Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Sil Austin was born Sylvester Austin on September 17, 1929 in Dunnelion, Florida and taught himself to play as a 12 year old. He won the Ted Mack Amateur Hour in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1945, playing “Danny Boy”. His performance brought him a record deal with Mercury Records and he moved to New York and studied at the Juilliard School of Music.
Austin played briefly with Roy Eldridge and with Tiny Bradshaw from 1952-54, before setting up his own successful touring group. He recorded over 30 albums for Mercury with a number of Top 40 hits on the pop charts with tunes like “Danny Boy” (his signature), “Slow Walk” and “My Mother’s Eyes”.
Sil Austin, a saxophonist who considered Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young and Sonny Stitt as his major influences, passed away of prostate cancer on September 1, 2001.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Hamiet Bluiett was born on September 16, 1940 in Brooklyn a.k.a. Lovejoy, Illinois, that was founded as a free black refuge community in the 1830s. As a child, he studied piano, trumpet, and clarinet, but was attracted most strongly to the baritone saxophone from the age of ten. He began his musical career by playing the clarinet for barrelhouse dances in Brooklyn, Illinois, before joining the Navy band in 1961. He attended Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
Following his time in the Navy, he returned to the St. Louis area in the mid-1960s. In the late 1960s Bluiett co-founded the Black Artists’ Group (BAG) in St. Louis, Missouri, comprised of a collective dedicated to fostering creative work in theater, visual arts, dance, poetry, film, and music. He led the BAG big band during 1968 and 1969.
Bluiett moved to New York City in 1969 and joined the Charles Mingus Quintet and the Sam Rivers large ensemble. In 1976 he co-founded the World Saxophone Quartet with two other BAG members, Julius Hemphill and Oliver Lake. The group would quickly become jazz music’s most renowned saxophone quartet. He has remained a champion of the somewhat unwieldy baritone saxophone, organizing large groups of baritone saxophones.
In the 1980s, he also founded The Clarinet Family, a group of eight clarinetists playing clarinets of various sizes ranging from E-flat soprano to contrabass. Since the 1990s he has led a virtuosic quartet, the Bluiett Baritone Nation, made up entirely of baritone saxophones, with drum set accompaniment. His return to his hometown in 2002 affords him the opportunity to gig, perform with students from Neighborhood Music School in New Haven, Connecticut under the name of “Hamiet Bluiett and the Improvisational Youth Orchestra”. He has recorded over three-dozen albums and continues to perform, record and tour.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Gene M. Roland was born September 15, 1921 in Dallas, Texas and learned to play several instruments, such as trumpet and piano. He received a degree in music from the University of North Texas College of Music, first hooked up with Kenton in 1944, playing fifth trumpet and contributing arrangements. He worked briefly with Lionel Hampton and Lucky Millinder, and then rejoined Kenton in 1945 as a trombonist and writer, arranging the hit “Tampico”.
In 1946 Roland played piano and wrote for a group that included Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Jimmy Giuffre and Herbie Steward, and would lead Woody Herman’s Four Brothers Second Herd. By the late 40s, he played trombone with George Auld, trumpet with Count Basie, Charlie Barnet and Lucky Millinder, and contributed charts for the big bands of Claude Thornhill and Artie Shaw. He led a giant rehearsal band in 1950 that included Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, wrote for Kenton in 1951, Dan Terry in 1954, and Woody Herman from 1956-58, for whom he contributed 65 arrangements.
Gene was a major force in Kenton’s mellophonium band of the early 1960s, not only writing for the ensemble, but also performing as one of the mellophoniums, occasionally doubling on soprano sax with the orchestra. He provided the robust vocal on “Hawaiian Teenage Girl”, and remained active as a writer in the 1960s and 70s, working with Copenhagen’s Radiohus Orchestra and playing trumpet, piano and tenor with his own groups.
Arranger, composer, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Gene Roland, who was the only arranger to write for Kenton in all four decades of the band’s existence, passed away on August 11, 1982 in New York City.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Scott Hamilton was born on September 12,1954 in Providence, Rhode Island. He emerged in the 1970s and at the time he was considered to be one of the few musicians of real talent who carried the tradition of the classic jazz tenor saxophone in the style of Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins as well as Zoot Sims and Don Byas forward.
Hamilton began playing in various rhythm & blues outfits in his hometown, but subsequently shifted to jazz and the tenor saxophone. In 1976 he moved to New York City, in part the recommendation of Roy Eldridge and joined Benny Goodman for a period of time. In 1977 he recorded his debut album for Concord Records, with whom he would have a long recording career in his own name and as one of their Concord Jazz All Stars. He also worked backing singer Rosemary Clooney and others.
In the early 1980s he had formed his own quintet and toured all over the world. By then free from his drinking habit, in 1982 he had matured sufficiently to be able to break away from the spell of mainly Ben Webster and Zoot Sims, whom he had been criticized of imitating. From this point on both his playing and his tone were very much his own.
By the early 1990s Scott was ready for a next step and by 1994 when he released Organic Duke, he had developed a quite singular style: a large, well-rounded but still focused tone and improvising, ostensibly still based on the swing idiom. Tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton has amassed a catalogue of over forty albums and continues to compose, perform and tour.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Prince Lasha (pronounced “La-shay“) was born William B. Lawsha on September 10, 1929 in Fort Worth, Texas. He came of age studying and performing alongside fellow I.M. Terrell High School students John Carter, Ornette Coleman, King Curtis, Charles Moffett and Dewey Redman.
Lasha moved to California during the 1950s. In the 1960s, Prince Lasha was active in the burgeoning free jazz movement, of which his Fort Worth cohort Ornette Coleman was a pioneer. Lasha worked closely with saxophonist Sonny Simmons, with whom he recorded two albums, The Cry and Firebirds no the Contemporary label, the latter receiving five stars and an AMG Albumpick at Allmusic.
Lasha worked as a sideman appearing on recordings with Eric Dolphy, Elvin Jones/Jimmy Garrison Sextet featuring McCoy Tyner, and with Michael White. In the 1970s, Lasha and Simmons made additional recordings under the name Firebirds. In 2005, Lasha recorded the album The Mystery of Prince Lasha with the Odean Pope Trio.
Saxophonist, flautist and clarinetist Prince Lasha died on December 12, 2008, in Oakland, California. He left a small legacy of six recordings as a leader marking his place in jazz history.
