Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Cliff Smalls was born Clifton Arnold on March 3, 1918  and was raised in Charleston, South Carolina. His father, a carpenter, performed piano and organ for Charleston’s Central Baptist Church. He taught Smalls classical music at an early age. He left home with the Carolina Cotton Pickers and also recorded with them, for instance, Off and on Blues and “Deed I Do, which he arranged and featured Cat Anderson in 1937 when he was 19.

With his career coinciding with the early years of bebop, from 1942 to 1946 he was a trombonist, arranger and also backup piano-player for band-leader and pianist Earl Hines, alongside Dizzie Gillespie and Charlie Parker. While in the Hines band he performed often during broadcasts seven nights a week on open mikes coast-to-coast across America. Hines also used Teddy Wilson, Jess Stacy and Nat “King” Cole as backup piano-players but Smalls was his favorite. He also played in the Jimmie Lunceford and Erskine Hawkins bands.

After the inevitable post-World War II breakup of the Hines big-band, Cliff went on to play and record in smaller ensembles with his former Earl Hines band colleagues, singer and band-leader Billy Eckstine, trombonist Bennie Green, saxophonist Earl Bostic and singer Sarah Vaughan. In 1949 he recorded with JJ Johnson and Charlie Rouse. He was the pianist on Earl Bostic’s 1950 hit Flamingo along with John Coltrane but had a serious automobile accident, with Earl Bostic, in 1951 and laid in bed all of 1952, till March of 1953.

Recovering, Smalls shifted his musical career to serve as music director/arranger for singers Eartha Kitt, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis, Jr., Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Clyde McPhatter, Roy Hamilton and Brook Benton. He recorded Bennie Green with Art Farmer in 1956 and was, for many years, a regular with Sy Oliver’s nine-piece Little Big-Band from 1974-1984, a regular stint in New York’s Rainbow Room.

In the 1970s he returned to jazz-recording, including four solo tracks for The Complete Master Jazz Piano Series in 1970, with Sy Oliver in 1973, Texas Twister with Buddy Tate in 1975, Swing and Things in 1976 and Caravan in France in 1978. In 1980 Smalls was featured playing piano in The Cotton Club, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Trombonist, pianist, conductor and arranger Cliff Smalls, who worked in the jazz, soul and rhythm & blues genres, passed away in 2008.

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