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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Three Wishes

Art Farmer had but one response to Pannonica’s inquiry of three wishes:

1. 1. “There is only one: to like myself.”

*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…

Bobby Bryant was born on May 19, 1934 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and played saxophone in his youth before moving on to the trumpet and then the flugelhorn. A move to Chicago, Illinois in 1952, where he studied at the Cosmopolitan School of Music until 1957. Remaining until 1960, he played with Red Saunders, Billy Williams, and other ensembles.

He relocated to New York City in 1960 and then Los Angeles, California in 1961, and became a fixture on the West Coast jazz scene. Leading his own groups, in addition, Bobby played with Vic Damone, Charles Mingus, Oliver Nelson, Gerald Wilson, Frank Capp/Nat Pierce, and the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra. He also worked as a studio musician and a music educator.

His most famous solo was in the song “L.O.V.E” recorded with Nat King Cole in 1964. He recorded five albums as a leader, arranged two albums for Peggy Lee in 1969 and Gene Ammons in 1971, and more than two-dozen with Brass Fever, Earth, Wind & Fire, Clare Fischer, Benny Golson, Eddie Harris Richard “Groove” Holmes, Quincy Jones, Stan Kenton, B. B. King, Blue Mitchell, Oliver Nelson, Lalo Schifrin, Horace Silver, The Three Sounds, Gerald Wilson, and Jimmy Witherspoon.

Having sustained health problems which reduced his activity to part-time, trumpeter and flugelhornist Bobby Bryant passed away in Los Angeles of a heart attack at the age of 64 on June 10, 1998.

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