Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Marc Ribot was born on May 21, 1954 in Newark, New Jersey and worked extensively as a session musician. His early sessions with Tom Waits helped define Waits new musical direction in 1985.
His own work has touched on many styles, including n wave, free jazz and Cuban music. Ribot’s first two albums featured The Rootless Cosmopolitans, followed by an album of works by Frantz Casseus and Arsenio Rodriguez. Further releases found him working in a variety of band and solo contexts including two albums with his self-described “dance band”, Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos.
His relatively limited technical facility is due to learning to play right-handed despite being left-handed. He currently performs and records with his group Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog. Marc’s studio work involves several tracks accompanying the legendary pianist McCoy Tyner’s “Guitars” project. He has performed and recorded with Jack McDuff, John Scofield, Wilson Pickett, Cibo Matto, Bela Fleck, Derek Trucks, Madeline Peyroux, Medeski Martin & Wood, Elton John and many others.
He has toured Europe with his band Sun Ship, had a biographical documentary film called the The Lost String and has also judged the 8th Annual Independent Music Awards to support indie careers in music. He has twenty-one albums as a leader, a filmography that includes five and a biographical documentary about him titled The Lost String. Guitarist Marc Ribot also plays banjo, trumpet, cornet and sings and continues to perform, record and tour.
Dose A Day-Blues Away
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Frederick Dewayne Hubbard was born on April 7, 1938 in Indianapolis, Indiana and started playing the mellophone and trumpet in his school band at Arsenal Technical High School. Upon the recommendation of one-time Stan Kenton sideman, trumpeter Lee Katzman, he began studies at the Arthur Jordan Conservatory of music. During his teens he played with Wes and Monk Montgomery, bassist Larry Ridley and James Spaulding.
1958 saw a 20-year old Hubbard in New York working with the likes of Philly Joe Jones, Sonny Rollins, Slide Hampton, Eric Dolphy, J. J. Johnson and Quincy Jones. Three years later in ’61 he recorded his debut as a leader, Open Sesame with Tina Brooks, McCoy Tyner, Sam Jones and Clifford Jarvis. That same year he replaced Lee Morgan in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and for the next five years played and recorded on a succession of albums. Leaving Blakey in 1966 he formed the first of several small groups with among others Kenny Baron and Louis Hayes.
Throughout his hard bop and post bop career he recorded profusely for Blue Note, Atlantic, CTI, Columbia and a host of subsidiaries and smaller labels playing with the likes of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Eric Dolphy, Don Cherry, Herbie Hancock, Oliver Nelson, Stanley Turrentine, George Benson, Richard Wyands, Eric Gale, Ron Carter, Jack DeJonette, Dexter Gordon, Curtis Fuller and the list goes on.
Freddie Hubbard, NEA Jazz Master, had an unmistakable and influential tone that greatly contributed to new perspectives for modern jazz and bebop. He passed away from a heart attack on December 29, 2008.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Reuben “Ruby” Braff was born on March 16, 1927 in Boston, Massachusetts He began playing in local clubs in the 1940s and in 1949, and he was hired to play with the Edmond Hall Orchestra at Boston’s Savoy Cafe. Ruby teamed up with Pee Wee Russell when the clarinet was making a comeback and they recorded several sessions for Savoy Records.
Relocating to New York in 1953 Braff easily fit into a variety of Dixieland and mainstream settings becoming in demand for band dates and recordings. He recorded as both leader and sideman working with such names as Vic Dickinson, Buck Clayton, Urbie Green, Ellis Larkins and Benny Goodman.
In the Sixties he was a member of George Wein’s Newport All-Stars but for a number of years work was hard to come by for the Dixieland player until the 70s when he formed a quartet in 1973. Following this he freelanced in different small combos and duets ultimately recording with Scott Hamilton’s quintet and sparring with guitarist Howard Alden.
Ruby Braff, cornetist and trumpeter who played in the genres of Dixieland, mainstream jazz and swing passed away on February 10, 2003 in Chatham, Massachusetts.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
James Dugald McPartland was born on March 15, 1907 in Chicago, Illinois and due to family problems caused Jimmy and his siblings to be partly raised in orphanages. After being kicked out of one orphanage for fighting, he got in further trouble with the law. Fortunately, he had started violin at age 5, then took up the cornet at 15 and credits music with turning him around.
A member of the legendary Austin High Gang in the 920s, they would study and attempt duplication of recordings by The New Orleans Rhythm Kings and visit with Louis Armstrong and King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band at Lincoln Gardens. After playing through high school, their first musical job was under the name The Blue Friars. In 1924, at age 17, McPartland was then called to New York to take Bix Beiderbecke’s place in the Wolverine Orchestra and who gave him a cornet he would play throughout his career.
From 1926 to the end of the decade, Jimmy worked with Art Kassel, the McKenzie-Condon Chicagoans, Ben Pollack and Benny Goodman, moonlighted in Broadway pit bands and played in a number of small combos. By the thirties he was back in Chicago working with his brother at the Three Deuces and working with other bands around the city. He spent time in South America, returned and led his own bands until drafted into WWII.
Upon his return McPartland worked with Willie “The Lion” Smith’s band that won a Grammy for the soundtrack to the 1954 film After Hours. He soon met and married Marian, encouraged her to form her own group and subsequently landed a long residency at the Hickory House. Jimmy went on to try his hand at acting resulting in a featured role in a Sal Mineo and Ralph Meeker episode “The Magic Horn” on The Alcoa Hour in 1956.
Over the course of his career James McPartland has played with Gene Krupa, Jack Teagarden, Eddie Condon, Pee Wee Russell, Bud Freeman, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Lil Armstrong and George “Pops” Foster to name a few while also guest starring with many bands and at festivals around the world. Although he and Marian divorced in 1970, they remained friends, worked together and remarried shortly before his death of lung cancer on March 13, 1991 in Port Washington, New York, two days shy of his 84th birthday.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bobby Hackett was born January 31, 1915 and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. At an early age he played the ukulele and by the time he was twelve, he was playing guitar, violin and had bought his first cornet. Leaving high school after his freshman year he took a steady job with a band that performed seven days a week at the Port Arthur and playing guitar regularly at the Rhodes and Arcadia ballrooms that often broadcasted on Providence radio and when Cab Calloway arrived short-handed and invited him to fill in.
In the fall of 1932 Bobby was recruited by The Herbie Marsh Orchestra, spent the summer of 1933 playing with Payson Re’s band, met Pee Wee Russell, by 1934, and playing college gigs with his band The Harvard Gold Coast Orchestra on weekends between Providence and Boston throughout 1935 and 36.
He worked with a new band at Nick’s in Greenwich Village, with Benny Goodman, Eddie Condon, Jack Teagarden and Teddy Wilson, played the new York World’s Fair in 1939, did the club circuit in New York, toured, recorded with his own band on MCA, took a seat with the Horace Heidt Musical Knights and recorded on the soundtrack of Fred Astaire vehicle “Second Chorus”.
After a dental surgery Bobby’s lip was in bad shape making it difficult for him to play, however, Glenn Miller offered him a job as a guitarist with the Miller Band and playing short trumpet solos. During the 1950s, he made a series of albums of ballads with a full string orchestra, produced by Jackie Gleason, in the Sixties toured with singer Tony Bennett, and by the early 1970s, Hackett performed separately with Dizzy Gillespie and Teresa Brewer. In his later years, he continued to perform in a Dixieland style even as trends in jazz changed.
Trumpeter Bobby Hackett passed away on June 7, 1976 from a heart attack. In 2012, he was selected to be inducted into the Rhode Island Music Hall of Fame.
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