Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Shake Keane was born Ellsworth McGranahan Keane on May 30, 1927 in Kingstown, St. Vincent, West Indies into a family that loved music and books. He attended Kingstown Methodist School and St. Vincent Grammar School. He was taught to play the trumpet by his father Charles and gave his first public recital at the age of six. When he was 14 years old, Keane led a musical band made up of his brothers. In the 1940s, with his mother Dorcas working to raise six children, the teenager joined one of the island’s leading bands, Ted Lawrence and His Silvertone Orchestra.
During his early adulthood in St. Vincent, his principal interest was literature, rather than the music for which he would become better known. Dubbed “Shakespeare” by his school friends, on account of his love of prose and poetry. This nickname was subsequently shortened to “Shake”, which name he came to use throughout his adult life. He published two books of poetry in the early Fifties L’Oubili and Ixion, while still in St. Vincent.
Emigrating to Great Britain in 1952 he worked on BBC Radio’s Caribbean Voices, reading poetry and interviewing fellow writers and musicians. He also began playing the trumpet in London nightclubs, working in a number of styles including cabaret, highlife, soca, mento, calypso, and jazz. From 1959 he committed more fully to jazz, spending six years as a member of pioneering alto saxophonist Joe Harriott’s band. The group was the first in Europe and one of the first worldwide, to play free jazz, and Keane contributed mightily to the band’s artistic success, thanks to his fleet and powerful improvisatory skills on trumpet and flugelhorn.
He also made a small handful of records under his own name, but these were usually light jazz. In 1966 he left Britain to settle in Germany and became a featured soloist with the Kurt Edelhagen Radio Orchestra, and also joined the Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band.
Setting aside his musical career, he returned to St. Vincent in 1972 taking up a government position as director of culture, where he remained in the post until 1975. He then became an educator as his main profession, while continuing to write poetry. In the early 1980s, Shake moved to New York City, settling the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn which became his base but found a second home in Norway.
He returned full-time to music in 1989 when he rejoined Michael Garrick and his old bandmates Coleridge Goode and Bobby Orr for a tour in honor of Joe Harriott. In 1991 Keane appeared in a BBC Arena documentary with the Jamaican poet Linton Kwesi Johnson.
In the 1990s, he remained based in Brooklyn, but found a second home in Norway, where he worked most extensively. He contributed music to Norwegian television and stage productions for the next few years, also touring the country playing jazz. It was while preparing for one such tour that he became ill, and subsequently, trumpeter and poet Shake Keane passed away from stomach cancer on November 11, 1997 in Oslo, Norway.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bobby Bryant was born on May 19, 1934 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and played saxophone in his youth before moving on to the trumpet and then the flugelhorn. A move to Chicago, Illinois in 1952, where he studied at the Cosmopolitan School of Music until 1957. Remaining until 1960, he played with Red Saunders, Billy Williams, and other ensembles.
He relocated to New York City in 1960 and then Los Angeles, California in 1961, and became a fixture on the West Coast jazz scene. Leading his own groups, in addition, Bobby played with Vic Damone, Charles Mingus, Oliver Nelson, Gerald Wilson, Frank Capp/Nat Pierce, and the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra. He also worked as a studio musician and a music educator.
His most famous solo was in the song “L.O.V.E” recorded with Nat King Cole in 1964. He recorded five albums as a leader, arranged two albums for Peggy Lee in 1969 and Gene Ammons in 1971, and more than two-dozen with Brass Fever, Earth, Wind & Fire, Clare Fischer, Benny Golson, Eddie Harris Richard “Groove” Holmes, Quincy Jones, Stan Kenton, B. B. King, Blue Mitchell, Oliver Nelson, Lalo Schifrin, Horace Silver, The Three Sounds, Gerald Wilson, and Jimmy Witherspoon.
Having sustained health problems which reduced his activity to part-time, trumpeter and flugelhornist Bobby Bryant passed away in Los Angeles of a heart attack at the age of 64 on June 10, 1998.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Oscar Valdambrini was born on May 11, 1924 in Turin, Italy and his professional career didn’t begin until the late 1940s when he played with Rex Stewart. Soon afterward he co-led a small ensemble with Gianni Basso and his association with Basso would continue through the early 1960s.
He also arranged and played as a sideman for Armando Trovajoli toward the end of the Fifties. During the 1960s he played with Gil Cuppini, Duke Ellington, and Giorgio Gaslini, and by the early Seventies, he was working with Maynard Ferguson.
Joining forces once again with Basso the two performed together from 1972 to 1974. He went on to also play with Franco Ambrosetti, Conte Candoli, Dusko Goykovich, Freddie Hubbard, Mel Lewis, Frank Rosolino, Ernie Wilkins, and Kai Winding in the 1970s.
Growing increasingly sick from the middle of the 1980s, trumpeter and flugelhornist Oscar Valdambrini, had a central role in the emergence of a modern jazz movement in Italy, receded from active performance and passed away on December 26, 1996 in Rome, Italy.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bill Hardman was born William Franklin Hardman, Jr. on April 6, 1933 in Cleveland, Ohio. Growing up he worked with local players like Bobby Few and Bob Cunningham and while in high school he appeared with Tadd Dameron. After graduating he joined Tiny Bradshaw’s band.
Hardman’s first recording was with Jackie McLean in 1956, later playing with Charles Mingus, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Horace Silver, and Lou Donaldson. He led a group with Junior Cook and recorded as a leader: Saying Something on the Savoy label. The album received critical acclaim in jazz circles but was little notoriety with the general public. He had three periods in as many decades with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, though his misfortune was not to be with the Messengers at the time of their popular Blue Note recordings. Blakey occasionally featured him playing several extended choruses unaccompanied.
Though he was a crackling hard bop player with blazing technique, crisp articulations, and a no-frills sound, he never received commercial success like his colleagues Donald Byrd, Freddie Hubbard, and Lee Morgan.
Bill later incorporated into his sound the fuller, more extroverted romantic passion of a Clifford Brown – a direction he would take increasingly throughout the late-1960s and 1970s. As a leader, he recorded six albums, as a sideman he recorded more than three dozen with Dave Bailey, Walter Bishop Jr., Charles Earland, Curtis Fuller, Benny Golson, Eddie Jefferson, Ronnie Mathews, Jimmy McGriff, Hank Mobley, Houston Person, Mickey Tucker, Steve Turre, Mal Waldron, and Reuben Wilson.
Hard bop trumpeter and flugelhornist Bill Hardman passed away on December 5, 1990 in Paris, France.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
David Burns was born on March 24, 1924 in Perth Amboy, New Jersey and began playing trumpet when he was nine years old. As a teenager, he heard bebop performances at Minton’s Playhouse, among others Dizzy Gillespie. His first ensemble was in Al Cooper’s Savoy Sultans, with whom he played from 1941 to 1943, prior to joining the Army Air Force. There he led a band from 1943 to 1945 that included James Moody as a sideman.
He joined Gillespie’s band in 1946 and appeared with Gillespie in Jivin’ in Bebop in 1947. After leaving Gillespie’s band in 1949, he worked with Duke Ellington from 1950 to 1952 and then with James Moody until 1957.
The late 1950s saw Dave playing shows in New York City and in the Sixties recorded for Vanguard Records. He worked with Billy Mitchell, Al Grey, Willie Bobo, Art Taylor, Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Leo Parker, and Milt Jackson. From the 1970s through the end of his career he increased his work as an educator. Trumpeter, flugelhornist, arranger, composer, and teacher Dave Burns passed away on April 5, 2009 in Freeport, New York.
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