Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Monty Sunshine was born on April 9, 1928 in Stepney, London, England. Along with Lonnie Donegan, Jim Bray, and Ron Bowden, formed the backline of what was the embryo Chris Barber Band. A few personnel changes between 1953 and ‘54 with the departure of Ken Colyer whose name headed the band for a time until they adopted Baber’s name permanently.
The band quickly gained an international reputation following their inaugural tour of Denmark, before their professional debut in the United Kingdom. Sunshine stayed with the band for several years, until leaving in 1960 and forming his own band, staying true to the original six-man lineup.
In January 1963, the British music magazine NME reported that the biggest trad jazz event to be staged in Britain had taken place at Alexandra Palace. The event included Sunshine, George Melly, Diz Disley, Acker Bilk, Chris Barber, Kenny Ball, Ken Colyer, Alex Welsh, Bob Wallis, Bruce Turner, and Mick Mulligan.
Sunshine returned to play a reunion concert with the original Chris Barber Band at the Fairfield Halls, Croydon in June 1975. This was well-received, and the band reformed once again for an international reunion tour in 1994. Sunshine retired from music around 2001. His discography is extensive, and compact discs have been issued of recordings with Colyer and Barber, as well as with his own band. He has also worked with Beryl Bryden, Johnny Parker, the Crane River Jazz Band, and Donegan’s Dancing Sunshine Band.
Clarinetist Monty Sunshine, who is known for his clarinet solo on the track Petite Fleur, a million-seller for the Chris Barber Jazz Band in 1959, passed away on November 30, 2010, at the age of 82.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lenny Tristano was born Leonard Joseph Tristano on March 19, 1919 in Chicago, Illinois, the second of four brothers. He started on the family’s player piano at the age of two or three. He had classical piano lessons when he was eight, Born with weak eyesight, and then with measles, by the age of nine or ten, he was totally blind. He attended the Illinois School for the Blind in Jacksonville, Florida for a decade around 1928. During his school days, he played several other instruments, including trumpet, guitar, saxophones, and drums and by eleven, he had his first gigs, playing clarinet in a brothel.
Back in Chicago, Tristano got his bachelor’s degree in music from the American Conservatory of Music but left before completing his master’s degree, moving to New York City in 1946. He played saxophone and piano with leading bebop musicians, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Max Roach among others. He formed his own small bands, which soon displayed some of his early interests – contrapuntal interaction of instruments, harmonic flexibility, and rhythmic complexity. His 1949 quintet recorded the first free group improvisations, that continued in 1951, with the first overdubbed, improvised jazz recordings.
He started teaching music, with an emphasis on improvisation, in the early 1940s, and by the mid-1950s was concentrating on teaching instead of performing. He taught in a structured and disciplined manner, which was unusual in jazz education when he began. His educational role over three decades meant that he exerted an influence on jazz through his students, including saxophonists Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh.
Through the Fifties to the Sixties he would go on to record for the New Jazz label which would become Prestige Records, and Atlantic Records, he founded his own label Jazz Records, create his own recording studio, tour throughout Europe, played A Journey Through Jazz, a five-week engagement at Birdland, s well as other New York City jazz haunts. His last public performance in the United States was in 1968 but continued teaching into the Seventies.
Having a series of illnesses in the 1970s, including eye pain and emphysema from smoking for most of his life, on November 18, 1978 pianist, composer, arranger, and jazz improvisation educator Lennie Tristano passed away from a heart attack at home in Jamaica, New York.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Donald Percy Rendell was born in Plymouth, England on March 4, 1926 and raised in London where his father, Percy, was the musical director of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company; his mother Vera was also a musician. He attended the City of London School, to which he gained a choral half-scholarship and during school was evacuated during the Second World War to Marlborough College, where he heard jazz for the first time.
Rendell began playing the piano at the age of five but switched to saxophone in his teens. While working for Barclay’s Bank, he left to become a professional musician and began his career on alto saxophone but changed to tenor saxophone in 1943. During the rest of the 1940s, he was in the bands of George Evans and Oscar Rabin. Beginning in 1950, he spent three years in the Johnny Dankworth Septet and performed with Billie Holiday in Manchester, England, before playing in the bands of Tony Crombie and Ted Heath.
