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Jesse Drakes was born October 22, 1924 in New York City. He hung out at Minton’s Playhouse in his youth and attended Juilliard in the 1940s. In the 1940s he played with Al Cooper’s Savoy Sultans, Sid Catlett, J.C. Heard, Edie Heywood, Deke Watson, and Sarah Vaughan. He worked extensively with Lester Young, the pair collaborated on and off between 1948 and 1956.
During this period Drakes played with Harry Belafonte, Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt, Louie Bellson and Duke Ellington. By the late 1950s he was playing less jazz and more R&B music, touring with King Curtis and playing at the Motown studios in the 1960s. From 1969 he was based out of New York, leading dance ensembles and singing.
Trumpeter Jesse Drakes, who never recorded as a leader, was found dead in his apartment in New York City on May 1, 2010, so his actual date of death is therefore unknown.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Don Elliott was born October 21, 1926 in Somerville, New Jersey and played mellophone in his high school band and played trumpet for an army band. After study at the University of Miami he added vibraphone to the list and recorded with Terry Gibbs and Buddy Rich before forming his own band.
From 1953 to 1960 he won the DownBeat readers poll several times for miscellaneous instrument-mellophone. Known as the “Human Instrument”, Don additionally performed jazz as a vocalist, trombonist, flugelhornist and percussionist. He pioneered the art of multitrack recording, composed countless prize-winning advertising jingles, prepared film scores, and built a thriving production company.
Elliott scored several Broadway productions including James Thurber’s The Beast in Me and A Thurber Carnival, in the latter of which he performed with his quartet. He also provided one of the voices for the novelty jazz duo the Nutty Squirrels. He lent his vocal talents to such motion picture soundtracks as The Getaway starring Steve McQueen, $ (Dollars) starring Warren Beatty, and The Hot Rock starring Robert Redford, as well as composing the score to The Happy Hooker starring Lynn Redgrave.
Elliott owned and operated one of the very first multitrack recording studios in New York City and in Weston, Connecticut and recorded over 60 albums and 5,000 advertising jingles throughout his career. A longtime associate of Quincy Jones, he contributed vocal work to many of Jones’ film scores. As sideman he performed and recorded with Phil Bodner, Miles Davis, Lee Konitz, Jackie McLean, Paul Desmond, Billy Taylor, Billy Eckstine, Bill Evans, Urbie Green, Michel Legrand, George Shearing, Marty Bell, Bob Corwin, Louis Bellson and Mundell Lowe among others.
Trumpeter, vibraphonist, vocalist, and mellophone player Don Elliott, whose recording Calypso Jazz is considered by some jazz enthusiasts to be one of the definitive calypso jazz albums, passed away of cancer on July 5, 1984 in Weston, Connecticut.
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Noël Chiboust was born on October 14, 1909 in Thorigny-sur-Marne , Département Seine-et-Marne, France. He began his career as a violinist with Ray Ventura and during the early Thirties played trumpet in the Michel Warlop Orchestra. By 1936 he was involved in the concert series la semaine à Paris, by the Hot Club de France. At this time in his career he also joined the André Ekyan Orchestra until 1938, then played in the Swing Band of Philippe Brun followed by an early 1940s stint with Alix Combelle.
Around the mid 1930s he recorded with Django Reinhardt , Stéphane Grappelli , Bill Coleman and Coleman Hawkins, joined Eddie Brunner in 1938 at Cabaret Bagatelle. The late 1930s saw him giving up the trumpet and joining the tenor saxophone and clarinet sections when he joined the Marcel Bianchi Orchestra.
From 1940 he recorded under his own name for the French label Swing releasing a few 78s. Starting in 1944 he performed with an orchestral cast including Hubert Rostaing, and with Jack Diéval and Lucien Simoen at Club Schubert. From 1947 to 1950 he had an engagement at Cabaret le Drap d’Or.
He turned his attention to popular music as well as the rock and roll to and by 1959 released several EPs and singles for Polydor Records with songs like Telstar, Dynamite Charleston and Yes Sir That’s My Baby.
Trumpeter, tenor saxophonist, clarinetist, arranger, composer and band leader in the field the swing and popular music era Noël Chiboust passed away on January 17, 1994.
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Leon Merian was born Vahan Leon Megerdichian on September 17, 1923 in Braintree, Massachusetts to Armenian immigrants and raised in Boston’s struggling Roxbury district. Showing an early interest in music, his first trumpet was a Christmas present at age 10 that led to taking lessons and by sixteen he was playing with the school band. Before long he was sitting in with musicians in local Boston clubs while still in high school in the late Thirties. He passed on a physics scholarship to pursue his music.
Early in his career, a record producer persuaded him to legally shorten his last name to Merian and he had already stopped using his first name as a child to avoid being teased. One of the first white musicians to play with a black band in the 1940s, he was hired by Lucky Millinder in 1942 at the age of 19 Charlie Shavers and Sonny Stitt and Gene Krupa and as the band toured the South got his initial introduction to racial discrimination. Leon recorded and performed with Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Elvis Presley, Dizzy Gillespie and other notable singers and jazz bands during a career of big bands, recording studios, major network orchestras, Broadway orchestra pits and nightclubs.
Merian played on the soundtracks of the Oscar-winning movies The Godfather and Ben-Hur, performed in Cole Porter’s Broadway musical Silk Stockings starring Rosalind Russell, and worked with the studio orchestras at ABC, CBS and NBC.
After serving as department chairman of foreign languages at New Rochelle High School in New York and at Endicott College in Beverly, Massachusetts, Merian went into the Milton, Massachusetts public schools, where he was chairman of the foreign languages department until he retired in 1982 to concentrate on music. Moving south to Florida in the late Eighties he led a 14-piece Leon Merian Big Band and his smaller Leon Merian Quintet in clubs and concert performing one his last at the age of 80.
Trumpeter, bandleader and educator Leon Merian, whose career spanned some sixty years, passed away on August 15, 2007 due to complications from diabetes.
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Conny Jackel was born Horst Konrad Jackel on August 30, 1931 in Offenbach am Main, Germany. He first worked as a steel fitter, then in 1951 he played at the conservatory and in the clubs of the US Army in France, the Netherlands and Germany in 1952. In 1955 he became a member of Helmut Brandt Combo, contributing to their success.
By 1959 Jackel had joined the Harald Banter Band in Cologne playing demanding arrangements for two years. In 1961 he joined the orchestra of Erwin Lehn in Stuttgart, where he also worked with Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Dizzy Gillespie and Frank Sinatra on stage.
From 1964 to 1969 he was a member of the Albert Mangelsdorff led Jazz Ensemble of Hessischer Rundfunk . From 1967 Conny played first trumpet in the Dance Orchestra of Hessischer Rundfunk under Willy Berking and the HR Big Band headed by Heinz Schönberger . In addition, he performed with Joki Friendand, Rudi Sehring, Attila Zoller and Charly Antolini. He recorded with Gustl Mayers Swing All Stars and the trio of Manfred Kullmann . Then he was a member of the jazz band Hanauer Sugarfoot Stompers and played with other traditional bands of the region such as the Phoenix Jazz Band.
In 1999 a bout with cancer caused Jackel to have his lower jaw removed forcing him to give up playing trumpet. Occasionally he would play drums as also in the Book Readers active as a drummer. For his contributions to jazz, he was inducted into the Knights of Ronneburg on September 9, 2006.
Trumpeter and flugelhornist Conny Jackel passed away after a long illness and the consequences of an operation on April 28, 2008 in Bad Nauheim, Germany.
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