Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Paul Broadnax was born on January 27, 1926 in Cambridge, Massachusetts to a tenor father with the Lyric Male Quartet who was also a choral director and voice teacher. She also was a dressmaker and bartered those talents to secure piano lessons for the youngster from the age of eight until he was fourteen. They moved to the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts when he was very young and where he grew up.
He studied clarinet in Junior High School which allowed him to play in the marching band. His classmates were Roy Haynes, Alan Dawson and Ray Perry, and during this period in life he formed his own band. After graduating from Mechanic Arts High School he was drafted into the Army Air Forces and sent to Texas. After being a foot soldier for only two days he was assigned to Special Services as a musician. It was here that he met arranger and pianist Donn Trenner, who he would later collaborate with on a later album.
Returning to Roxbury after World War II, Paul hooked up with alto saxophonist Harold Emerson, trumpeter Buster Daniels and tenor saxophonists Doug Lee and Fred Williams. He began playing with ensembles at jazz venues throughout the region. Nat King Cole and Duke Ellington would become huge influences inhis development. In the late 1940s, Broadnax began writing arrangements for Sabby LewisIn the late 1940s, Broadnax began writing arrangements for Sabby Lewis for more than five years, and worked with Paul Gonsalves before he joined the Ellington Orchestra.
In addition to supplying arrangements for Lewis, directing his own groups and working with the Tom Kennedy and Buster Daniels bands, he played tenor, piano and sang with the Gilmore Big Band, all the while writing arrangements for the group. Setting up other sources of revenue to supplement his earnings as a musician, Broadnax attended what is now the Wentworth Institute of Technology to be certified as an airplane mechanic, and he graduated from Northeastern University with an associate’s degree in engineering. He worked at Raytheon for many years, then left to focus more on music, while also running an Amway business.
He would go on to form the Paul Champ Three featuring bassist Champlain “Champ” Jones and drummer Tony Sarni, have a regular spot on the ABC affiliate in Boston and for another group with bassist Dave Trefethen and drummer Les Harris, Jr. He would appear with among others, Cab Calloway, Dorothy Donnegan, Lionel Hampton, Clark Terry, Joe Williams, and Jimmy Witherspoon. Vocalist and pianist Paul Broadnax, who in 2003 was chosen as Musician of the Year by the Boston Musicians’ Association, transitioned on August 1, 2018.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Page Cavanaugh was born Walter Page Cavanaugh on January 26, 1922 in Cherokee, Kansas and began on piano at age nine. By the time he turned 16 he was playing with Ernie Williamson’s band for a year before moving to Los Angeles, California and joining the Bobby Sherwood band at age 20.
While serving in the military during World War II, he met guitarist Al Viola and bassist Lloyd Pratt, and they formed a trio. After the war’s end they performed together in the style of the Nat King Cole Trio, scoring a number of hits in the late 1940s, including The Three Bears, Walkin’ My Baby Back Home, and All of Me. The trio appeared in the films A Song Is Born, Big City, Lullaby of Broadway and Romance on the High Seas. He recorded dozens of tracks with Doris Day, Frank Sinatra, Dinah Shore, June Christy, Mel Torme and other legendary singers.
During the early Fifties he had a program, Page Pages You, on the short-lived Progressive Broadcasting System, the trio played on Frank Sinatra’s radio program, Songs by Sinatra, and on The Jack Paar Show. Cavanaugh played in Los Angeles nightclubs through the 1990s, both in a trio setting and as a septet, the Page 7. He recorded with Bobby Woods & Les Deux Love Orchestra, and as a bandleader with MGM, Capitol, RCA, Star Line, Tiara, and Dobre Records over the course of his career, releasing his final trio album, Return to Elegance, in 2006.
Pianist, vocalist, and arranger Page Cavanaugh transitioned from kidney failure on December 19, 2008 in Los Angeles, California.
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Three Wishes
Baroness de Koenigswarter presented Eddie Thompson with the inquiry of three wishes and he responded by telling her:
- “I wish I could jump off the Brooklyn Bridge and make it! You want a serious wish? I wish I could make a record album I’d be satisfied with.”
- “Oh God, this is hellishly difficult! I wish I could live like a millionaire. I don’t want to be one. I want to live like one.”
- “I hope I’ll still be playing when I’m a hundred.”
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Charles Theodore Straight was born on January 16, 1891 in Chicago, Illinois. He started his career in 1909 at 18 accompanying singer Gene Greene in Vaudeville. In 1916, he began working at the Imperial Piano Roll Company in Chicago, where he recorded dozens of piano rolls.
Becoming a popular bandleader around town during the Jazz Age, his band, the Charley Straight Orchestra, had a long term engagement at the Rendezvous Café from 1922 to 1925 and recorded for Paramount Records and Brunswick Records during the decade.
This period also saw Straight working with Roy Bargy on the latter’s eight Piano Syncopations. Besides working as a pianist or leading an orchestra, he also composed and arranged music, both ragtime and jazz.
Pianist, bandleader and composer Charley Straight transitioned on September 22, 1940 in Chicago after being struck by an automobile while working as a city sanitary inspector. He was emerging from a manhole in the street.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Ojārs Raimonds Pauls was born January 12, 1936 in Iļģuciems, Riga, Latvia and is the second child of a glass blowing factory worker and a seamstress. His father played drums and his grandfather played the violin, and following in his grandfather’s footsteps he is enrolled into Riga’s institute of Music kindergarten branch. Being too young and his fingers unfit for playing violin, he started on the piano.
By 1943 he was studying at Riga’s 7th Elementary school while continuing piano lessons with professor Valerijs Zosts and teachers Emma Eglīte and Juta Daugule. 1946 saw Raimonds admitted to the Secondary Musical School of Emīls Dārziņš, combining his studies at the elementary school for three years.
When he turns 14, Pauls was playing piano at restaurants and clubs with a violin and saxophone virtuoso Gunārs Kušķis. Five years later he completed his studies at the Riga’s 7th Elementary school, however, during this time, he independently developed a liking for playing jazz by studying and imitating various jazz records.
He would go on to compose for musicals, ballets, theater performances, puppet shows, films, choirs, and instrumentals, He has received several honors from his home country, the USSR, Sweden, Japan and Armenia.
Composer, arranger and pianist Raimonds Pauls, who was the Minister of Culture of Latvia from 1988 to 1993, continues to record and perform.
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