ. The broadcast was instrumental in making him one of North America’s most popular bandleaders through the 1940s.

In the 1930s and ‘40s Vincent worked occasionally in feature films, notably The Big Broadcast and I Don’t Want to Make History and  was one of the first bandleaders to work in Soundies movie musicals. His flamboyant style of piano playing influenced Eddy Duchin and Liberace.

Noted musicians who played in his band included Artie Shaw, Xavier Cugat, Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey, Bob Effros, Mike Mosiello, Fred Lowery, Joe Tarto and Glenn Miller. He featured singers Keller Sisters and Lynch, Betty Hutton, and Marion Hutton. Lopez’s longtime drummer was Mike Riley, who popularized the novelty hit The Music Goes Round and Round.

In 1941, Lopez’s Orchestra began a residency at Manhattan’s Taft Hotel that lasted 25 years. In the early 1950s, he along with Gloria Parker hosted a radio program broadcast from the Taft Hotel called Shake the Maracas in which audience members competed for small prizes by playing maracas with the orchestra.

Bandleader, pianist and actor Vincent Lopez, who published his autobiography Lopez Speaking in 1960, died at the Villa Maria nursing home in North Miami, Florida on September 20, 1975.

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