SIGNAL QUARTET
Defying easy categorization, Signal Quartet brings together a variety of disparate strains from the jazz continuum to create a distinctive group sound. Incorporating the freewheeling adventurousness of the avant garde, the improvisational combustibility of post-bop, and the spaciousness and lyricism innate to the American Midwest; Signal Quartet can reach young and old, purists and radicals, aficionados and neophytes alike through their thoughtful compositions and unpredictable improvisations.
Personnel:
Ben Wolkins – Trumpet, Flugelhorn,
Ian Blunden – Guitar
Eric Nachtrab – Bass
Sean Perlmutter – Drums
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ben Pollack was born on June 22, 1903 in Chicago, Illinois and learned to play drums in high school. He formed groups on the side, performing professionally in his teens. He joined the New Orleans Rhythm Kings in Chicago in 1923 and later went out to Los Angeles, California and joined Harry Bastin Band.
In 1924, returning to Chicago he played for several bands including Art Kessel. That association led to his forming Ben Pollack and His Californians, the 12-piece Venice Ballroom Orchestra in 1925. He had some performances broadcast on WLW radio in Cincinnati, Ohio. Over time the band included Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Jack Teagarden, Jimmy McPartland and Gil Rodin. From about 1928, with involvement from Irving Mills, members of Pollack’s band moonlighted at Plaza-ARC and recorded a vast quantity of hot dance and jazz for their dime store labels.
His band played in Chicago and moved to New York City in 1928, having obtained McPartland and Teagarden around that time. This outfit enjoyed immense success, playing for Broadway shows and winning an exclusive engagement at the Park Central Hotel. Pollack’s band was involved in extensive recording activity at that time, using a variety of pseudonyms in the studios. The orchestra also made a Vitaphone short subject sound film.
Fancying himelf more as a bandleader-singer type he signed Ray Bauduc to handle the drumming chores. They became known as Ben Pollack and his Park Central Orchestra. When Benny Goodman and Jimmy McPartland left the band in mid-1929. They were replaced by Matty Matlock on clarinet and Jack Teagarden’s brother, Charlie, on trumpet and tenor saxophonist Eddie Miller in 1930. Five years later the band broke up.
Pollack formed a new band with Harry James and Irving Fazola, the former with whom he wrote the hit “Peckin'”. In the early 1940s, he organized a band led by comedian Chico Marx, started Jewel Records, opened restaurants in Hollywood and Palm Springs, and appeared as himself in the movie The Benny Goodman Story, and made a cameo in The Glenn Miller Story.
Drummer Ben Pollack, who appeared in five films in the late Forties and Fifties, suffered a series of financial losses, grew despondent and hanged himself in his home in Palm Springs on June 7, 1971.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Tony Oxley was born on June 15, 1938 in Sheffield, West Riding of Yorkshire, England. A self-taught pianist by the age of eight, he first began playing the drums at seventeen and was taught by Haydon Cook. While playing evening gigs with local dance bands at night, he was sacked from his regular job, at a cutlery-making company, for falling asleep.
During his National Service from 1957 to 1960 with the Black Watch military band he studied music theory and improved his drumming technique. After leaving the army he became a member of a dance band playing for passengers on the Queen Mary and made several trips to New York. When on shore leave Tony visited clubs and heard Philly Joe Jones, Horace Silver, Art Blakey. From 1960 to 1964 he led a quartet which performed locally back home.
1963 saw Oxley playing Saturday afternoon gigs with other aspiring young jazz musicians and working with Gavin Bryars and guitarist Derek Bailey, in a trio known as Joseph Holbrooke. Moving to London, England in 1966 he became house drummer at Ronnie Scott’s, where he accompanied visiting musicians such as Joe Henderson, Lee Konitz, Charlie Mariano, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, and Bill Evans until the early 1970s. He was a member of bands led by Gordon Beck and Mike Pyne.
As a sideman he appeared on the John McLaughlin 1969 album Extrapolation and formed a quintet with Bailey, Jeff Clyne, Evan Parker, and Kenny Wheeler, releasing the album The Baptised Traveller. Tony helped found Incus Records with Bailey and others and Musicians Cooperative. The label would go on to release more than 50 albums, received a three-month artist-in-residence job at the Sydney Conservatorium in Australia and joined the London Jazz Composers Orchestra and collaborated with Howard Riley.
Oxley wwent on to join saxophonist Alan Skidmore’s quintet, tutor at the Jazz Summer School in Barry, South Wales, and form the band Angular Apron, and start the Celebration Orchestra He toured and recorded with Anthony Braxton, and began a working relationship with Cecil Taylor. Over the next few decades he joined several bands, recorded a series of albums and ventured into electronic and acoustic percussion music.
Free improvising drummer and electronic musician Tony Oxley died on December 26, 2023.
LOUIS HAYES & THE CANNONBALL LEGACY BAND
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KRANTZ CARLOCK LEFEBVRE
KCL, the iconic, genre-bending powerhouse trio led by visionary guitaristWayne Krantz and featuring drummer Keith Carlock(Steely Dan, Sting, John Mayer) and bassist Tim Lefebvre (Tedeschi Trucks Band,David Bowie), held a Thursday-night residency at NYC’s 55 Bar throughout the first decade of the new millenium. Cutting live recordings from the club and posting them online in the early days of the internet and touring only sporadically, KCL developed a thoroughly original style of interactive group improvisation inspired in part by the great Miles Davis Quintet of the 60s, but played out in spontaneously generated contexts of heavy funk, rock and electronica instead of straight-ahead swing.
As other instrumental bands of the day dabbled in derivative fusion and retro-jazz, KCL became an underground phenomenon, cultivating an international following of devoted fans of every stripe looking for an alternative creative music that served the mind, body and spirit. Relentlessly grooving, always innovative, never complacent -KCL made contemporary music that resonated beyond category.Other sideman obligations sidelined the band soon after their Abstract Logix release, “Krantz Carlock Lefebvre,” in 2010, but their reputation continued to expand globally through fan circulation of the band’s many live videos and recordings. Now, in 2020, KCL re-ignites to tour with incendiary shows throughout the USA, Europe and Asia.
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