Daily Dose Of Jazz…
David Friedrich Dallwitz was born on October 25, 1914 in Freeling, South Australia. He studied violin as a child and after moving with his family to Adelaide, South Australia in 1930, he developed an aptitude for jazz piano. Beginning in 1933 for two years he studied concurrently at the South Australian School of Art and the North Adelaide School of Fine Art.
He led the Southern Jazz Group, a Dixieland band that performed at the first Australian Jazz Convention. Abandoning jazz for a period, he studied at the Elder Conservatorium of Music, composing symphonic and chamber music and taking up bassoon and cello. He became involved in composing and arranging music for revues, leading to the formation of the Flinders Street Revue Company, for which he also directed and played piano.
Returning to jazz in 1970, he resumed recording. He worked with Australian progressive musicians such as John Sangster, Bob Barnard, and Len Barnard. He led the Dave Dallwitz Ragtime Ensemble.
Pianist, bandleader, composer, and arranger, painter, and art teacher Dave Dallwitz, who led jazz, Dixieland and ragtime bands, passed away on March 24, 2003 in Adelaide after finishing the artwork for his album The Dave Dallwitz Big Band live at Wollongong, December 1984.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Giorgio Gaslini was born on October 22, 1929 in Milan, Italy and began performing aged 13 and recorded with his jazz trio at 16. In the 1950s and 1960s, Gaslini performed with his own quartet. He was the first Italian musician mentioned as a “new talent” in the Down Beat poll and the first Italian officially invited to the New Orleans Jazz Festival in 1976-77. He collaborated with leading American soloists, such as Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy, Don Cherry, Roswell Rudd, Max Roach, but also with the Argentinian Gato Barbieri and Frenchman Jean-Luc Ponty.
Adapting the compositions of Albert Ayler and Sun Ra for solo piano, issued on the Soul Note label, he also composed the soundtrack of Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte, The Night, in 1961. In the early Seventies, he was the first holder of jazz courses at the Santa Cecilia Academy of Music in Rome.
As to contemporary music, he composed symphonic works, operas and ballets represented at the Scala Theatre in Milan and other Italian theatres. In addition from 1970 to 1977 he scored nine films, including Your Hands On My Body, Cross Current, and Kleinhoff Hotel. From 1991 to 1995, Gaslini composed works for Carlo Actis Dato’s Italian Instabile Orchestra.
Pianist, composer and conductor Giorgio Gaslini passed away on July 29, 2014 at age 84 in Borgo Val di Taro, Parma, Italy, where he had been living for years together with his longtime wife and fourteen dogs and cats.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bill Chase was born William Edward Chiaiese in Squantum, Massachusetts on October 20, 1934 His parents changed their name to Chase because they thought Chiaiese was difficult to pronounce. His father played trumpet in the Gillette Marching Band and encouraged his son’s musical interests, which included violin and drums. In his mid-teens, he settled on trumpet and attended his first Stan Kenton concert, which included trumpeters Conte Candoli and Maynard Ferguson.
After high school, he studied classical trumpet at the New England Conservatory but switched to the Schillinger House of Music, now Berklee College of Music. His instructors included Herb Pomeroy and Armando Ghitalla. By 1958 he was playing lead trumpet with Maynard Ferguson, Stan Kenton in 1959, and Woody Herman’s Thundering Herd during the 1960s.
One of Chase’s charts from this period, Camel Walk, was published in the 1963 Downbeat magazine yearbook. From 1966 to 1970 he freelanced in Las Vegas, Nevada working with Vic Damone and Tommy Vig. 1967 saw him leading a six~piece band at the Dunes and Riviera Hotel where he was featured in the Frederick Apcar lounge production of Vive Les Girls, for which Chase arranged the music.
In 1971 he started a jazz~rock band that mixed pop, rock, blues, and four trumpets. The debut album Chase was released in 1971 where he was joined by Ted Piercefield, Alan Ware, and Jerry Van Blair, three jazz trumpeters who were adept at vocals and arranging. The album contains Chase’s most popular song, Get It On, which garnered them a Best New Artist Grammy nomination.
For the next three years, he released two more and was working on a fourth when Chase’s work on a fourth studio album when en route to a scheduled performance at the Jackson County Fair, trumpeter and bandleader Bill Chase passed away at the age of 39 on August 9, 1974 along with the pilot, co-pilot, keyboardist Wally Yohn, guitarist John Emma, and drummer Walter Clark in the crash of a chartered twin-engine Piper Twin Comanche in Jackson, Minnesota.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Masabumi Kikuchi was born on October 19, 1939 in Tokyo, Japan and lived his early life in World War II and post-war country. He studied piano and music at the Tokyo Art College High School. After graduating, he joined Lionel Hampton’s Japanese touring band.
Known for his eclectic music that ranges from vanguard classical to fusion and digital music. Not only working with Hampton, but he also performed with Sonny Rollins, Woody Herman, Mal Waldron, Joe Henderson, McCoy Tyner, Gil Evans, Elvin Jones, Miles Davis, Gary Peacock, Paul Motian, Billy Harper, and Hannibal Peterson.
As a leader and co~leader, he recorded twenty-five albums, and as a sideman or member of other groups, he recorded twenty~eight albums. Pianist and composer Masabumi Kikuchi passed away from a subdural hematoma on July 6, 2015 at a hospital in Manhasset, New York.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Luiz Floriano Bonfá was born on October 17, 1922 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He studied with Uruguayan classical guitarist Isaías Sávio from the age of 11 and these weekly lessons entailed a long, harsh commute by train, 2 1/2 hours one way and on foot from his family home in Santa Cruz. Given his extraordinary dedication and talent for the guitar, Sávio excused the youngster’s inability to pay for his lessons.
He first gained widespread exposure in Brazil in 1947 when he was featured on Rio’s Rádio Nacional, then an important showcase for up-and-coming talent. In the late 1940s Bonfá was a member of the vocal group Quitandinha Serenaders. Some of his earliest compositions such as Ranchinho de Palha, O Vento Não Sabe, were recorded and performed by Brazilian crooner Dick Farney in the 1950s and his first hit song was De Cigarro em Cigarro recorded by Nora Ney in 1957.
Farney introduced Luiz to Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, the leading songwriting team behind the worldwide explosion of Bossa Nova. He collaborated with them on de Moraes’ anthological play Orfeu da Conceição, which several years later gave origin to Marcel Camus’ film Black Orpheus. For the film he wrote Samba de Orfeu and Manhã de Carnaval, the latter of which Carl Sigman wrote English lyrics and titled the song A Day in the Life of a Fool, which has been among the top ten standards played worldwide, according to The Guinness Book of World Records.
As a composer and performer, Bonfá was at heart an exponent of the bold, lyrical, lushly orchestrated, and emotionally charged samba-canção style that became a highly visible ambassador of Brazilian music in the United States beginning with the famous November 1962 Bossa Nova concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall.
Bonfá worked with American musicians such as Quincy Jones, George Benson, Stan Getz, and Frank Sinatra, recording several albums while in U.S. Also of note is his “The Gentle Rain”, with lyrics by Matt Dubey, and “Sambolero”.
Composer and guitarist Luiz Bonfá, who recorded some five dozen albums, passed away from prostate cancer at 78 in Rio de Janeiro on January 12, 2001.
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