Daily Dose Of Jazz…
William Overton Smith was born on September 22, 1926 in Sacramento, California. He grew up in Oakland, California where he began playing clarinet at the age of ten. At 13 he put together a jazz group to play for dances and at the age of 15 he joined the Oakland Symphony. After high school, a brief cross-country tour with a dance band led to his giving two weeks notice for the best education he could, and he headed to New York City.
Studying at the Juilliard School of Music by day, he played in the city’s jazz clubs at night. The Juilliard faculty doing nothing for him, Bill returned home and attended Mills College in Oakland where he met pianist Dave Brubeck. He went on to study composition with Roger Sessions at the University of California, Berkeley, where he graduated with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree.
A win of the Prix de Paris gave Bill two years of study at the Paris Conservatory, and in 1957, he was awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome and spent six years in that city. After teaching at the University of Southern California, he then spent thirty years teaching at the University of Washington School of Music in Seattle, Washington, and co-led the Contemporary Group.
Smith investigated and cataloged a wide range of extended techniques on the clarinet, including the use of two clarinets simultaneously by a single performer, and compiled the first comprehensive catalogue of fingerings for clarinet multiphonics. He was among the early composers interested in electronic music, and as a performer he continued to experiment with amplified clarinet and electronic delays.
He remained active nationally, internationally, and on the local Seattle music scene until well into his 90s. Clarinetist and composer Bill Smith, who played in various Brubeck groups and who composed, recorded and premiered his jazz opera Space in the Heart, passed away at age 93 in his home from complications of prostate cancer on February 29, 2020.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Larry Binyon was born on September 16, 1908 in Urbana, Illinois and his mother shared some of her musical knowledge. By age eighteen he was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,playing E flat soprano flute in the school’s concert band as well as flute and piccolo in its first regimental band during the 1926-27 school year.
After spending one year at college by 1927 he was already playing professionally in Chicago as part of Beasley Smith’s band, which also included drummer Ray McKinley and clarinetist Matty Matlock. Flute may have been his first instrument, or his primary one at school, but tenor saxophone became his main instrument for dance bands.
Later that year Binyon joined bandleader Ben Pollack when he returned to Victor’s Chicago studio after a five-month hiatus. History does not reveal him as a bandleader as there is little evidence of him having led his own bands, and no recordings were ever issued under his own name. He certainly has a load of credits as a band member, however, and was adept in both big band and small group settings.
Working a variety of radio jobs during the day, one eye glued open to help recover from the previous night’s late-ending gig.During the 1920s he worked with Irving Mills’ Hotsy-Totsy Gang, Roger Wolfe Kahn & His Orchestra, and Mildred Bailey with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra to name a few.
His widest exposure on recording is his backup work on records by the Boswell Sisters, Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Fats Waller & His Buddies sessions, Henry “Red” Allen, Eddie Condon, Toby Hardwicke, Gene Krupa. Saxophonist, clarinetist, and flutist Larry Binyon passed away on February 10, 1974.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Claude Luter ws born on July 23, 1923 in Paris, France the son of a professional pianist and studied the instrument with his father before moving to the clarinet in his teens. Seduced by jazz, he abandoned his training as a naval architect, although he retained an interest in sailing and later qualified as a private pilot. He went on to take clarinet lessons from a pit orchestra player, and pursued his passion for jazz by following the Claude Abadie band around Paris’s Latin Quarter clubs in the late 1930s, sometimes acting as a helpmate to the band’s frail trumpeter, the writer Boris Vian, with whom he made his debut on record in 1944.
Encountering trumpeters Pierre Merlin and Claude Rabanit, who became key members of his first band in 1946. Already recording as Claude Luter et Ses Orientais for the French Swing label, Luter and company moved over to the Vieux Colombier, popular with the existentialist crowd. He began a friendship with the trumpeter’s New Orleans-born clarinetist, Barney Bigard, a connection later cemented on record.
Among Luter’s principal influences was soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet. As luck would have it, Bechet made concert appearances in Paris in 1949 and was teamed with Luter’s down-to-earth trad band at the Salle Pleyel. He also sat in with them at the Vieux Colombier, beginning an association that endured after Bechet settled permanently in France.
Luter later visited New Orleans, Louisiana a number of times, recorded there and took part in the centenary celebrations of Bechet’s birth. He also attended the tribute concert for Louis Armstrong’s 70th birthday in Los Angeles, California in 1970. Clarinetist Claude Luter, who doubled on soprano saxophone, passed away on October 6, 2006 in Paris at the age of 83.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Karel Krautgartner was born on July 20, 1922 in Mikulov, Moravia into the family of a postmaster. He began studying clarinet on a private basis with Stanislav Krtička, and performed a demanding part of the Concertino by Leoš Janáček at the composer’s request at the festival of contemporary music in Frankfurt am Main, Germany in 1926. Acquiring the necessary skills of clarinet playing, and a fanatic passion for clarinet construction and components – reeds, mouthpieces, and barrels, which he later used his knowledge of wind instruments as a lecturer at German universities in Cologne and Düsseldorf.
In 1930 he began playing piano and by 1935 after moving to Brno, Czech Republic he became interested mainly in jazz radio broadcasts. 1936 saw Karel founding the student orchestra Quick band. In 1942, he signed his first professional contract as a saxophonist in the Gustav Brom orchestra in the hotel Passage in Brno. A year later he created Dixie Club and started to arrange in the Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller styles. From 1945 – 1955, the core of the Dixie Club moved to Prague and became a part of the Karel Vlach Orchestra.
He achieved a privileged position as the leader of the saxophone section and started to contribute with his own compositions. In 1956,along with Karel Velebný he put together the Karel Krautgartner Quintet, performed with the All Star Band, and with Studio 5. During the Sixties he became the head of the Dance Orchestra of Czechoslovakia Radio, renamed the Karel Krautgartner Orchestra. In 1968 he emigrated to Vienna, Austria and became the chief conductor of the 0RF Bigband. He eventually moved to Cologne, Germany. Clarinetist, saxophonist, arranger, composer, conductor and educator Karel Krautgartner passed away on September 20, 1982.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Joe Darensbourg was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on July 9, 1906 and in his youth moved out to California where he played gigs where he could find them and appeared in several silent films with these bands. In 1950 Joe appeared in Mahogany Magic with Kid Ory’s Creole Jazz Band. The Sixties saw him playing with Louis Armstrong’s All Stars in The Good Years of Jazz: Louis Armstrong & The All Stars.
In 1958 his Dixie Fliers recording of Yellow Dog Blues hit #43 on the pop charts, and Louis Armstrong’s version of Hello Dolly, which Drensburg played clarinet went to #1 in 1964. By the Sixties he performed on a television special with the All Stars Winter Carnival in Sun Valley, California and a March of Dimes tribute to Louis Armstrong.
He was noted for his work with Buddy Petit, Jelly Roll Morton, Charlie Creath, Fate Marable, Andy Kirk, Johnny Wittwer, Kid Ory, Wingy Manone, Joe Liggins and Louis Armstrong. Clarinetist and saxophonist Joe Darensbourg, who played Dixieland, passed away on May 24, 1985.
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