Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Charles Theodore Straight was born on January 16, 1891 in Chicago, Illinois. He started his career in 1909 at 18 accompanying singer Gene Greene in Vaudeville. In 1916, he began working at the Imperial Piano Roll Company in Chicago, where he recorded dozens of piano rolls.
Becoming a popular bandleader around town during the Jazz Age, his band, the Charley Straight Orchestra, had a long term engagement at the Rendezvous Café from 1922 to 1925 and recorded for Paramount Records and Brunswick Records during the decade.
This period also saw Straight working with Roy Bargy on the latter’s eight Piano Syncopations. Besides working as a pianist or leading an orchestra, he also composed and arranged music, both ragtime and jazz.
Pianist, bandleader and composer Charley Straight transitioned on September 22, 1940 in Chicago after being struck by an automobile while working as a city sanitary inspector. He was emerging from a manhole in the street.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ojārs Raimonds Pauls was born January 12, 1936 in Iļģuciems, Riga, Latvia and is the second child of a glass blowing factory worker and a seamstress. His father played drums and his grandfather played the violin, and following in his grandfather’s footsteps he is enrolled into Riga’s institute of Music kindergarten branch. Being too young and his fingers unfit for playing violin, he started on the piano.
By 1943 he was studying at Riga’s 7th Elementary school while continuing piano lessons with professor Valerijs Zosts and teachers Emma Eglīte and Juta Daugule. 1946 saw Raimonds admitted to the Secondary Musical School of Emīls Dārziņš, combining his studies at the elementary school for three years.
When he turns 14, Pauls was playing piano at restaurants and clubs with a violin and saxophone virtuoso Gunārs Kušķis. Five years later he completed his studies at the Riga’s 7th Elementary school, however, during this time, he independently developed a liking for playing jazz by studying and imitating various jazz records.
He would go on to compose for musicals, ballets, theater performances, puppet shows, films, choirs, and instrumentals, He has received several honors from his home country, the USSR, Sweden, Japan and Armenia.
Composer, arranger and pianist Raimonds Pauls, who was the Minister of Culture of Latvia from 1988 to 1993, continues to record and perform.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Walter Bishop Sr. was born on January 9, 1905 in Jamaica but emigrated to the United States prior to beginning his professional career. He settled with his family in the Sugar Hill district of the Harlem neighborhood of Upper Manhattan.
He played drums on recordings by pianist Alex Hill and trumpeter Jabbo Smith during the 1920s and 1930s. His song Swing, Brother, Swing was recorded by Billie Holiday with Count Basie, among other performers.
Other songs written by Bishop include Jack, You’re Dead, which was a #1 R&B hit in 1947 as recorded by Louis Jordan, The Stuff is Here (and It’s Mellow), and Bop! Goes My Heart, which was recorded by Frank Sinatra.
His song My Baby Likes to Bebop was recorded by Ella Fitzgerald, and by Nat “King” Cole with Johnny Mercer, and his calypso “Sex is a Misdemeanor” was recorded by Vanessa Rubin.
Drummer, composer and songwriter Walter Bishop Sr., the father of jazz pianist Walter Bishop Jr., transitioned one day before his 80th birthday on January 8, 1984.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bob Zurke came into the world as Boguslaw Albert Zukowski on January 7, 1912 in Hamtramck, Michigan. By the age of 16 he was already using the name Bob Zurke professionally when he first recorded with a group led by pioneering female jazz bassist Thelma Terry. At that time, Zurke also began to work as a copyist for the Detroit-based booking agency run by Jean Goldkette.
Through the end of 1936, he worked in various Detroit, Michigan clubs, mostly as a band pianist, but he occasionally went on tour with other groups. During this period he developed a long friendship with pianist Marvin Ash, who would later go on to record some of Zurke’s compositions.
1937 saw Bob was hired by bandleader Bob Crosby to fill in for Joe Sullivan, then ailing with tuberculosis and it was here that he gained notice, contributing arrangements to the band’s book and as a featured soloist.
As an arranger his arrangement of Meade Lux Lewis’ Honky Tonk Train Blues, became a hit. In 1938 he was named the winner in the piano category in the DownBeat Reader’s Poll. By 1939 Sullivan was back with the Bob Crosby Orchestra and Zurke subsequently worked with the William Morris Agency to form his own band. They debuted at an RCA Victor recording session that same year as Bob Zurke and his Delta Rhythm Orchestra. His alcohol dependency, alleged drug use and unreliability and volatility led to the group disbanding.
After a period of wandering from job to job Zurke settled in Los Angeles, California in mid-1942 and began an engagement at the Hangover Club in Los Angeles that he held until the end of his days. In 1943, he made one final recording, synchronizing an original piano part to the Walter Lantz cartoon Jungle Jive (in the Swing Symphony series), one of his most difficult and challenging solos.
He published two folios of jazz piano solos and several sheet music editions of single pieces; in addition to that, 14 original compositions from Zurke are known to exist.
Pianist, arranger, composer and bandleader Bob Zurke, who was considered one of the finest boogie~woogie pianists of the time, collapsed at the Hangover Club and was taken to the hospital where he transitioned on February 16, 1944 from complications of pneumonia, aggravated by acute alcohol poisoning. He was 32.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Doug Hammond was born December 26, 1942 in Tampa, Florida. His first major release was Reflections in the Sea of Nurnen on Tribe Records in 1975.
He has worked with musicians including Earl Hooker, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Sammy Price, Donald Byrd, Wolfgang Dauner, Ornette Coleman, Steve Coleman, Nina Simone, Betty Carter, Marion Williams, Paquito D’Rivera, Arnett Cobb, James Blood Ulmer and Arthur Blythe.
In 2010 Hammond wrote and conducted Acknowledgement Suite with Dwight Adams, Jean Toussaint, Roman Filiú, Howard Curtis, Wendell Harrison, Dick Griffin, Stéphane Payen, Kirk Lightsey and Arron James.
As an educator Doug was a professor at the Anton Bruckner Private University in Linz, Austria. His work has been filmed in a documentary Sparkle of Inspiration by the Austrian director Dieter Strauch.
Drummer, composer, poet, producer, and professor Doug Hammond, who plays in the free funk/avant-garde jazz genres, lives and continues to work in Linz.
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