Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Paul Broadnax was born on January 27, 1926 in Cambridge, Massachusetts to a tenor father with the Lyric Male Quartet who was also a choral director and voice teacher. She also was a dressmaker and bartered those talents to secure piano lessons for the youngster from the age of eight until he was fourteen. They moved to the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts when he was very young and where he grew up.

He studied clarinet in Junior High School which allowed him to play in the marching band. His classmates were Roy Haynes, Alan Dawson and Ray Perry, and during this period in life he formed his own band. After graduating from Mechanic Arts High School he was drafted into the Army Air Forces and sent to Texas. After being a foot soldier for only two days he was assigned to Special Services as a musician. It was here that he met arranger and pianist Donn Trenner, who he would later collaborate with on a later album.

Returning to Roxbury after World War II, Paul hooked up with alto saxophonist Harold Emerson, trumpeter Buster Daniels and tenor saxophonists Doug Lee and Fred Williams. He began playing with ensembles at jazz venues throughout the region. Nat King Cole and Duke Ellington would become huge influences inhis development. In the late 1940s, Broadnax began writing arrangements for Sabby LewisIn the late 1940s, Broadnax began writing arrangements for Sabby Lewis for more than five years, and worked with Paul Gonsalves before he joined the Ellington Orchestra.

In addition to supplying arrangements for Lewis, directing his own groups and working with the Tom Kennedy and Buster Daniels bands, he played tenor, piano and sang with the Gilmore Big Band, all the while writing arrangements for the group. Setting up other sources of revenue to supplement his earnings as a musician, Broadnax attended what is now the Wentworth Institute of Technology to be certified as an airplane mechanic, and he graduated from Northeastern University with an associate’s degree in engineering. He worked at Raytheon for many years, then left to focus more on music, while also running an Amway business.

He would go on to form the Paul Champ Three featuring bassist Champlain “Champ” Jones and drummer Tony Sarni, have a regular spot on the ABC affiliate in Boston and for another group with bassist Dave Trefethen and drummer Les Harris, Jr. He would appear with among others, Cab Calloway, Dorothy Donnegan, Lionel Hampton, Clark Terry, Joe Williams, and Jimmy Witherspoon. Vocalist and pianist Paul Broadnax, who in 2003 was chosen as Musician of the Year by the Boston Musicians’ Association, transitioned on August 1, 2018.

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