Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Emanuel Perez was born on December 28, 1871 in New Orleans, Louisiana into a Creole of Color family of Spanish, French and African descent. At the turn of the century, he became a member of the Onward Brass Band, leading it from 1903 to 1930. The Onward Brass Band was one of the most respected of its day that included King Oliver, Peter Bocage, Henry Kimball, Lorenzo Tio, Luis Tio, George Baquet, Isidore Barbarin, and Benny Williams. The Perez and Oliver two cornet, or “trumpet” team, was one of the most renowned in New Orleans.
Manuel started his own brass band, called the Imperial Orchestra, which operated from 1901 to 1908. A move north to Chicago, Illinois in 1915 saw him playing with Charles Elgar’s Creole Orchestra at the Arsonia Cafe and also with the Arthur Sims Band. Returning to the Crescent City in the Twenties, he played in Storyville, on steamboat excursions with Fate Marable and in parades with the Maple Leaf Orchestra.
Suffering a stroke in 1930, he left music during this period to work with his brother, who owned a moving company, while he ran the used furniture store. Cornetist Manuel Perez, who was a sight-reader and highly technical musician, He would go on to suffer a series of strokes that left him disabled and eventually caused his death in 1946 in New York City.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ernie Carson was born December 4, 1937 in Portland, Oregon. He played trumpet from elementary school, and played with the Castle Jazz Band in the mid-1950s prior to a stint in the U.S. Marines.
Following his discharge Ernie moved to and worked in Los Angeles, California with Dave Wierbach, Jig Adams, Ray Bauduc, Pat Yankee, and Turk Murphy. He led several of his own groups from the 1970s, including the Capital City Jazz Band and a new version of the Castle Jazz Band.
After more than twenty years of playing based in Atlanta, Georgia he moved back to his hometown in 1995. Dixieland jazz revival cornetist, pianist and singer Ernie Carson, who left a small catalogue of music as his legacy, passed away on January 9, 2012 in Portland, Oregon.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
William Christopher Handy was born on November 16, 1873 in a log cabin built by his grandfather in Florence, Alabama. Because his father believed musical instruments were tools of the devil, he purchased his first guitar without his parents’ permission, that he secretly saved for by picking berries and nuts and making lye soap. Upon seeing the guitar his father ordered him to return it, but also arranged short-lived organ lessons, moving on to learn to play the cornet. Secretly he joined a local band, purchased a cornet from a fellow band member and spent every free minute practicing it.
After working for a time on a “shovel brigade” at the McNabb furnace, in 1892 Handy travelled to Birmingham, Alabama, passed a teaching exam and began teaching. Finding the compensation too little, he quit, got a job in a pipe plant, put together a small string orchestra and taught musicians how to read music. He later organized the Lauzetta Quartet, ventured to St. Louis, Missouri and founding working conditions deplorable, so they disbanded.
Handy would go on to Evansville, Indiana, play the cornet in the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, join a successful band that performed throughout the neighboring cities and states and worked as a first tenor vocalist in a minstrel show, a band director, choral director, cornetist and trumpeter.
At the age of 23, he was the bandmaster of Mahara’s Colored Minstrels and over a three-year tour, they toured to Chicago, throughout Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Cuba and Alabama at the end. Weary of life on the road, he and his wife, Elizabeth, settled in his nearby hometown of Florence and he became a faculty member at Alabama and Mechanical University from 1900 to 1902.
W.C. traveled throughout Mississippi, listening to various styles of black popular music, and with his remarkable memory would recall and transcribe the music later. He rejoined the Mahara Minstrels, toured the Midwest and Pacific Northwest, and became the director of a black band in Clarksdale, Mississippi. By 1909 he and his band moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where the publication of his Memphis Blues sheet music introduced his style of 12-bar blues, credited as the inspiration for the foxtrot dance step. By the time he was 40, he had established his musical style, his popularity had greatly increased, he was a prolific composer and a successfully profitable music publisher.
He founded the Handy Record Company, gained widespread popularity with the Bessie Smith recording of his Saint Louis Blues with Louis Armstrong, published several books including an autobiography and went blind after a fall from a subway platform. He later suffered a stroke and on March 28, 1958, W. C. Handy, The Father of the Blues, passed away from bronchial pneumonia at Sydenham Hospital in New York City.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bobby Lee Bradford was born July 19, 1934 in Cleveland, Mississippi and at age eleven his family moved to Dallas, Texas in 1946. He moved to Los Angeles, California in 1953 where he reunited with childhood friend from Texas, Ornette Coleman. He subsequently joined Coleman’s ensemble but was drafted into the U.S. Air Force and replaced by Don Cherry.
After playing in military bands from late 1954 to late 1958, Bradford reunited with Coleman’s quartet from 1961 to 1963, infrequently performing in public, but prolifically recorded under Coleman’s Atlantic contract. Unfortunately these tapes were among those many destroyed in the Great Atlantic Vault Fire. Returning to the West Coast to pursue further studies, he would eventually receive his B.M. degree from Huston-Tillotson College.
He soon began a long-running and relatively well-documented association with the clarinetist John Carter, a pairing that brought both increased exposure at international festivals. Following Carter’s death in 1991, Bobby fronted his own ensemble known as The Mo’tet.
Bradford has performed with Eric Dolphy, Leon “Ndugu” Chancler, Ingebrigt Håker-Flaten, Bob Stewart, Charlie Haden, George Lewis, James Newton, Frode Gjerstad, Vinny Golia, Nels Cline, William Parker, Paal Nilssen-Love, and David Murray, among others.
An educator, he is a professor at Pasadena City College in California and Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he teaches The History of Jazz. Trumpeter and cornetist Bobby Bradford is the father of drummer Dennis Bradford and jazz vocalist Carmen Bradford. He has recorded eight albums as a leader, ten as a co-leader, seventeen as a sideman and continues to perform with his group The Mo’tet.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Warren Smith was born on May 17, 1908 in Middlebourne, West Virginia and and taught by hi s multi-instrumentalist father, he began playing piano from age seven. He learned cornet and saxophone before settling on the trombone.
Starting out in Harrison’s Texans, a territory band in the 1920s, Smith followed with an extended half-dozen year run in Abe Lyman’s employ in the 1930s. He worked with Bob Crosby in Indianapolis, Indiana during late in the 1930s before returning to work with Lyman briefly and closing out the decade.
Moving to Chicago, Illinois in the Forties, he settled in with Bud Jacobson and Bob Scobey, before heading to the West Coast to work with Jess Stacy and Lu Watters. In 1955 he toured with Duke Ellington, then played with Joe Darensbourg from 1957 to 1960. Through the Sixties he performed with Wild Bill Davison and Red Nichols.
On August 28, 1975 in Santa Barbara, California swing and mainstream trombonist Warren Smith, who never led a recording session but was fortunate to be able to make his living performing, passed away of natural causes at age 67.
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