Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Michael Baird was born Lusaka, Zambia on July 5, 1954 and moved to the Netherlands at an early age, where he learned to play drums. Since the mid-1970s he has worked with several Dutch jazz groups and from 1975-83 he played and recorded with Gijs Hendriks, Slide Hampton, Kenny Drew, Raul Burnet, Sonny Grey, Siggi Kessler, Michel Herr, Michel Grailler, Joe Diorio, Jan Akkerman, Wim Overgaauw, Stan Tracey, and Kenny Wheeler.
He founded his own label SWP Records in 1986, led his group Sharp Wood for a decade beginning in 1986 and the octet Utrecht Deep Artment for two years. In 2000 he put together a quintet CapeAbility, followed by sextet Trendy 3D Junk and by 2002 was performing solo concerts along with various other projects and composition commissions.
He has compiled and produced a 22 Cd series “Historical Recordings by Hugh Tracey” of African music from the 40s and 50s, made his own field recordings in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and released both on SWP Records.
Drummer, percussionist and keyboardist Michael Baird continues to perform, record and push the boundaries of jazz.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Corky Hale was born Merrilyn Hecht on July 3, 1936 in Freeport, Illinois. She learned piano, harp, flute, and cello by the time she was in her teens. She went on to study at the Chicago Music Conservatory and then at Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan.
By age 16 she had enrolled in Stephens College, a school for young ladies, for her last year of high school. After graduation she decided to move to Hollywood, California to be a musician but her father had other plans, sending her to nearby University of Wisconsin–Madison. After a year she dropped out, intent on moving to Hollywood but again a compromise with her parents led her to UCLA.
During the 1950s, she became a studio musician in Hollywood, playing harp on albums by Chet Baker, June Christy, Ella Fitzgerald, Anita O’Day, and Frank Sinatra. She worked as a vocalist with Freddy Martin at the Coconut Grove in Los Angeles, California. Jerry Gray invited her to perform with his band in Las Vegas, Nevada where she played piano for Billie Holiday and accompanied her on tour.
As a solo act, she recorded the album Corky Hale Plays George Gershwin and Vernon Duke with Buddy Collette, Howard Roberts, and Chico Hamilton. The late Sixties saw her accompany Tony Bennett on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and sang a song by herself.
She has worked with Liberace, Barbra Streisand, Elkie Brooks, Harry James, Peggy Lee, James Brown, Spike Jones, George Michael, Roberta Flack, Les McCann, Herbie Mann, Nina Simone and Björk, to name a few. Hale has also produced plays, including Give ‘Em Hell, Harry, starring Jason Alexander and Lullaby of Broadway, a profile of the lyricist Al Dubin. She has appeared at Vibrato, Catalina Bar & Grill, The White House, and the Kennedy Center.
At the University of Wisconsin, Hale was one of the few white students to join the NAACP. She was a birth control teacher at Planned Parenthood in New York and is on the National Advisory Board of NARAL and on the board of WRRAP. She is an American Film Institute associate and is the founder of Angel Harvest, an organization which redistributes unused food from restaurants, hotels, and events to hungry and needy people in Los Angeles.
Harpist, pianist, flutist, and vocalist Corky Hale, who recorded four albums as a leader and has been a theater producer, political activist, restaurateur, and is the owner of the Corky Hale Women’s Clothing Store in Los Angeles.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jack Hylton was born John Greenhalgh Hilton on July 2, 1892 in Great Lever near Bolton, Lancashire, England the son of a cotton yarn twister and an amateur singer at the local Labour Club. He learned piano to accompany him on the stage and later sang to the customers when his father bought a pub in nearby Little Lever, becoming known as the Singing Mill-Boy. He also performed as a relief pianist for various bands.
Moving to London, England as a pianist in the 400 Club during his early career and playing with the Stroud Haxton Band. During World War I he became musical director of the band of the 20th Hussars, and later in the Army Entertainment Division. After the war Hylton formed a double act with Tommy Handley to little success, played with the Queens Dance Orchestra, wrote arrangements of popular songs and recorded them for His Master’s Voice and Zonophone under the label Directed by Jack Hylton. His records carried the new style of jazz-derived American dance music.
