Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Tony Kinsey was born Cyril Anthony Kinsey on October 11, 1927 in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham, England. Holding down jobs on trans-Atlantic ships during his youth, he studied while at port with Bill West in New York City and Birmingham with Tommy Webster. He had a close association with Ronnie Ball early in his life.
Kinsey led his own ensemble at the Flamingo Club in London, England through the 1950s, and recorded on more than 80 sessions between 1950 and 1977, including with Tubby Hayes, Bill Le Sage, Ronnie Scott, Johnny Dankworth, Tommy Whittle, Joe Harriott, Lena Horne, Frank Holder, Ella Fitzgerald, Ben Webster, Clark Terry, Harry Edison, Buddy DeFranco, Billie Holiday, Oscar Peterson, and Sarah Vaughan.
He performed at European jazz festivals both as a drummer and as a poet. He did some work as a session musician in the 1950s and 1960s, playing on records by Eddie Calvert, Cliff Richard, and Ronnie Aldrich. Kinsey was also a founder member of the group, The John Dankworth Seven in 1950.
He was a resident at the Florida Club, Leicester Square, in the 1950s and had his own trio in the mid~Sixties. By the mid 1980s Tony performed regularly with vibraphone player Lennie Best at venues in the London area including the South Hill Park Cellar Bar in Bracknell.
Kinsey also branched into composition; a string quartet composition of his is used in the short film On the Bridge, and he wrote arrangements for big bands in addition to music for over 100 commercials. Later in his life he wrote music for a musical based on the life of George Eliot.
In 2012, he appeared in the documentary film, No One But Me, discussing jazz vocalist Annie Ross. Drummer and composer Tony Kinsey continues to remain active as drummer.
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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…
Alex Riel was born in Copenhagen, Denmark on September 13, 1940. His career began in the mid-Sixties when he got the house drummer position at the club Montmarte in his home city with bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, and pianists Tete Montoliu or Kenny Drew. They accompanied visiting American musicians Ben Webster, Dexter Gordon, Kenny Dorham, Johnny Griffin, Don Byas, Donald Byrd, Brew Moore and Yusef Lateef.
Among those mentioned above he also worked with Ray Brown, Don Cherry, Art Farmer, Stéphane Grappelli, Hank Jones, and Thad Jones. He formed a renowned jazz ensemble with bass player Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen and Kenny Drew.
Riel has recorded thirteen albums as a leader and another twenty-five as a sideman with Drew, Gordon, Webster, Kenny Werner, Bob Brookmeyer, Thomas Clausen, Bill Evans, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Ken McIntyre, Archie Shepp, Lars Gullin, Sahib Shihab, Thorgeir Stubø and Jackie McLean.
Delving into rock music, in 1968 Alex was a founding member of the Danish rock group The Savage Rose. His album The Riel Deal won a Danish Grammy Award Jazz in 1996.
In September 2010, Riel turned seventy years old and the milestone was celebrated at the famed Jazzhus Montmartre. The event was broadcast live with the title Celebration of a Living Jazz Legend by the Danish national television station TV2 which was also showing rare photos depicting Riel with Duke Ellington, Ben Webster, Bill Evans and The Savage Rose.
His first group Alex Riel/Palle Mikkelborg Quintet won the Montreux Grand Prix Award at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1968. Over the course of his career drummer Alex Riel has founded several groups and continues to advance the music.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Cliff Leeman was born in Portland, Maine on September 10, 1913. At age 13 he played percussion with the Portland Symphony Orchestra and toured as a xylophonist on the vaudeville circuit late in the 1920s. He first made his name in the jazz world during the Thirties and Forties working in the swing bands of Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Charlie Barnet, Johnny Long, and Woody Herman.
After a stint in the Army in 1944, he worked with Don Byas, John Kirby, Raymond Scott, Jimmy Dorsey, and Ben Webster. He briefly left the music industry before joining the Casa Loma Orchestra in 1947, later moving on to the Charlie Barnet Orchestra and closing out the decade in Bob Chester’s big band ensemble.
He played on radio and television in the 1950s, in addition to playing live often with Eddie Condon and Bobby Hackett. His later associations include Pee Wee Erwin, Yank Lawson/Bob Haggart, Ralph Sutton, Billy Butterfield. During the 1960s he performed with Bob Crosby, Wild Bill Davison, Dukes of Dixieland, Peanuts Hucko and Joe Venuti. The Seventies saw Cliff with The Kings of Jazz, Bud Freeman, Don Ewell, the World’s Greatest Jazz Band, and Jimmy McPartland.
He recorded several albums for Fat Cat Jazz in the 1970s. Drummer Cliff Leeman, whose nickname is Mr. Time, passed away on April 26, 1986.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Horst Konrad “Conny” Jackel was born on August 30, 1931 in Offenbach am Main, Germany. Initially working as a steel construction fitter, he attended the conservatory in 1951 and from 1952 played in the clubs of the US Army in France, the Netherlands and Germany.
In 1955 he became a member of the Helmut Brandt Combo, contributing to its success. In 1959 he went on to perform the equally demanding arrangements of the Media Band of Harald Banter in Cologne. 1961 saw Jackel moving to the Erwin Lehn Orchestra in Stuttgart, where he performed with Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Dizzy Gillespie and Frank Sinatra.
From 1964 to 1969 he was a member of the Hessischer Rundfunk Jazz Ensemble led by Albert Mangelsdorff, then became first trumpet of the orchestra in 1967 under Willy Berking and the HR Big Band under Heinz Schönberger. He would go on to perform with Joki Freund, Rudi Sehring, Attila Zoller, Charly Antolini and the Sugar Foot Stompers among other traditional bands.
Suffering from cancer, he lost his lower jaw to amputation forcing him to give up the trumpet. Occasionally he was active as a drummer with The Bookreaders. After a long illness as a result of an operation, trumpeter and flugelhornist Conny Jackel, whose motto was “No beer – no music!”, passed away on April 28, 2008 in Bad Nauheim, Germany.
