Three Wishes

The Baroness asked Harry Carney what his three wishes would be and he replied:

1. 1. “To be healthy.”

   2. “To be happy.”

   3. “For everyone to have eternal life and healthy minds.”

*Excerpt from Three Wishes: An Intimate Look at Jazz Greats ~ Compiled and Photographed by Pannonica de Koenigswarter

More Posts: baroness,clarinet,history,instrumental,jazz,music,pannonica,saxophone,three,wishes

Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Giuseppi Logan was born on May 22, 1935 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who taught himself to play piano and drums before switching to reeds at the age of 12. At the age of 15 he began playing with Earl Bostic and later studied at the New England Conservatory. In 1964 he relocated to New York and became active in the free jazz scene.

Giuseppi played alto and tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, flute, piano and oboe. He collaborated with Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders and Bill Dixon before forming his own quartet made up of pianist Don Pullen, bassist Eddie Gómez and percussionist Milford Graves. After Pullen’s departure, pianist Dave Burrell joined the group. A member of Byard Lancaster’s band, he also toured with and appeared on recordings by Patty Waters. He recorded two albums for the ESP-Disk record label and later appeared on an album by Roswell Rudd on the Impulse! label.

Beset with personal problems, Logan vanished from the music scene in the early 1970s and for over three decades his whereabouts were unknown. In 2008 he was filmed by a Christian mission group just after he had returned to New York City after years in and out of institutions in the Carolinas. Around this same time filmmaker Suzannah Troy made the first of many short films of Logan practicing in his preferred hangout, Tompkins Square Park. Subsequently, he was the subject of a major piece by Pete Gershon in the spring 2009 edition of Signal to Noise Magazine, which detailed the events surrounding Logan’s “comeback” gig at the Bowery Poetry Club in 2009.

The same year he performed with a group in NYC as part of the RUCMA performance series. Later in the year he appeared in the short documentary film Water in the Boat by David Gutiérrez Camps, where his music improvisations formed the soundtrack of the film. In 2010 Giuseppi began recording again and released an album announcing his return to music on Tompkins Square Records with Matt Lavelle, Dave Burrell, Warren Smith and Francois Grillot. This group performed a concert in Philadelphia with Dave Miller playing for Warren Smith at the Ars Nova Workshop. He went on to record six songs with a group of younger experimental musicians.

Around 2011 he was shot and ended up in a home in Far Rockaway, Queens. Still living in New York and performing as a street musician, reedist Giuseppi Logan passed on April 17, 2020 at a nursing facility in Far Rockaway, Queens from COVID-19.

More Posts: bandleader,clarinet,flute,history,instrumental,jazz,music,oboe,piano,saxophone

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.

More Posts: bandleader,clarinet,history,instrumental,jazz,music,saxophone,vocal

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.

More Posts: bandleader,clarinet,history,instrumental,jazz,music

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.

More Posts: bandleader,clarinet,drums,history,instrumental,jazz,music,piano,saxophone