Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Arnie Lawrence ,was born Arnold Lawrence Finkelstein on July 10, 1938 in Brooklyn, New York. He studied clarinet in his youth before switching to saxophone and from the age of 12 he was playing in clubs in the Catskills, and by age 17 was performing at Birdland, at one point working a double bill with John Coltrane.
He played with Charles Mingus, Thad Jones, Maynard Ferguson, Clark Terry and Duke Pearson but did not make his first recordings until 1966, playing on Chico Hamilton’s The Dealer. Working for several years with Hamilton and becoming a soloist on The Tonight Show from 1967 to 1972, Arnie made his first records as a leader in 1968.
In the early 1970s Lawrence played with Willie Bobo, then joined Blood, Sweat & Tears in 1974. He did a world tour with Liza Minnelli in 1978–79, and released a few more records under his own name before touring with Louie Bellson and Elvin Jones in the early 1980s. He composed a symphony he titled Red, White and Blues, which was premiered by an orchestra in Williamsburg, Virginia. It featured himself, Dizzy Gillespie and Julius Hemphill all soloing in the performance.
Putting on his educator hat he taught from the middle of the 1970s, working as an artist in residence in Kentucky and Kansas. By 1986 he had stopped recording and touring and founded the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York City. Among the program’s students were Roy Hargrove, Brad Mehldau, Larry Goldings, John Popper, Peter Bernstein and Spike Wilner of Smalls Jazz Club. Moving to Israel in 1997, where he founded the International Center for Creative Music, an education facility open to both Jewish and Arab students. He played regularly in Israel and owned his own nightclub called Arnie’s Jazz Underground.
Suffered from lung and liver cancer late in life, alto saxophonist Arnie Lawrence passed away on April 22, 2005, in Jerusalem, Israel and Palestine, as both claim the city as their capital.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Louis Thomas Jordan was born on July 8, 1908 in Brinkley, Arkansas where his father was a music teacher and bandleader for the Brinkley Brass Band and the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. Losing his mother young, he studied music under his father, starting out on the clarinet, then piano and ultimately landed on the saxophone as his primary instrument. In his youth he played in his father’s bands instead of doing farm work when school closed. During his early career period he played the piano professionally, but alto saxophone became his main instrument. However, he would become even better known as a songwriter, entertainer and vocalist.
He briefly attended and majored in music at Arkansas Baptist College in Little Rock, but after a period with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels and with other local bands like Bob Alexander’s Harmony Kings, he went to Philadelphia and then New York. By 1932, Jordan was performing with the Clarence Williams band, and when he was in Philadelphia he played clarinet in the Charlie Gaines band.
1936 saw him joining the Savoy Ballroom orchestra, led by the drummer Chick Webb. A vital stepping-stone in his career, Louis introduced songs as he began singing lead, and often singing duets with up and comer Ella Fitzgerald. They would later reprise their partnership on several records, by which time both were major stars. In 1938, Webb fired Jordan for trying to persuade Fitzgerald and others to join his new band.
He became famous as one of the leading practitioners, innovators and popularizers of jump blues, a swinging, up-tempo, dance-oriented hybrid of jazz, blues and boogie-woogie. Jordan’s band also pioneered the use of the electronic organ.
Jordan was a talented singer with great comedic flair, and he fronted his own band for more than twenty years. He duetted with some of the biggest solo singing stars of his time, including Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. An actor and a major black film personality, he appeared in dozens of “soundies” or promotional film clips, made numerous cameos in mainstream features and short films, and starred in two musical feature films made especially for him.
With his dynamic Tympany Five bands, Jordan mapped out the main parameters of the classic R&B, urban blues and early rock-and-roll genres with a series of highly influential 78-rpm discs released by Decca Records. These recordings presaged many of the styles of black popular music of the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s and exerted a strong influence on many leading performers in these genres.
Known as The King of the Jukebox for his crossover popularity with both black and white audiences of the swing era, Louis was a prolific songwriter who wrote or co-wrote many songs that stayed in the top of the Billboard charts and that were influential classics of 20th-century popular music.
