Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Eiji Kitamura 北村 英治 was born on April 8, 1929 in Tokyo, Japan. Devoting himself to clarinet, he was playing while still an undergrad at Keio University at in Tokyo. He made his debut at the age of 22.
Kitamura built a following in his country performing regularly on his television program. He first came to prominence in the United States at the 20th Anniversary Jam Session of the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1977. His following in Japan was built previous to this on his regular television program.
An interpreter of traditional jazz, the clarinetist prefers this genre over modern jazz. Much of his influence in his playing came from the swing of Benny Goodman and Woody Herman. He has recorded some two-dozen albums or more albums including a series of albums with Teddy Wilson as well as for CBS Sony, Concord and various Japanese labels over the course of his career.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Kathy Stobart was born Florence Kathleen Stobart in the coastal town of South Shields, England on April 1, 1925. She first learned piano and alto saxophone as a child. After picking up her brother’s tenor saxophone and a month’s trial, she first played in Don Rico’s all-girl band at the age of 14 and then locally in Newcastle.
It wasn’t until her joining the Peter Fielding ballroom orchestra that her interest in jazz peaked. She met saxophonists Keith Bird and Derek Neville, who were then stationed at a local RAF camp. They bought her ten jazz records for my 17th birthday and Bird painstakingly took her through various harmonic exercises and saw to it that she succeeded him when he vacated a quartet job in London in late 1942.
Moving to London in the 1940s she began playing with Denis Rose, Ted Heath and Jimmy Skidmore. Later in the decade Stobart played with Art Pepper and Peanuts Hucko. Before the end of the Forties she played with and had a brief marriage with Art Thompson.
She toured with Vic Lewis in 1949 and led her own group in early 1950s, among its members was Derek Humble, Dill Jones and Bert Courtley, whom she married in 1951 until his death in 1969. Throughout the 1950s and 60s Kathy went into semiretirement to raise her family.
Returning to performing, from 1969 to 1977 she played with Humphrey Lyttelton. Following this she led her own groups, with Harry Beckett, John Burch and Lennie Best among others. Aside from this she played with Johnny Griffin, Al Haig, Earl Hines, Buddy Tate, Zoot Sims, Marian McPartland and Dick Hyman.
From 1992 she was paying with Lyttelton again adding flute, clarinet and baritone saxophone to her arsenal of instruments. Tenor saxophonist Kathy Stobart, who held lengthy teaching assignments at City Literature Institute in London, passed away on July 5, 2014.
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Sidney Arodin was born in Westwego, Louisiana on March 29, 1901. He went by Sidney Arnandan, Arnondrin or Arnondin. He began playing clarinet at age 15 and played local New Orleans gatherings and on the riverboats. He made his way to New York City in the early Twenties and played with Johnny Stein’s New Orleans Jazz Band from 1922.
He performed with Jimmy Durante in the middle of the decade, then returned to Louisiana to play with Wingy Manone and Sharkey Bonano. During the 1930s he worked with Louis Prima and with a reconstituted version of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, featuring Manone.
By 1941, Arodin’s poor health prevented him from playing frequently live, but before this time he recorded with Johnnie Miller, Albert Brunies, Monk Hazel and the Jones-Collins Astoria Hot Eight. Many of his performances are mistakenly credited on original recordings to Charlie Cordella.
Clarinetist and composer Sidney Arodin, who co-wrote the standard Lazy River with Hoagy Carmichael, passed away in New Orleans, Louisiana on February 6, 1948.
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James Hal Kemp was born March 27, 1904 in Marion, Alabama. He studied and learned to play the saxophone and clarinet and while at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill he formed his own campus jazz group, the Carolina Club Orchestra. They recorded for English Columbia and Perfect/Pathé Records in 1924 and toured Europe that same summer under the sponsorship of bandleader Paul Specht.
Kemp returned to UNC in 1925 and put together a new edition of the Carolina Club Orchestra, featuring classmates and future stars John Scott Trotter, Saxie Dowell and Skinnay Ennis. By 1927 he turned professional and turned over the orchestra to Kay Kyser.
Basing his band in New York City, Hal’s group included Trotter, Dowell, and Ennis, and later joined by trumpeters Bunny Berigan and Jack Purvis. The sound was 1920s collegiate jazz and in the Thirties he toured Europe again and recorded regularly for Brunswick, English Duophone, Okeh and Melotone record labels.
During the height of the Depression in 1932 Kemp changed the orchestra’s style to a dance band. He incorporated an early version of the echo effect using large megaphones for the clarinets, muted trumpets and a double-octave piano. Vocalists with the band during the 1930s included Ennis, Dowell, Bob Allen, Deane Janis, Maxine Gray, Judy Starr, Nan Wynn and Janet Blair.
Hal’s band was one of the most popular bands in the 1930s and was often featured performing on NBC and CBS radio shows. The band also appeared in numerous motion-picture short subjects and was featured in the 1938 RKO film Radio City Revels. He had hits with There’s A Small Hotel, Lamplight, I Got A Date With An Angel, You’re The Top, Lullaby Of Broadway and Where or When.
On December 19, 1940, alto saxophonist, clarinetist, bandleader, composer and arranger Hal Kemp while driving from Los Angeles to a booking in San Francisco, his car collided head-on with a truck. Breaking a leg and several ribs, one of which punctured a lung, he developed pneumonia while in the hospital and died two days later in Madera, California. He was inducted into the Big Band and Jazz hall of Fame in 1992.
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Marzette Watts was born March 9, 1938 in Montgomery, Alabama. Early in his life he played piano but did not play regularly in his teens. While studying at Alabama State College he became a founding member of SNCC, however, this association led to his being forced to leave the state at the behest of the governor.
He moved to New York, where he lived in a loft building on Cooper Square where Leroi Jones aka Amiri Barak lived and with whom he participated in the Organization of Young Men.. Watts returned to college in New York, completing his studies in 1962; and then moved to Paris to study painting at the Sorbonne and began playing saxophone for extra money.
Returning to New York in 1963, Marzette studied under Don Cherry, played in his loft and around the city with Juini Booth, Henry Grimes, J.C. Moses, and others. He also continued painting, producing work strongly influenced by Willem de Kooning. His loft attracted many established and up-and-coming musicians who would hang out there and play at parties, including Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders.
By 1965 he devoted himself to music more fully, moved to Denmark for further study. Moving back and forth between Europe and New York City, while in New York he recorded an album for ESP-Disk and another for Savoy Records, and aught briefly at Wesleyan University.
He wrote film scores and did production work for his own films, eventually abandoning music to work in film and record production. Late in his life he moved to Santa Cruz, California but free jazz tenor and soprano saxophonist, bass clarinetist and sound engineer Marzette Watts passed away in Nashville, Tennessee of heart failure on March 2, 1998.
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