The Jazz Voyager
The next stop-off for this Jazz Voyager remaining on the other side of the Atlantic is a compact jazz club, established in 1992, with regular evening concerts by international musicians simply called A-Trane. Established in 1992 at Bleibtreustraße 1, 10625 Berlin, Germany, this Charlottenburg venue opens at 8:00 pm daily and closes at 1:00 am, seven days a week.
Named after the subway train that brought jazz musicians to downtown Manhattan and after saxophonist John Coltrane. It is also a play on words for the Strayhorn composition Take The “A” Train made famous by Duke Ellington, reputed to bring you up to Sugar Hill in Harlem.
There is food served here, however, there is a cafe just thirty meters away that serves up traditional German cuisine as well as international dishes of fish, meat and vegetarian. Reservations are highly recommended and may be made in conjunction with music seating but must be made in advance as meals are served prior to the performance at A-Trane. This trip will get me a seat or dinner and music by the Dominic Miller Band giving the crowd jazz and more at 9:00 pm. For more information or to make a reservation one can do so by dialing 49 30 3132550 or dinner only +49 30 31803780.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bernie Leighton, born on January 30, 1921 in West Haven, Connecticut, first played piano professionally at the end of the 1930s. In the early Forties, he played with Bud Freeman, Leo Reisman, Raymond Scott and Benny Goodman before serving in the Army.
Following his discharge, he found work as a studio sideman through the Sixties with Dave Tough, Billie Holiday, Neal Hefti, Goodman again, Artie Shaw, John Serry, Sr., James Moody and Bob Wilber. He toured a year with Tony Bennett from 1972 to 1973.
While Leighton was best known as a sideman, he also recorded extensively as a leader, releasing albums on Keynote Records, Mercury Records, Columbia Records, Brunswick, Disneyland and Capitol. He also recorded a tribute to Duke Ellington released in 1974. He has a cameo role in the 1986 film Hannah and Her Sisters. Pianist Bernie Leighton passed away on September 16, 1994 in Coconut Creek, Florida.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Charles Frederic Ramsey, Jr. was born on January 29, 1915 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Taking his BA at Princeton University in 1936, then went to work at Harcourt Brace in the late Thirties. The early Forties had him at the United States Department of Agriculture and Voice of America.
With Charles Edward Smith, Ramsey wrote Jazzmen in 1939, an early landmark of jazz scholarship particularly noted for its treatment of the life of King Oliver. After receiving Guggenheim fellowships, he visited the American South in the middle of the 1950s to make field recordings and do interviews with rural musicians, some of which were used in releases by Folkways Records and in a 1957 documentary, Music of the South.
He curated an anthology of early jazz recordings for Folkways, titled simply Jazz. Ramsey worked with the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University from 1970. He researched Buddy Bolden’s life with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and continued with a Ford Foundation grant. He presented early jazz interviews on National Public Radio in 1987. The writer of jazz and record producer Charles Ramsey passed away on March 18, 1995 in Paterson, New Jersey.
Three Wishes
When asked what his three wishes would be, Paul Wheaton said:
- “Good health.”
- “To get close to myself.”
- “To play whatever I feel.”
*Excerpt from Three Wishes: An Intimate Look at Jazz Greats ~ Compiled and Photographed by Pannonica de Koenigswarter
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Known professionally as Acker Bilk, Bernard Stanley Bilk MBE was born in Pensford, Somerset on January 28, 1929. He earned the nickname “Acker” from the Somerset slang for friend or mate. His parents tried to teach him the piano but, as a boy, he found it restricted his love of outdoor activities, including football. He lost two front teeth in a school fight and half a finger in a sledding accident, both of which he said affected his eventual clarinet style.
Leaving school Bilk worked at a cigarette factory in Bristol, then three years with the Royal Engineers in the Suez Canal Zone. While there he learned to play the clarinet after his sapper friend, John A. Britten, gave him one bought at a bazaar. He later borrowed a better instrument from the army and kept it after demobilization and played with friends on the Bristol jazz circuit and in 1951 moved to London to play with Ken Colyer’s band. Disliking London he returned west and formed his own band in Pensford called the Chew Valley Jazzmen, which was renamed the Bristol Paramount Jazz Band when they moved to London in 1951. Booked for a six-week gig in Düsseldorf, Germany, the band developed their distinctive style complete with striped-waistcoats and bowler hats.
His return from Germany, Acker based himself in Plaistow, London, and his band played the London jazz clubs. It was here he became part of the late 1950s trad jazz boom in the United Kingdom. They had an eleven chart hit singles in the Sixties, played the Royal Variety Performance, and became an internationally known musician in 1962 when he added a string ensemble on one of his albums that won him an audience outside the UK. His composition Stranger on the Shore was used in a British television series of the same name. He went on to record it as the title track of a new album and the single stayed on the charts for 55 weeks.
He appeared in two theatrical motion pictures, recorded a series of albums in Britain that were also released successfully in the United States on the Atlantic Records subsidiary Atco, however, his success tapered off when British rock and roll made its big international impact beginning in 1964. In the cabaret circuit, he had a couple of more hits, continued to tour, appointed MBE in 2001 and was awarded the BBC Jazz Awards’ Gold Award.
Clarinetist and vocalist Acker Bilk, known for his breathy, vibrato-rich, lower-register style, passed away in Bath, Somerset, on November 2, 2014, at the age of 85.
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