Daily Dose Of Jazz…
George Horace Webb was born on October 8, 1917 in London, United Kingdom to a former music hall artiste. He grew up with a love of early jazz recordings, principally those made by the New Orleans musicians. A keen jazz enthusiast, he was a self-taught amateur pianist.
Working as a machine gun fitter in the Vickers-Armstrong factory at Crayford, he organized lunchtime entertainment at the factory, assembling scratch bands from among the workers. With his band, George Webb’s Dixielanders, he played regularly and famously at The Red Barn public house at Barnehurst, Kent, beginning in the early 1940s. They made several recordings and BBC radio broadcasts but by 1948 they had disbanded.
Webb was then part of Humphrey Lyttelton’s band from 1948 to 1951. After a short-term reformation of the Dixielanders in 1952, he concentrated on running a jazz club. In the mid-Sixties he was a musician agent and manager. Early in the following decade, he returned to more frequent playing and toured Europe as a soloist. Another version of the Dixielanders operated for a year and then ran a pub for 12 years.
A move back to Kent had him guest performing in various bands into the 2000s with Humphrey Lyttelton, Wally Fawkes and Eddie Harvey. In his playing he tried to re-create the style of such bands as King Oliver’s.
Pianist George Webb, who is considered by many as the father of the traditional jazz movement in Britain, transitioned on March 10, 2010.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jacob Varmus was born on October 6, 1973 in San Francisco, California. He first heard the trumpet’s call when he was two years old and ten years later had a trumpet of his own. He began winning top marks at all the California Music Educators’ Association festivals for his work as soloist and chamber musician.
Evolving parallel to his love of music was a talent for using language artistically thru poetry, critical essays, and autobiographical stories. In high school he won awards for poetry and sports journalism as well as music. His first year of college at the University of Iowa, Jacob studied poetry closely with MacArthur grant recipient Jorie Graham and classical trumpet virtuoso David Greenhoe.
An initiation to the music of John Coltrane sent Varmus to focus on jazz. In 1994 he moved to New York City to finish his BFA at the New School Jazz program. There he received timeless lessons from a long list of artists including Arnie Lawrence and Billy Harper. Here he became known to his peers and elders as a composer of harmonically intricate yet compellingly simple and striking tunes.
By his senior year he was being commissioned by the Jazz Composers’ Collective to write a suite combining jazz quintet with string quartet. It featured Ted Nash and Frank Kimbrough. He went on to enroll in composer workshops, receiving a further commission for jazz quartet.
As an educator he is on the faculty of the New York Jazz Academy. Trumpeter and composer Jacob Varmus continues to pursue his highly melodic yet rigorous music.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Thelma Terry was born Thelma Esther Combes on September 30, 1901 in Bangor, Michigan in 1901. After her parents divorced she moved with her mother and two sisters to Chicago, Illinois where she chose to study string bass. Her early years were spent on the road performing in Chautauqua assemblies. When she graduated from Austin Union High School, she earned first chair in the Chicago Women’s Symphony Orchestra. As this did not provide her with a living, she turned to jazz.
She found her way into Chicago nightlife, playing in and around the city with her all-women band, Thelma Combes and her Volcanic Orchestra, or her jazz string quartet, and was hired by Al Capone as the house band in his Colosimo’s Restaurant.
Withan article in Variety bringing national attention to her, the Music Corporation of America took notice of Combes and renamed her “Thelma Terry” and gave her an all-male band, Thelma Terry and Her Playboys, with a young Gene Krupa on drums.
MCA billed Terry as “The Beautiful Blonde Siren of Syncopation”, “The Jazz Princess”, and “The Female Paul Whiteman”. Bud Freeman was so enthusiastic about the band that he paid another musician to fill his seat in the Spike Hamilton Band so he could join the Playboys. The band toured nationally on the Eastern Seaboard and as far west as Kansas City. In 1929 she disbanded the Playboys, quit MCA to marry Willie Haar and settled in Savannah, Georgia.
After a failed comeback, and a divorce in 1936 she sold her string bass, turned her back on the music profession, and took a job as a knitting instructor. She spent her last years with family in her native Michigan.
Bandleader and bassist Thelma Tery, who was the first American woman to lead a notable jazz orchestra as an instrumentalist, transitioned on May 30, 1966 from esophageal cancer at the age of 64.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Chris Abelen was born in Tilburg, Netherlands on September 29, 1959 and started out on trumpet at 11, switching to the bigger horn at 18. He studied classical trombone with Charles Toet and Henri Aarts, and then jazz and improvised music with Willem van Manen a member of Willem Breuker Kollektief, the band that first called global attention to Dutch improvised music.
Taking over van Manen’s chair in the Kollektief in 1984, they would tour and record extensively with that band until 1988. Abelen led his own groups and in 1992 led a pan-generational, pan-stylistic international tentet showcasing the players with mini-concertos that demonstrate Abelen’s preoccupations with color, texture, mood, and his wry indirect sense of humor.
His desire to lead his own band had him forming first a sextet that evolved into a quartet. He then put together a tentet, in which a quartet and quintet was produced. All the configurations went on to record several albums. Over the years Chris has toured and recorded with numerous Dutch jazz and new music ensembles, including Willem van Manen’s Contraband, I Compani, Paradise Regained Orchestra, Eric van der Westen Octet, and numerous others.
Taking his music in a new direction by 2016 he had released his sixth album, A Day At The Office, with a septet. Other new projects are still in the pipeline and trombonist Chris Abelen continues to perform and compose.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Michael Anthony Nock was born September 27, 1940 in Christchurch, New Zealand. He began studying piano at 11 and attended Nelson College for one term in 1955. By the age of 18, he was performing in Australia and in Sydney he played in The Three Out trio with Freddy Logan and Chris Karan. They toured England in 1961 before he left to attend Berklee College of Music.
Nock was a member of Yusef Lateef’s group from 1963 to 1965. Three years later he became involved with fusion, leading the Fourth Way band for two years. For a decade beginning in 1975 he was a studio musician in New York City, then returned to Australia.
His 1987 album Open Door with drummer Frank Gibson, Jr. was named that year’s Best Jazz Album in the New Zealand Music Awards. The 2003 New Year Honours saw Mike appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to jazz.
Currently residing in New South Wales, pianist, composer and arranger Mike Nock, who taught at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music until 2018, continues to perform with his trio, big band, and various one-off ensembles.
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