Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Vincent Lopez was born of Portuguese immigrant parents in Brooklyn, New York City on December 30, 1895. By 1916 he was leading his own dance band in New York City. Five years later his band began broadcasting on the new medium of entertainment radio, giving listeners a weekly 90-minute show on Newark, New Jersey station WJZ. The broadcast was instrumental in making him one of North America’s most popular bandleaders through the 1940s.
In the 1930s and ‘40s Vincent worked occasionally in feature films, notably The Big Broadcast and I Don’t Want to Make History and was one of the first bandleaders to work in Soundies movie musicals. His flamboyant style of piano playing influenced Eddy Duchin and Liberace.
Noted musicians who played in his band included Artie Shaw, Xavier Cugat, Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey, Bob Effros, Mike Mosiello, Fred Lowery, Joe Tarto and Glenn Miller. He featured singers Keller Sisters and Lynch, Betty Hutton, and Marion Hutton. Lopez’s longtime drummer was Mike Riley, who popularized the novelty hit The Music Goes Round and Round.
In 1941, Lopez’s Orchestra began a residency at Manhattan’s Taft Hotel that lasted 25 years. In the early 1950s, he along with Gloria Parker hosted a radio program broadcast from the Taft Hotel called Shake the Maracas in which audience members competed for small prizes by playing maracas with the orchestra.
Bandleader, pianist and actor Vincent Lopez, who published his autobiography Lopez Speaking in 1960, died at the Villa Maria nursing home in North Miami, Florida on September 20, 1975.
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ABELITA MATEUS TRIO
Singer, pianist and São Paulo native Abelita Mateus is in the vanguard of the next wave of soulful and hypnotic 21st Century Brazilian music.
A New Yorker since 2012, her 2017 debut album Vivenda made the jazz chart’s Top 25 and Downbeat wrote that her 2018 follow-up record Mixed Feelings “shows off an impressive ability to synthesize the sounds of her Brazilian home with jazz, the music that inspired her move to the States.”
Tickets: $25.00 +Fee
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CHRISTIAN SANDS QUARTET
The New Haven prodigy began lessons as a toddler, started gigging at seven, studied with Dr. Billy Taylor and Dave Brubeck, joined Christian McBride’s group while still in school and has appeared on over 30 recordings, six as a leader. Though fluent in every jazz style, the trio format is his favorite.
Tickets: $30.00 ~$35.00 +Fee
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lowell Dwight Dickerson was born in Los Angeles, California on December 26, 1944 and grew up in the city where his influences were Horace Silver, McCoy Tyner, Kenny Barron, and Bud Powell, among others. He became active on the local jazz scene in the 1960s.
In the early Sevenites he appeared on the Chicago, Illinois tenor titan Gene Ammons’ Free Again album on Prestige, and the latter part of the decade found him being featured on a few LPs by baritone saxophonist Nick Brignola. In the 1980s Dickerson started recording as a leader when he provided his debut album, Sooner or Later, for Discovery. In 1992,
Dickerson recorded Dwight’s Rights which features Red Holloway on tenor sax for the small Night Life label. He has played as a sideman in the 1990s with saxman Rickey Woodard, singer Michael Martin and Albert “Tootie” Heath. The early 2000s saw him featured on singer David Coss’ Simple Life album.
Pianist Dwight Dickerson, who occasionally sings and plays a variety of genres ranging from hard bop, funk and soul jazz, to modal post-bop, continues to perform and record at 80.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
John Josephus Hicks Jr. was born December 21, 1941 in Atlanta, Georgia, the eldest of five children. As a child he moved around the United States as his father, Rev. John Hicks Sr, took up jobs with the Methodist church. His mother was his first piano teacher after he began playing at six or seven in Los Angeles, California. He took organ lessons, sang in choirs and tried the violin and trombone. Once he learned to read music around the age of 11, he started playing the piano in church.
His development accelerated once his family moved to St. Louis, Missouri when Hicks was 14 and he settled on the piano. Attending Sumner High School and played in schoolmate Lester Bowie’s band, the Continentals, which performed in a variety of musical styles. Hicks worked summer gigs in the southern United States with blues musicians Albert King and Little Milton with the latter providing his first professional work in 1958.
He studied music in 1958 at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he shared a room with drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson. He also studied for a short time at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, Massachusetts before moving to New York in 1963.
In New York, John first accompanied singer Della Reese, then went on to play with Joe Farrell, Al Grey, Billy Mitchell, Pharoah Sanders, Jimmy Witherspoon, Kenny Dorham and Joe Henderson before joining Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1964. From 1965 to 1967 he worked on and off with vocalist Betty Carter, then joined Woody Herman’s big band, where he stayed until 1970, playing as well as writing arrangements for the band.
From 1972 to 1973, Hicks taught jazz history and improvisation at Southern Illinois University. From the 1970s onward he had a prolific career as a leader recording his debut in England followed by fifty-three more albums and as a sideman he recorded 300.
Towards the end of his life, he taught at New York University and The New School in New York. In 2006 John played in a big band led by Charles Tolliver, recorded his final studio album On the Wings of an Eagle.
Pianist, composer and arranger John HIcks, whose collection of papers, compositions, video and audio recordings are held by Duke University, died from internal bleeding on May 10, 2006.
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