After touring in Europe with Stan Kenton, he played in Cyprus with Tony Kinsey, then Don was a member of Woody Herman’s Anglo American Herd in 1959. During the late 1950s and early Sixties, he led bands, including one with Ian Carr that lasted until 1969, one with Barbara Thompson in the 1970s, and as the sole leader in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, the Rendell-Carr Quintet gained an international reputation, performing in France at the Antibes Festival and was the Band of the Year for three years in succession in the Melody Maker poll. He performed in festivals in England and France as well as working with Michael Garrick and Brian Priestley.
He taught at the Royal Academy of Music for three years in the early 1970s, at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama beginning in 1984 and wrote instruction books on flute and saxophone. Don Rendell, who played soprano saxophone, flute, clarinet and was also an arranger, passed away after a short illness at the age of 89 on October 20, 2015.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bob Hardaway was born on March 1, 1928 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to a dad who earned the nickname of J.B. “Bugs” Hardaway by inventing the characters of Bugs Bunny and Woody Woodpecker. Moving to Hollywood got him his early coaching from film composer Darrell Caulkner. As an instrumentalist, he learned many fundamentals in his Air Force band, which inspired him to write music for a touring show, Air Force Frolics, which he also conducted. After military service he returned to college in Los Angeles, California then began a career as a big-band section player in reliable outfits such as Ray McKinley. It was Billy May who came through with the first recorded solo opportunity for him on a Capitol album promising an instrumental Bacchanalia.
Hardaway’s presence as a soloist was furthermore boosted on a mid-’50s series of Decca sides by bandleader Jerry Gray, among the features being the reliable “Thou Swell,” the gentle “Baby’s Lullaby,” and a pounding “Kettle Drum.” He had the first saxophone chair in the Woody Herman band in 1956 and also performed and recorded with big-band maestros Stan Kenton, Les Elgart, Benny Goodman, Alvino Rey, and Med Flory, among others. He would record on sessions with Lulu, Bonnie Raitt, Neil Diamond, Roger Neumann’s Rather Large Band, Harry Nilsson and Doris Day.
Jazz discographies alone pile up nearly 75 recording sessions involving Hardaway between 1949 and 1995. In addition, there were vocalists and vocal groups too numerous to name outside of that genre with which he recorded, usually in the company of A-list session players such as bassist Carol Kaye. At 91, multi-instrumental reedist Bob Hardaway has been retired since the Nineties.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Nathan Tate Davis was born on February 15, 1937 in Kansas City, Kansas and eventually would travel extensively around Europe after World War II. He moved to Paris in 1962 but would return to the U.S. by 1969, holding a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University and was a professor of music and director of jazz studies at the University of Pittsburgh, an academic program that he helped initiate.
He was the founder and director of the University of Pittsburgh Annual Jazz Seminar and Concert, the first academic jazz event of its kind in the United States. He also helped to found the university’s William Robinson Recording Studio as well as establish the International Academy of Jazz Hall of Fame located in the school’s William Pitt Union and the University of Pittsburgh-Sonny Rollins International Jazz Archives.
One of Davis’ best known musical associations was heading the Paris Reunion Band from 1985 to1989, which at different times included Nat Adderley, Kenny Drew, Johnny Griffin, Slide Hampton, Joe Henderson, Idris Muhammad, Dizzy Reece, Woody Shaw, and Jimmy Woode. He also toured and recorded with the post-bop ensemble leading Roots which he formed in 1991. He composed various pieces, including a 2004 opera entitled Just Above My Head.
He retired as director of the Jazz Studies Program at Pitt in 2013. Davis also served as the editor of the International Jazz Archives Journal. Over the course of his career, he recorded eighteen albums as a leader.
Multi-instrumentalist Nathan Davis, who played the tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, and flute, and was awarded the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation’s BNY Mellon Jazz Living Legacy Award at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, passed away in Palm Beach, Florida on April 8, 2018 at the age of 81.
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