Dismissed by his own bandmates from the Queen’s Hall in 1922, Jack not only set up his own band, but also set up a number of other orchestras under the Jack Hylton Organisation. Even though he was not professionally trained for business, he brought his band to success during the Great Depression. He is credited for bringing Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and others to Britain and Europe in the 1930s.
Hylton also became a director and major shareholder of the new Decca record label, recorded with Paul Robeson, and made the first transatlantic entertainment broadcast with Paul Whiteman and his orchestra. He performed in the United States when Standard Oil signed him for a radio show on CBS. Returning to Britain he toured Europe, appeared on radio and television and finally disbanded by 1940.
He continued to conduct orchestras for radio in the years to come, leading the Glenn Miller Orchestra when it visited England in 1943. During the war, he took the London Philharmonic Orchestra around Britain, giving promenade concerts. At this point in his career he became an impresario, discovering new stars and managing radio, film and theatre productions.
The Fifties saw him reuniting with old band members for that year’s Royal Command Performance, billed as “The Band that Jack Built”. He founded Jack Hylton Television Productions, which lasted until 1960. IIn his final years Hylton was still producing stage shows, as well as taking a leading role in organising various Royal Command Performances, until his final stage production, Camelot, in 1965.
Complaining of chest and stomach pains he was admitted to the London Clinic, where three days later on January 29, 1965 1892~1965 | pianist, composer, bandleader and impresario Jack Hylton transitioned from a heart attack. He was 72.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Barbara Montgomery ws born in San Francisco, California on June 30, 1948 and during her teen years lived in Vietnam in the early to mid Sixties because her father’s work as an electrical engineer took them there. In the late 1960s she moved to her adopted home of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and during this period is when she started singing.
In the early to mid-’70s, Montgomery’s day gig was The Mike Douglas Show, for which she performed a variety of duties including makeup artist, camera person, and stage manager. When the popular television program moved from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, California she chose to stay and ultimately went on tour with pop/folk singer Harry Chapin later in the decade, helping with lighting and doing some background vocals. Becoming a full time mother in 1979, she took a break from music for several years.
Since 1986, she has served as musical director for fitness expert Richard Simmons. Between the demands of working for Simmons and raising a child, Barbara had little time for jazz singing in the 1980s. But she returned to club gigs in 1992 and acquired a small following playing the Philadelphia jazz circuit, where she has been joined by such notables as guitarist Jimmy Bruno and pianists Sid Simmons, Barry Sames, and Dennis Fortune.
Montgomery recruited former Chick Corea drummer Dave Weckl and co-producer/guitarist Michael Sembello for her self-titled debut album in 1996. Two years later she released her sophomore LP, Ask Me Now and her third Dakini Land followed after three more years, in tribute to the work of Chick Corea. This release won her much praise and put her on the scene as a vocalist to follow. That reputation was helped by Little Sunflower, the following year’s record of standards.
Vocalist Barbara Montgomery, who was influenced by Chris Connor, Julie London, and June Christy, continues to perform and record.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ken Hyder was born June 29, 1946 in Dundee, Scotland. He began playing jazz in his native Scotland before moving south to London, England where he studied under John Stevens and played at the Little Theatre Club at Garrick Yard, an avant garde haunt, run by Stevens.
Over the course of a 40 year career Hyder has worked with and recorded with Elton Dean, Chris Biscoe, Tim Hodgkinson, Paul Rogers, Maggie Nicols, Don Paterson and Frankie Armstrong, just to name a few in a long list.
He composes music and has produced more than three dozen albums of original material. In 1970, Hyder formed Talisker and during the decade began moving away from jazz and into collaborations with musicians from different musical backgrounds, including Irish, South African and South American players. This led him to explore spiritual aspects of music with spiritual practitioners like Tibetan and Japanese Buddhist monks, and Siberian shamans.
As an author he has published three e-books based on shamanism in Siberia, cyber crime and cyber terrorism, and a memoir. Jazz fusion drummer and percussionist Ken Hyder, best known for combining folk, ethnic and Celtic music with jazz, continues to perform and record.
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