Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Herman “Trigger” Alpert was born on September 3, 1916 in Indianapolis, Indiana. Attending Indiana University, he studied the bass and soon after was playing with guitarist Alvino Rey in New York City. In the early 1940s he toured with the Glenn Miller band and his enthusiastic playing style can be witnessed during a 1941 performance of In The Mood in Sun Valley Serenade.
During the rest of the decade, he worked with Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge, Ella Fitzgerald, Bud Freeman, Woody Herman, Jerry Jerome, Bernie Leighton, Ray McKinley, Frank Sinatra, and Muggsy Spanier. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he recorded as a sideman with Don Elliott, Coleman Hawkins, Gene Krupa, Mundell Lowe, Buddy Rich, Artie Shaw, and the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra.
Until the late 1960s, Trigger was a member of the CBS Orchestra and the CBS band for the television series the Garry Moore Show with Carol Burnett and the Barbra Streisand television specials My Name Is Barbra and Color Me Barbra.
Alpert wrote two instructional books: Walking the Bass in 1958 and the Electric Bass in 1968. He recorded a single album as a leader titled Trigger Happy on the Riverside label in 1956.
Retiring from music in 1970, he made his longtime interest in portrait photography a full-time profession. Bassist Trigger Alpert passed away on December 21, 2013 at an assisted living facility in Jacksonville Beach, Florida.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Sy Johnson was born on April 15, 1930 in New Haven, Connecticut and learned to play the piano in his youth. He first performed in New York City with Charles Mingus at the jazz club Showplace, with Booker Ervin on tenor, Ted Curson on trumpet, Dannie Richmond on drums, and Mingus on bass. and on his first night with Mingus, Eric Dolphy performed on alto, bass clarinet, and flute.
In 1971, eleven years later, Mingus gave Johnson Let My Children Hear Music to arrange, which featured two Mingus pieces, Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife (Are Some Jiveass Slippers) and Don’t Be Afraid, the Clowns Afraid Too. The album’s emergence was heralded with a live concert, Mingus And Friends At Philharmonic Hall, also arranged by Johnson and released as an album.
Performing We Did It on Soul Train in 1973 and continued to work with Mingus until his death from Lou Gehrig’s disease in 1979. Mingus recorded two of Johnson’s compositions, Wee and For Harry Carney, and nominated Johnson for a Guggenheim award following his own in Jazz Composition.
Johnson continues to work with Sue Mingus arranging charts for all the Mingus repertory ensembles—the Mingus Big Band, the Mingus Orchestra and the Mingus Dynasty. He would go on to collaborate with arrangements for Joe Williams, Frank Sinatra, Wes Montgomery, Roy Eldridge, Ben Webster, Quincy Jones, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Mel Torme, Terry Gibbs, Lee Konitz and Sarah Vaughan, among others.
He has also worked on Broadway and in films such as the1984 movie The Cotton Club. Arranger Sy Johnson is also a jazz photographer, writer, pianist, singer, and teacher.
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