Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Cliff Smalls was born Clifton Arnold on March 3, 1918 and was raised in Charleston, South Carolina. His father, a carpenter, performed piano and organ for Charleston’s Central Baptist Church. He taught Smalls classical music at an early age. He left home with the Carolina Cotton Pickers and also recorded with them, for instance, Off and on Blues and “Deed I Do, which he arranged and featured Cat Anderson in 1937 when he was 19.
With his career coinciding with the early years of bebop, from 1942 to 1946 he was a trombonist, arranger and also backup piano-player for band-leader and pianist Earl Hines, alongside Dizzie Gillespie and Charlie Parker. While in the Hines band he performed often during broadcasts seven nights a week on open mikes coast-to-coast across America. Hines also used Teddy Wilson, Jess Stacy and Nat “King” Cole as backup piano-players but Smalls was his favorite. He also played in the Jimmie Lunceford and Erskine Hawkins bands.
After the inevitable post-World War II breakup of the Hines big-band, Cliff went on to play and record in smaller ensembles with his former Earl Hines band colleagues, singer and band-leader Billy Eckstine, trombonist Bennie Green, saxophonist Earl Bostic and singer Sarah Vaughan. In 1949 he recorded with JJ Johnson and Charlie Rouse. He was the pianist on Earl Bostic’s 1950 hit Flamingo along with John Coltrane but had a serious automobile accident, with Earl Bostic, in 1951 and laid in bed all of 1952, till March of 1953.
Recovering, Smalls shifted his musical career to serve as music director/arranger for singers Eartha Kitt, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis, Jr., Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Clyde McPhatter, Roy Hamilton and Brook Benton. He recorded Bennie Green with Art Farmer in 1956 and was, for many years, a regular with Sy Oliver’s nine-piece Little Big-Band from 1974-1984, a regular stint in New York’s Rainbow Room.
In the 1970s he returned to jazz-recording, including four solo tracks for The Complete Master Jazz Piano Series in 1970, with Sy Oliver in 1973, Texas Twister with Buddy Tate in 1975, Swing and Things in 1976 and Caravan in France in 1978. In 1980 Smalls was featured playing piano in The Cotton Club, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Trombonist, pianist, conductor and arranger Cliff Smalls, who worked in the jazz, soul and rhythm & blues genres, passed away in 2008.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Paul William Rutherford was born on February 29, 1940 in Greenwich, South East London, England. He initially played saxophone but switched to trombone. During the Sixties, he taught at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
By 1970, Rutherford, guitarist Derek Bailey and bassist Barry Guy formed the improvising group Iskra 1903, sans drums and percussion, permitting the players to explore a range of textures and dynamics which set it apart from such other contemporary improvising ensembles. The group stayed together until 1973, recording a double album from Incus, later reissued with much bonus material on the 3-CD set Chapter One.
The group’s name is the Russian word for spark and was the title of the Iskra revolutionary newspaper edited by Lenin. The “1903” designation means 20th-century music for the trio. Another edition of the group included Evan Parker under Iskra 1904, and Rutherford at one point assembled a 12-piece ensemble called Iskra 1912.
The group was later revived with Philipp Wachsmann replacing Bailey, a phase of the group’s life that lasted from roughly 1977 to 1995, documenting their earlier work on Chapter Two (Emanem, 2006) and its final recordings were issued on Maya (Iskra 1903) and Emanem (Frankfurt 1991).
Rutherford went on to play with Globe Unity Orchestra, London Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, Centipede, the Mike Westbrook Orchestra, and the Orckestra, a merger of avant-rock group Henry Cow, the Mike Westbrook Brass Band and folk singer Frankie Armstrong. He also played a very small number of gigs with Soft Machine.
He is perhaps most famous for solo trombone improvisations. His album The Gentle Harm of the Bourgeoisie is a landmark recording in solo trombone and his 1983 trio album Gheim, recorded at the Bracknell Jazz Festival is another acclaimed work. A film soundtrack was separately released as Buzz Soundtrack.
A major player in the British free improvisation scene and part of the European free jazz scene, he was one of the first to use unorthodox playing techniques for improvisation. Trombonist Paul Rutherford, one of the first to use trombone multiphonics, i.e. he sang into the trombone and blew at the same time, passed away from cirrhosis of the liver and a ruptured aorta on August 5, 2007, at the age of 67.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Frederick L. Robinson was born in Memphis, Tennessee on February 20, 1901, and learned to play the trombone as a teenager. He studied music in Ohio before moving to Chicago, Illinois where he played in Carroll Dickerson’s orchestra. As a member of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, he played on recordings and continued working with both Dickerson and Armstrong until late 1929.
He went on to take a position in Edgar Hayes’s band and in the 1930s he worked extensively as a sideman, with Marion Hardy, Don Redman, Benny Carter, Charlie Turner, Fletcher Henderson, and Fats Waller. From 1939 to 1940 he was in Andy Kirk’s band, and in the later 1940s he worked with George James, Cab Calloway, and Sy Oliver. Early in the 1950s he was performing with Noble Sissle, but sometime after 1954 he became less active as a performer. Trombonist Fred Robinson passed away on April 11, 1984, in New York City.
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Three Wishes
Tom McIntosh had only one wish when asked by Pannonica:- “To be exactly as the Creator wished me to be. Then everything else would have to be alright.”
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Three Wishes
Nica asked Bernard McKinney of his three wishes and he told he they were:- “To be as fluent on my instrument as Bird was on his.”
- “To be making as much money as bird should have been making.”
- “To have a gig where I would be free to express myself.”
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