Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Piers Lawrence was born on April 19th in New York City, raised in San Francisco, California and Switzerland, where he attended the Conservatoire de Musique de Lausanne and studied guitar and composition.
An alum of the Harlem-based, Jazz-Mobile Orchestra and studying with Barry Galbraith and Ted Dunbar, he has played Broadway shows including Guys and Dolls, Dancin’, Hubie, and Your Arms Too Short to Box With God, and has toured and recorded with R&B hitmakers Wilson Picket, The Main Ingredient, Esther Phillips, Phyllis Hyman, The Caribbean All-Stars and Merl Saunders.
He has recorded sessions and shared the jazz stages with many great musicians including Narada Michael Walden, Sammy Figueroa, Hiram Bullock, Lou Soloff, Jerry Garcia, John Handy, Steve Kimock, Armando Peraza, Bob Weir, Vince Welnick, Reuben Wilson, Jimmy Heath, and Tommy Flanagan.
Being based in Manhattan, the jazz guitarist continues to lead the Piers Lawrence Quartet, manage his record label, JazzNet Media, that produced his internationally acclaimed recording Stolen Moments, and produces independent projects and ambient music for film and television.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Anthony C. Mottola was born on April 18, 1918 in Kearny, New Jersey. He started out learning to play the banjo, then took up the guitar and had his first guitar lessons from his father. In 1936 he toured with an orchestra led by George Hall, marking the beginning of his professional life.
His first recordings were duets with guitarist Carl Kress. In 1945 he collaborated with accordionist John Serry Sr. in a recording of Leone Jump for Sonora Records which was played in jukeboxes throughout the United States. Tony’s only charted single as a soloist was This Guy’s In Love With You, which reached No. 22 on the Billboard magazine Easy Listening Top 40 in the summer of 1968.
Mottola worked often on television, appearing as a regular on shows hosted by vocalist Perry Como and comedian Sid Caesar and as music director for the 1950s series Danger. From 1958–1972, he was a member of The Tonight Show Orchestra led by Skitch Henderson.
He composed music for the TV documentary Two Childhoods, which was about Vice President Hubert Humphrey and writer James Baldwin, and won an Emmy Award for his work. In 1980, Mottola began performing with Frank Sinatra, often in duets, appearing at Carnegie Hall and the White House. He retired from the music business in 1988 but kept playing at home almost every day.
Guitarist Tony Mottola, who released dozens of albums as a leader, passed away in Denville, New Jersey on August 9, 2004.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Sam Noto was born on April 17, 1930 in Buffalo, New York, where he learned to play the trumpet. While still in his early twenties he was invited to join Stan Kenton’s band as the lead trumpeter, playing with him full-time until 1958. He returned to the Kenton band in 1960 after a year-long stint touring Europe with Louie Bellson and Pearl Bailey in 1959.
Between 1964 and 1967 for two separate periods, Sam was also a member of the Count Basie Orchestra. He worked primarily in Las Vegas, Nevada after 1969. It was while living and working in Vegas, he became acquainted with trumpeter Red Rodney who was influential in Noto’s prolific recording career with Xanadu.
Relocating to Toronto in 1975 he quickly became a first-call studio player and member of Rob McConnell’s “The Boss Brass” for a number of years in the ‘80s. Noto established his own successful groups including the Sam Noto Quintet, performing frequently throughout Toronto in the ‘90s and early 2000s.
He recorded six albums as a leader and another eighteen as a sideman working with Count Basie, Stan Kenton, Rob McConnell, Frank Rosolino, Red Rodney, Don Menza, Buddy Rich, Joe Romano, Charlie Parker, Mel Lewis, Dizzy Gillespie, Louie Bellson, and Kenny Drew. He has had recording associations with Xanadu, Muse, Capitol, Sea Breeze, Dot, Coliseum, Reprise, Supermono, and Unisson record labels.
Now residing in Fort Erie, Ontario, trumpeter and bop soloist Sam Noto continues to play in and around the Toronto area, as well as closer to home in Buffalo, New York jazz clubs.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Raymond Ventura was born on April 16, 1908 into a Jewish family in Paris, France and learned to play the piano as a child. By the time he turned 17 in 1925 he was the pianist for the Collegiate Five, which recorded as the Collegians for Columbia Records beginning in 1928 and then for Decca in the 1930s.
Later he led the Collegians and it became a dance orchestra resembling a big band. His sidemen included Alix Combelle, Philippe Brun, and Guy Paquinet. In the early Forties, Ray led a big band in South America and in France during the rest of the decade.
One of his band’s popular songs from 1936 was Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise in which the Marquise is told by her servants that everything is fine at home except for a series of escalating calamities. It was seen as a metaphor for France’s obliviousness to the approaching war.
Between 1931 and 1953 he appeared with his big band in four films, American Love, Beautiful Star, Women of Paris, and A Hundred Francs A Second. Pianist and bandleader Ray Ventura, who helped popularize jazz in France in the 1930s, March 29, 1979 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Del Porter was born Delmar Smith Porter on April 13, 1902 in Newberg, Oregon. He first began singing in 1928 as a member of the Foursome, which came to prominence in the Ethel Merman Broadway hit shows, Girl Crazy in 1930 and 1934’s Anything Goes. With the Foursome’s arranger and Porter’s lifelong friend, Raymond M. Johnson, he reorganized the quartet around 1946 as the Sweet Potato Tooters, one of the hottest bands in the country at the time. He would go on to record as a leader, toured with Glenn Miller, and recorded with Bing Crosby, Dick Powell, and Red Nichols.
They recorded extensively for Decca, but a long dry spell followed the quartet’s appearance in the Eleanor Powell movie Born to Dance which resulted in the creation of a six-piece group the Feather Merchants, patterned after the cockeyed musical humor of Frank & Milt Britton and Freddie Fisher’s Schnickelfritz Band. This band evolved into City Slickers, a band he co-founded with Spike Jones about the time the group split up.
The zany band that revolutionized the field of comedy music during World War II, from their earliest days, as lead vocalist, clarinetist, composer, and arranger. He wrote two songs Siam and Pass the Biscuits, Mirandy which became staples of the band’s repertoire. But he was all talent and no ambition, and soon took a back seat to Jones.
After leaving the Slickers in 1945, he returned to lend his melodious voice on Spike Jones Plays the Charleston and their Bottoms Up album. In addition to his music publishing business, Tune Town Tunes, with fellow City Slicker and songwriting partner Carl Hoefle. Porter later wrote jingles for Paper Mate pens, recorded with his Sweet Potato Tooters for Capitol transcriptions, as well as Mickey Katz and Spade Cooley. He continued to dabble in songwriting in his later years.
Vocalist, saxophonist, and clarinetist Del Porter, who in the 1940s, led his own big band, passed away on October 4, 1977 in Los Angeles, California.
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