Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Steve Elmer was born on October 6, 1941 in Brooklyn, New York. He began his musical training as a drummer in a Brooklyn junior high school when he was thirteen years old. He briefly attended Manhattan School of Music before he became the featured jazz drummer with the All American Big Brass Band’s 16-country three-month tour of Africa.
On his return, he spent the next two years playing drums with the Pepe Morreale Trio and cornetist Bobby Hackett. Elmer then earned his B.S in Music Education from Hofstra University and took a job teaching music in a Passaic, New Jersey elementary school followed by a year-and-a-half at Manhattan Vocational- Technical High School.
At age 25, Steve took the first of many formal piano lessons with the brilliant jazz pianist and teacher Lennie Tristano. After six years of intense training, Elmer decided to move away from the Tristano influence and follow his own musical instincts.
In 1969 Steve attended Queens College where he received a Master’s degree in Music Composition, and accepted an invitation to become an assistant professor. He developed a BA in Jazz Studies program where he and Count Basie alumnus Frank Foster served as the faculty.
Elmer stopped playing professionally from 1976-1991 until he met a young drummer named Myles Weinstein and discovered they were both on the same musical wavelength. He and Myles formed a group called The Jazz Mentality Chris Potter on saxophones and Ralph Hamperian on bass. The group recorded two CDs, Maxwell’s Torment and Show Business Is My Life featuring many of Steve’s original compositions.
In 2006, Steve recorded I Used To Be Anonymous, featuring nine original compositions. The trio toured Japan, recorded Fire Down Below, their second CD, in 2008 featuring ten more of his original compositions and a lot of classic jazz playing. Pianist and drummer Steve Elmer is looking forward to a return to Japan and recording his first solo piano album.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bryce Benno Rohde was born on September 12, 1923 in Hobart, Tasmania, an island state of Australia. His early influences were Art Tatum and Nat King Cole but eventually leaned towards George Russell’s Lydian Concept.
He played jazz in Adelaide, Australia early in his career before a 1953 move to Canada. In 1954 he and two other expats plus an American formed the Australian Jazz Quartet/Quintet. The group recorded several albums and toured widely in the United States, but broke up in 1958 following a tour of Australia.
Rohde led his own quartets in Australia until 1964, then moved to California in 1965. After then he based himself out of San Francisco, leading his own ensembles at times. Among those Australian musicians with whom he worked extensively are Bruce Cale and Charlie Munro.
The pianist played New York City and Chicago, and recorded for Bethlehem Records. He also published a book combining original jazz compositions and his other passion, black and white photography. It shares the title of one of his seven recordings as a leader, Turn Right At New South Wales.
Over a career in jazz spanning more than 50 years he performed with Count Basie, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, and John Coltrane among others. He eventually settled in San Francisco, California where he continued to perform and record until his death. Pianist, composer and bandleader Bryce Rohde passed away on January 26, 2016.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Cæcilie Norby was born on September 9, 1964 in Frederiksberg, Denmark, into a musical family, her father a classical composer and her mother an opera singer. She was a founding member of the band Street Beat in 1982 then for two years, she was a member of the jazz-rock band Frontline. From 1985 to 1993, she worked with singer Nina Forsberg in the rock band One~Two. During the 1990s, she turned to jazz and released her first solo album for Blue Note.
Her self~titled debut recording co~produced by Niels Lan Doky featured Scott Robinson, Randy Brecker and Michael Brecker each played on one track. Doky produced her following album My Corner Of The Sky in 1996, which prominently featured pianists David Kikoski, Joey Calderazzo and Terri Lyne Carrington on drums. The repertoire for both recordings included only a few jazz standards like Summertime or Just One of Those Things, instead she and Lan Doky arranged classic popular songs for a jazz line-up, like Wild Is the Wind, By the Time I Get to Phoenix and a track by Curtis Mayfield on the first album. The Look of Love, Life on Mars, Spinning Wheel and Set Them Free by Sting she recorded on the second.
For both albums Norby wrote lyrics to compositions by Randy Brecker, Chick Corea, Don Grolnick and Wayne Shorter. Both albums gained wide attention and five-digit sales, especially in Denmark and also in Japan.
