Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Tony DiGregorio was born June 1, 1958 in Poughkeepsie, New York and started playing guitar at age 10. He later received informal lessons with uncle, Oscar DiGregorio, Louis E. Bruno, Gene Bertoncini, and Mark Diorio. He received his B.A.in music from Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College. He studied classical guitar with Dennis Cinelli, composition with Schoenberg, harmony/counterpoint, piano and solfeggio with Paul Caputo, and improvisation/composition with Marty Ehrlich.

As a composer Tony created and performed incidental music for experimental theater productions of The Room, The Lady Aoi, and Journey into the Night in New York City and San Francisco, California with bassist Gerard Zanonico and clarinetist Robert Rossette.

From 1985 to 1994 DiGregorio played with the Swing Now Trio with various special guests Charlie Persip, Teddy Charles, Max Kaminsky, Chuck Wayne, Gene Bertoncini, Buddy Tate, Tom Harrell, Eddie Barefield, Mel Lewis, and Bobby Watson just to name a few.

Since 1994 Tony has worked with Laurel Watson, Hill Greene, Ken Filiano, Theo Wilson, Nicki Parrot, John Rasczka, Dave Hopkins Trio, Marco Katz, Tim Hays, and others including a performance of Terry Rielly’s “In C” with The Styrenes in 2003.

Guitarist and composer Tony DiGregorio continues to compose, perform and record.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Clora Larea Bryant was born on May 30, 1927 in Denison, Texas to Charles and Eulila Bryant, the youngest of three children. As a young child she learned to play piano with her brother Mel, and was a member of a Baptist church choir. Her brother Fred left his trumpet when he joined the military, she picked it up and learned to play. In high school she played trumpet in the marching band.

She turned down scholarships from Oberlin Conservatory and Bennett College to attend Prairie View College in Houston, Texas starting in 1943. Bryant was a member of the Prairie View Co-eds Jazz Band which toured in Texas and performed at the Apollo Theater in New York City in 1944. Her father got a job in Los Angeles, CAlifornia and she transferred to UCLA in 1945, and where she first heard bebop on Central Avenue.

In 1946 she became a member of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, an all-female jazz band, earned her union card and dropped out of school. Dizzy Gillespie became her mentor and provided her with work. She joined the black female jazz band the Queens of Swing as a drummer, and went on tour with the band.

In 1951 she worked in Los Angeles as a trumpeter for Josephine Baker and Billie Holiday. The same year the Queens of Swing became the first women’s jazz group to appear on television and performed as The Hollywood Sepia Tones. Clora was called onto Ada Leonard’s all-girl orchestra show, however, racist directed calls to the station the engagement. In 1954 she briefly moved to New York because she had lost inspiration from playing in bands.

Bryant recorded her first and only album, Gal With A Horn, in 1957 before returning to the life of a traveling musician. She worked with Louis Armstrong and Harry James, toured with singer Billy Williams and around the world with her brother Mel, had a TV show in Australia and became the first female jazz musician to tour in the Soviet Union after writing to Mikhail Gorbachev.

After a heart attack and quadruple bypass surgery in 1996, Bryant was forced to give up the trumpet but she continued to sing. She also began to give lectures on college campuses about the history of jazz, co-edited a book on jazz history in Los Angeles titled Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles, and worked with children in Los Angeles elementary schools.

Trumpeter and vocalist Clora Bryant, who was the only female trumpeter to perform with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and was a member of the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on August 25, 2019, after suffering a heart attack at home.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

James J. Snidero was born in Redwood City, California on May 29, 1958 and grew up in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Camp Springs, Maryland. He then attended the University of North Texas, performed in the One O’clock Lab band and then moved to New York City in 1981. Once there he recorded and toured with Jack McDuff from 1981 to 1982, then joined Toshiko Akiyoshi’s Jazz Orchestra in 1983 after she moved to New York.

Snidero was a working member of Frank Sinatra’s band from 1991 to 1995 and Eddie Palmieri’s band beginning 1994. He performed with the Frank Wess Sextet, the Mingus Big Band, and Walt Weiskopf. He has worked as a sideman for David Hazeltine, David Murray, Mike LeDonne, Joe Magnarelli, Maria Schneider, Mel Lewis, Jim Rotondi, Brian Lynch, Conrad Herwig, and Tom Varner.

He recorded and performed with his own quintet and over time had various musicians including trumpeters Brian Lynch, Tom Harrell and Tim Hagans; pianists Benny Green and Mulgrew Miller; double bassists Peter Washington and Dennis Irwin; and the drummers Billy Hart and Louis Hayes, Gene Jackson, and Adam Nussbaum.

As an educator Jim has held professor positions at the New School University, Indiana University and Princeton University. He has written five series of jazz etude books and produced courses in jazz improvisation and performance for The Jazz Conception Company.

Saxophonist Jim Snidero Snidero, who has recorded 27 albums as a leader and thirty-three as a sideman, continues to perform throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan.

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Jazz Poems

ELEGY FOR THELONIOUS

Damn the snow

Its senseless beauty pours a hard light through the hemlock. Thelonious is dead. Winter drifts in the hourglass; notes pour from the brain cup. Damn the alley cat wailing a muted dirge off Lenox Ave. Thelonious is dead. Tonight’s a lazy rhapsody of shadows swaying to blue vertigo & metaphysical funk. Black trees in the wind. Crepuscule with Nelly Plays inside the bowed head. “Dig the Man Ray of piano!” O Satisfaction, hot fingers blur on thosewhite rib keys. Comingon the Hudson. Monk’s Dream. The ghost of bebop from 52nd Street, footprints in the snow. Damn February. Let’s go to Minton’s & play “modern malice” till daybreak. Lord, there’s Theloniou wearing that old funky hat pulled down over his eyes.

Yusef Komunyakaa | 1947

from Jazz Poems ~ Selected and Edited by Kevin Young

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Arthur Herbert was born May 28, 1907 in Brooklyn, New York to Trinidadian parents. As a young man he worked in a silver and gold refinery while playing local gigs in New York nightclubs and hotels in his spare time. In 1935 he joined Eddie Williams’s band, and soon after started his own, the Rhythm Masters.

In the 1930s and 1940s he worked as a sideman with musicians such as Pete Brown, Coleman Hawkins, Hot Lips Page and Sidney Bechet. The 1950s saw Herbert in semi-retirement as a musician and started up his own pest extermination business. He played in various swing jazz revival ensembles, and toured with Lem Johnson in Poland in the 1960s.

Herbert taught his nephew, drummer Herb Lovelle, to read sheet music, something black musicians were then not held to know. He got his nephew his first gig with Hot Lips Page. He also taught drummer Shelly Manne, according to Herb Lovelle.

Drummer Arthur Herbert date of death is unknown but would have celebrate his 117th birthday today.

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