Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Hank Shaw was born Henry Shalofsky on June 23, 1926 in London, England and played with Teddy Foster’s band during World War II at the age of 15. In the latter half of the decade, he played in London with Oscar Rabin, Frank Weir, and Tommy Sampson, then switched permanently to playing bebop music in 1946 after hearing Dizzy Gillespie.
A visit to the United States in 1947 with close friend and fellow pioneer bebopper alto saxophonist Freddy Syer, preceded their move to Canada after he was unable to secure a work permit. There they played with Oscar Peterson and Maynard Ferguson before returning to England in 1948. He was one of the early Club Eleven players, along with Ronnie Scott, John Dankworth, Lennie Bush, and others. He also played with many of these musicians on the recordings of Alan Dean’s Beboppers.
After Club Eleven shuttered, Shaw played with Vic Lewis and toured Europe with Cab Kaye, then joined Jack Parnell’s ensemble in 1953 and Ronnie Scott’s nonet in 1954. He went on to play regularly both live and as a session musician for many British jazz musicians over the course of the next twenty or so years, working with Joe Harriott, Tony Crombie, Don Rendell, Tony Kinsey, Stan Tracey, Bill Le Sage, and others.
In the Sixties, he led a quartet at the 100 Club and played in the Bebop Preservation Society and the John Burch Quartet for over two decades each. Retiring from music due to ill health in the late 1990s, trumpeter Hank Shaw passed away on October 26, 2006 in Kent, four months past his 80th birthday.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Paul Mares was born on June 15, 1900 in New Orleans, Louisiana and was self-taught on the cornet and trumpet and picked up his early experience laying the riverboat Capitol playing with the Tom Brown Band. Leaving his hometown in 1919 he moved to Chicago, Illinois and worked with Ragbaby Stevens before freelancing around the city.
In 1921 Paul formed the Friars Society Orchestra, a group that prominently featured trombonist George Brunies and clarinetist Leon Rappolo. From 1922-23, the band recorded for Gennett Records and became one of the best-regarded bands in the city. The band, which broke up in 1924, included up-and-coming jazz musicians, including the members of the Austin High School Gang and Bix Beiderbecke.
Mares who was influenced by King Oliver, played in New York for a short time, went back to New Orleans the following year and led a couple more sessions. In 1934, a move to Chicago the following year had him making a brief comeback and leading a recording session that resulted in four titles before he retired again.
By 1935 Mares he was playing trumpet and fronting a recording session with his band called Paul Mares and his Friars Society Orchestra. The name referred to the Friar’s Inn club where the Rhythm Kings had first played in Chicago. The 1935 band included the white New Orleanian and N.O.R.K. veteran Santo Pecora on trombone, the black New Orleanian Omar Simeon on clarinet and the Chicagoan altoist Boyce Brown, as well as George Wettling on drums, pianist Jess Stacey, bassist Pat Pattison, and guitarist Marvin Saxbe.
He then largely retired from playing to work in the family fur business, and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings passed into history. He ran a barbeque restaurant, did defense plant work during World War II, and returned to music in 1945, leading a final band from 1945-48 that unfortunately never recorded. Cornetist and trumpeter Paul Mares passed away on August 18, 1949 in Chicago.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Rubin “Zeke” Zarchy was born on June 12, 1915 in New York City. He first learned the violin, but after a stint as a bugler with his Boy Scout troop, he switched permanently to trumpet while in his early teens.
In 1935 Zarchy was working with the Joe Haymes Orchestra, followed by Benny Goodman, and then Artie Shaw. He went on to work through the end of the decade with Bob Crosby and Red Norvo, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller.
Between 1942 and 1945 he played in US Army bands: he was part of what became Miller’s Army Air Force Band (officially, the 418th Army Band), playing lead trumpet as Master First Sergeant. Zeke’s trumpet can be heard on recordings as Benny Goodman’s Bugle Call Rag, Glenn Miller’s Moonlight Cocktail, and Bob Crosby’s South Rampart Street Parade.
After the war, Frank Sinatra invited Zarchy to move to Los Angeles, California where he became a first-call studio musician. He played on numerous recordings, including those led by Boyd Raeburn, Jerry Gray, Sarah Vaughan, and Frank Capp. He appeared in film in The Glenn Miller Story in 1954.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Zeke played in the CBS house bands of several television variety shows, including The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Danny Kaye Show and The Jonathan Winters Show, and was a member of the NBC Staff Orchestras in New York and Los Angeles.