Her third album Queen of Bad Excuses, released in 1999, was a collaboration with bassist Lars Danielsson, who already played bass on her sophomore release. This time she brought into the studio pianists Ben Besiakov and Lars Jansson, drummers Anders Kjellberg, Per Lindvall, Billy Hart, guitarist John Scofield, saxophonist Hans Ulrik and percussionist Xavier Desandre Navarre. Vocalist Cæcilie Norby continues to advance the music.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
William James “Count” Basie was born on August 21, 1904 in Red Bank, New Jersey. His father played the mellophone, his mother played the piano and gave him his first piano lessons. Taking in laundry and baking cakes for sale for a living, she paid 25 cents a lesson for his piano instruction. The best student in school, he inished junior high school and spent much of his time at Red Bank’s Palace Theater, where he quickly learned to improvise music appropriate to the acts and the silent movies.
A natural pianist but preferring drums he was discouraged by the obvious talents of Sonny Greer, who also lived in Red Bank and became Duke Ellington’s drummer in 1919, He let the idea of drumming go and concentrated on the piano exclusively at age 15. He and Greer played together in venues until Greer set out on his professional career. By then, Basie was playing with pick-up groups for dances, resorts, and amateur shows, and Harry Richardson’s Kings of Syncopation.
By 1920 Basie was in Harlem where he bumped nto Greer and started meeting the musicians making the scene like Willie “The Lion” Smith and James P. Johnson. Before he was 20 years old, he toured extensively on the Keith and TOBA vaudeville circuits as a solo pianist, accompanist, and music director for blues singers, dancers, and comedians. This provided an early training that was to prove significant in his later career.
Back in Harlem in 1925, he met Fats Waller, who taught him how to play that instrument. As he did with Duke Ellington, Willie “the Lion” Smith helped Basie out during the lean times by arranging gigs at house-rent parties, introducing him to other leading musicians, and teaching him some piano technique.
In 1928, Basie joined Walter Page and his Famous Blue Devils. It was at this time that he picked up the moniker of Count. The next year saw him in Kansas City holding down the piano chair with Bennie Moten. After a couple of re-organizations of the band, Basie formed his own nine-piece band, Barons of Rhythm who played regularly at the Reno Club and on the radio. Moving to Chicago, Illinois the band eventually became the Count Basie Orchestra where they did their first recordings for Vocalion under the name Jones-Smith, as Basie had already signed with Decca.
Over the course of the fifty years he led the band he was instrumental in creating innovations like the use of two “split” tenor saxophones, emphasizing the rhythm section, riffing with a big band, using arrangers to broaden their sound, which any other bands copied. He also brought to prominence such players as Lester Young, Herschel Evans, Freddie Green, Buck Clayton, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Al Grey, Jimmy Rushing, Helen Humes, Thelma Carpenter, and Joe Williams.
Pianist, organist, bandleader, and composer Count Basie, who recorded close to two hundred albums and in 1958 became the first Black man to win a Grammy Award, passed away on April 26, 1984.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Dill Jones was born Dillwyn Owen Paton Jones on August 19, 1923 in Newcastle Emlyn, Carmarthenshire, Wales. He was brought up in New Quay on the Cardiganshire coast. Music was in the family, his mother a pianist and his aunt played organ at the Methodist Tabernacle. He was exposed to jazz as a 10-year-old by hearing records by Fats Waller and Bix Beiderbecke on the radio.
After leaving college, Jones followed his father into banking but was called up by the Royal Navy for wartime service in the Far East. When the war ended he enrolled at Trinity College of Music in London, England but did not complete the course, preferring the informality of late night jazz sessions.
Joining the Harry Parry Sextet and Vic Lewis’ Orchestra before plying his trade as ship’s pianist on the luxury liner, the Queen Mary, he sailed between New York City and Southampton. This gave Dill the chance to hang out in New York’s jazz clubs and hear Coleman Hawkins and Lennie Tristano, among others. After forming the Dill Jones Quartet in 1959, he emigrated to the United States in 1961, settling in New York City. He became an expert in the Harlem stride style. was soon in demand, earning his reputation playing with the likes of Gene Krupa, Jimmy McPartland and Yank Lawson.
Between 1969–1973, Jones was a member of the JPJ Quartet with Budd Johnson, Oliver Jackson and Bill Pemberton. A double CD anthology of Dill Jones` work was released in 2004, entitled Davenport Blues – Dill Jones plays Bix, Jones and a Few Others.
Pianist Dill Jones, who was instrumental in bringing jazz to British television when he hosted the BBC Jazz Club, passed away from throat cancer in a New York hospital on June 22, 1984. He was 60