Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Milt Bernhart was born on May 25, 1926 in Valparaiso, Indiana and began on tuba but switched to trombone in high school. At 16 he worked in Boyd Raeburn’s band and later had some gigs with Teddy Powell. After time in the Army he worked, off and on, with Stan Kenton for the next ten years. In 1955 Bernhart recorded his first album as a leader. In 1986 he was elected President of the Big Band Academy of America.

Although known as mild-mannered or humorous, he spent a brief period with Benny Goodman, who brought out his ire. He indicated working with Goodman was “the bottom” of his first 23 years of life, except for basic training in the Army. He called Goodman a bore and claimed he did nothing about the treatment Wardell Gray faced at a segregated club in Las Vegas and he even alleges that he quit because Goodman publicly humiliated Gray in front of an audience.

The West Coast jazz trombonist recorded more than a hundred albums as a sideman working with Maynard Ferguson, Henri Rene, Shorty Rogers, Pete Rugolo, Howard Rumsey, Lalo Schifrin, Chet Baker, Sammy Davis Jr., June Christy, Astrud Gilberto, Peggy Lee, Johnny Mandel, and Henry Mancini among numerous others.

He recorded with Frank Sinatra, supplying the solo in the middle of Sinatra’s 1956 recording of I’ve Got You Under My Skin conducted by Nelson Riddle. Trombonist Milt Bernhart passed away from congestive heart failure at the Adventist Health in Glendale, California at the age of 77 on January 22, 2004.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Mike Zwerin was born in New York City on May 18, 1930, where he studied at the High School of Music and Art. He began leading bands in his teens, employing several up-and-coming musicians. He went on to attend the Univerity of Miami and after graduation, he went into his father’s business, the Capitol Steel Corporation.

At the age of 18, while on his summer holidays from the University of Miami, he was spotted by Miles Davis at Minton’s in Harlem, while sitting in with Art Blakey. He was immediately drafted into the rehearsal band for what would become immortalized as Birth of the Cool, while the regular trombonist Kai Winding was indisposed. Also present were Gerry Mulligan, Max Roach, and Lee Konitz. His contribution, in particular, his solo on the track Move, can be heard on The Complete Birth of the Cool. A few muddy recordings exist of radio broadcasts by the band during Zwerin’s time in it, which gave him a lifelong reputation as a jazz musician lucky enough to have been at the cutting edge of a new movement.

Abandoning his musical life for much of the 1950s and after a spell in France, he returned to New York in 1958 and played the trombone in several big bands. Among his other recordings are Getting Xperimental over U, and Mack the Knife, an album of Kurt Weill songs that he produced and arranged himself. He also appears on Archie Shepp’s 1968 album The Magic of Ju-Ju.

Before moving permanently to Europe in 1969, he was a jazz critic for the Village Voice and focusing on journalism, writing for Down Beat, Rolling Stone, and Penthouse before joining the Herald Tribune. Zwerin’s move to London, England in 1969 and then to Paris, France in 1972, would be his home for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, he kept his hand in as a trombonist throughout the 1980s, working with his fellow expatriate Hal Singer and with the guitarist Christian Escoudé. In 1988 he toured with the Charles Mingus Big Band, having played briefly with the Swiss bandleader George Gruntz and played with the French fusion band Telephone.

Zwerin’s lasting claim to fame, however, is, perhaps, not his trombone playing but his book La Tristesse de Saint Louis: Swing Under the Nazis (1985). He spent two years researching it, traveling across France, Austria, Poland and Germany to interview survivors and unearthing the story of how jazz was banned by the Nazis as degenerate music, and yet somehow survived as what Zwerin called a metaphor for freedom.

Cool and progressive jazz trombonist and bass trumpeter Mike Zwerin passed away on April 2, 2010 after a long illness in Paris at the age of 79.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Pee Wee Hunt was born Walter Gerhardt Hunt on May 10, 1907 in Mount Healthy, Ohio. Developing a musical interest at an early age, his mother played the banjo and his father played the violin. The teenager was a banjoist with a local band while he was attending college at Ohio State University where he majored in Electrical Engineering. During his college years, he switched from banjo to trombone. Graduating from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, he joined Jean Goldkette’s Orchestra in 1928.

Pee Wee was the co-founder and featured trombonist with the Casa Loma Orchestra, but he left the group in 1943 to work as a Hollywood radio disc jockey before joining the Merchant Marine near the end of World War II. He returned to the West Coast music scene in 1946 and his Twelfth Street Rag became a three million-selling number one hit in 1948.

Hunt was satirized as Pee Wee Runt and his All-Flea Dixieland Band in Tex Avery’s animated MGM cartoon Dixieland Droopy in 1954. His second major hit was Oh! in 1953, his second million-selling disc, which reached number three in the Billboard chart.

Trombonist Pee Wee Hunt passed away after a long illness at age 72, on June 22, 1979 in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

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Three Wishes

The Baroness inquired of Jimmy Wilkins as to what his three wishes would be and he responded by saying:

1. 1. “I wish my first wife would hurry up and give me a fu**ing divorce.”

   2. “I wish I could put my day gig down and play some music.”

   3. “I wish I was rich.”

*Excerpt from Three Wishes: An Intimate Look at Jazz Greats ~ Compiled and Photographed by Pannonica de Koenigswarter

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Billy Byers was born on William Mitchell Byers on May 1, 1927 in Los Angeles, California. He picked up the trombone and played with Karl Kiffle before serving in the Army in 1944–45. In the second half of the 1940s, he arranged and played trombone for Georgie Auld, Buddy Rich, Benny Goodman, Charlie Ventura, and Teddy Powell.

Following this period of playing, Byers composed for WMGM (AM) radio and television in New York City. During the mid-1950s, he was living and arranging in Paris, France where he also led a session as a leader, released as Jazz on the Left Bank, at this time. Later in the 1950s in Europe, he played with Harold Arlen (1959–1960) and with the Quincy Jones Orchestra. Becoming Quincy’s assistant at Mercury Records in the Sixties, he arranged for Count Basie albums.

He also led some recording sessions of Duke Ellington standards, toured Europe and Japan alongside Frank Sinatra in 1974, and had extensive credits arranging and conducting for film. Billy won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Orchestrations for the City of Angels.

He recorded with Count Basie, Bob Brookmeyer, Al Cohn, Billy Eckstine, Coleman Hawkins, J. J. Johnson, Lee Konitz, Jack McDuff, Gary McFarland, Hal McKusick, Carmen McRae, Joe Newman, Lalo Schifrin, Bud Shank, Charlie Shavers, Julius Watkins, Andy Williams, Cootie Williams, Kai Winding, and Frank Zappa. With four albums as a leader and another twenty-eight as a sideman, trombonist Billy Byers,  passed away in Malibu, California, on May 1, 1996.

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