In his later years, he made many music tours of Europe, South America, and Australia, as well as thirty-two concert trips to Japan. He tutored several young trumpet players who became successful performers and studio musicians. Trumpeter Zeke Zarchy passed away in Irvine, California, on April 11, 2009.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
John Joseph Harold Holmes, better known in the music world as Johnny was born in Montreal, Canada on June 8, 1916. He began playing cornet at 10 and studied briefly with C. Van Camp. After playing trumpet for a year in 1940 in a co-operative band, the Esquires, he took over its leadership from 1941 to 19.50.
After establishing the Johnny Holmes Orchestra they played Saturday nights at Victoria Hall in Montreal that was broadcast on CBC radio. They occasionally toured in Quebec and Ontario. One of Montreal’s leading dance bands of the day, it boasted a healthy jazz quotient and benefited from Holmes’ ability to identify talented younger musicians. At various times his sidemen included Nick Ayoub, Al Baculis, Percy and Maynard Ferguson, pianist Bud Hayward, Art Morrow, and Oscar Peterson. Lorraine McAllister and Sheila Graham, in turn, sang with the band.
Holmes retired from music from 1951 to 1959 but was heard 1959 to 1969 on several CBC radio shows including The Johnny Holmes Show, Broadway Holiday, among others. His orchestras made several broadcast recordings between 1966 and 1973 for the CBC’s LM series and continued to perform periodically until his retirement from music in 1978. One edition without saxophones took the name Brass Therapy.
He wrote numerous arrangements for his orchestra and his radio shows, more than 40 songs, and such extended works as The Fair City, a jazz suite dedicated to Expo 67. Trumpeter, bandleader, arranger, and composer Johnny Holmes, who has no known recording on line, passed away on June 11, 1989 in Montreal.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Shake Keane was born Ellsworth McGranahan Keane on May 30, 1927 in Kingstown, St. Vincent, West Indies into a family that loved music and books. He attended Kingstown Methodist School and St. Vincent Grammar School. He was taught to play the trumpet by his father Charles and gave his first public recital at the age of six. When he was 14 years old, Keane led a musical band made up of his brothers. In the 1940s, with his mother Dorcas working to raise six children, the teenager joined one of the island’s leading bands, Ted Lawrence and His Silvertone Orchestra.
During his early adulthood in St. Vincent, his principal interest was literature, rather than the music for which he would become better known. Dubbed “Shakespeare” by his school friends, on account of his love of prose and poetry. This nickname was subsequently shortened to “Shake”, which name he came to use throughout his adult life. He published two books of poetry in the early Fifties L’Oubili and Ixion, while still in St. Vincent.
Emigrating to Great Britain in 1952 he worked on BBC Radio’s Caribbean Voices, reading poetry and interviewing fellow writers and musicians. He also began playing the trumpet in London nightclubs, working in a number of styles including cabaret, highlife, soca, mento, calypso, and jazz. From 1959 he committed more fully to jazz, spending six years as a member of pioneering alto saxophonist Joe Harriott’s band. The group was the first in Europe and one of the first worldwide, to play free jazz, and Keane contributed mightily to the band’s artistic success, thanks to his fleet and powerful improvisatory skills on trumpet and flugelhorn.
He also made a small handful of records under his own name, but these were usually light jazz. In 1966 he left Britain to settle in Germany and became a featured soloist with the Kurt Edelhagen Radio Orchestra, and also joined the Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland Big Band.
Setting aside his musical career, he returned to St. Vincent in 1972 taking up a government position as director of culture, where he remained in the post until 1975. He then became an educator as his main profession, while continuing to write poetry. In the early 1980s, Shake moved to New York City, settling the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn which became his base but found a second home in Norway.
He returned full-time to music in 1989 when he rejoined Michael Garrick and his old bandmates Coleridge Goode and Bobby Orr for a tour in honor of Joe Harriott. In 1991 Keane appeared in a BBC Arena documentary with the Jamaican poet Linton Kwesi Johnson.
In the 1990s, he remained based in Brooklyn, but found a second home in Norway, where he worked most extensively. He contributed music to Norwegian television and stage productions for the next few years, also touring the country playing jazz. It was while preparing for one such tour that he became ill, and subsequently, trumpeter and poet Shake Keane passed away from stomach cancer on November 11, 1997 in Oslo, Norway.
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