Pioneering alto saxophonist, pianist, clarinetist, singer, actor, songwriter and bandleader Louis Jordan, one of the most successful black recording artists of the 20th century, passed away on February 4, 1975 at age 66 in Los Angeles, California.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bill Trujillo was born on July 7, 1930 in Los Angeles, California and started clarinet lessons at the age of four, then switched to tenor saxophone after seeing Lester Young perform with Count Basie in Los Angeles. His mother, a dance teacher at the famous Palomar Ballroom, regularly took him and his older brother to hear big bands when they were in residence at the Palomar, the Paramount, and other popular LA show places.
Learning to read music before he could read words and after Lincoln High School, where his friend and classmate was Lennie Niehaus played, Trujillo started his long professional career at the age of 16 with the West Coast based Glenn Henry Band. The band also boasted a young trombone player named Jimmy Knepper. During the ’40s, Bill played with Alvino Rey and other West Coast groups. In 1953, he joined Woody Herman with whom he remained until the following year when Bill Russo beckoned he joined the quintet but then playing in Chicago. Eventually finding the Windy City too cold, he returned to L.A. where he played in the orchestras of Charlie Barnet and Jerry Gray, and gigged with small groups.
At the behest of his longtime friend Lennie Niehaus, Trujillo joined Stan Kenton band in 1958, however, road trips often lasting a year or more put too much of a strain on his young family. Moving to Las Vegas, Nevada in 1960 he played with Nat Brandywynne and he has been there ever since. He became a mainstay in show orchestras at the Tropicana, Flamingo, Thunderbird and the Dunes playing behind Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and many other. After a labor dispute in 1989 dried up this source of work, he returned to playing in big bands and small groups throughout the country.
In 1999 he led his debut album It’s Tru followed by his 2006 It’s Still Tru with Carl Fontana on the TNC label. As an educator, saxophonist Bill Trujillo teaches clarinet, flute, and all saxophones while continuing to perform in Las Vegas.
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Carolyn Breuer was born on July 4, 1969 in Munich, Germany, the daughter of jazz musician Hermann Breuer. When she was 19 years old, she studied saxophone as a member of the Bundes Jazz Orchestra at the Konservatorium in Hilversum under Ferdinand Povel. After graduation, she moved to New York City where she took private lessons with George Coleman and Branford Marsalis.
She has worked with Coleman, Fee Claassen and Ingrid Jensen before starting her own label, NotNowMom!-Records. Breuer’s Serenade release won her the “Heidelberger Künstlerpreis” which is Heidelberg’s prize for artists in Amsterdam, Netherlands. She is the first jazz musician to receive this award, previously only given to classical musicians.
Breuer has toured internationally and and performed with WDR’s Big Band, the Berlin Jazz Festival and the North Sea Jazz Festival. Her album, Fate Smiles On Those Who Stay Cool, became so popular in the Netherlands that politician Klaas De Vries began a speech in parliament with exactly those words.
Alto and soprano saxophonist Carolyn Breuer has recorded six albums as a leader, two with her father and one with Fee Classen. She continues to perform, record and tour.
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Ken Fowser was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on June 30, 1982 and began playing the saxophone at age eleven, picking up his father’s old alto he used while in the Air Force band. Playing through elementary school, he studied privately with Tony Salicandro at the New Jersey Conservatory of Music, It was there that his love of jazz developed.
This was followed with studies at the university of the Arts Philadelphia and his insurgence into the local jazz scene where he began making a name for himself. Opportunities came along for him to perform with Mickey Roker, John Swana, Larry McKenna, Bootsie Barnes, Sid Simmons, Byron Landham, Billy James, and others.
Leaving Philly for William Paterson University he received his degree in music in 2005. A move to New York, graduate studies at SUNY Purchase College, private studies with Eric Alexander and Ralph Lalama, and received his degree in 2008. With his already established jazz in-roads in the City, it was an easy translation for Ken to co-lead with Behn Gillece and record his debut album Full View with special guest pianist David Hazeltine the following year on the Posi-tone label.
Saxophonist Ken Fowser hosts a weekly jam session at Small Jazz Club in New York City and continues to perform, compose and record.
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