Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Arthur Stewart Farmer was born August 21, 1928, an hour before his twin brother, in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Their parents, James Arthur Farmer and Hazel Stewart Farmer, divorced when the boys were four, and their steelworker father was killed in a work accident not long after. He moved with his grandfather, grandmother, mother, brother and sister to Phoenix, Arizona when he was still four. He began playing piano while in elementary school, then moved on to bass tuba and violin before settling on cornet and then trumpet at the age of thirteen. He taught himself to read music and practiced his new main instrument, the trumpet.
Farmer and his brother moved to Los Angeles in 1945, attending the music-oriented Jefferson High School where they got music instruction and hung out with other developing musicians such as Sonny Criss, Ernie Andrews, Big Jay McNeely and Ed Thigpen. By sixteen he was playing trumpet professionally, performing in the Horace Henderson, Jimmy Mundy and Floyd Ray bands, among others.
Art left school to tour with a group led by Johnny Otis, but this job lasted for only four months, as Farmer’s lip gave out, becoming lacerated through underdevelopment of his technique. He then received technique training in New York, auditioned unsuccessfully for Dizzy Gillespie and returned to the West Coast in 1948 as a member of Jay McShann’s outfit.
Farmer played and toured with Benny Carter, Wardell Gray, Roy Porter and Gerald Wilson in the early 50s.He would record his first studio session with Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson, and gained great attention with his piece titled “Farmer’s Market”. He joined Lionel Hampton’s orchestra, toured Europe, became a member of Teddy Charles’ New Directions band, relocated to New York and in 1953, had his first recording session as leader for Prestige titled The Art Farmer Septet.
Over the course of his career he has worked with Quincy Jones, Gigi Gryce, Horace Silver, Gerry Mulligan, Thelonious Monk, and Charles Mingus, appeared on the Steve Allen show, Newport Jazz Festival, and two films – I Want To Live and The Subterraneans. As a member of Jazz at the Philharmonic he toured Europe again, that helped him gain an international reputation. He formed the Jazztet with Benny Golson, assited the careers of McCoy Tyner and Granchan Moncur, appeared in the photo Great Day In Harlem, recorded prolifically and led groups through the Sixties, and took a job in the orchestra pit on Broadway as jobs in jazz dried up.
He would settle in Vienna and divide his time between Europe and New york, revive the Jazztet with Golson, form a quintet with Clifford Jordan as a member, lost 30 pounds, quit smoking and drinking, avoided drugs, performed regularly, was awarded the Austrian Gold Medal of Merit, and was selected as a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 1999. A few months later on October 4, 1999 bebop trumpeter, flugelhorn and flumpet player and bandleader Art Farmer passed away of a heart attack at his New York Manhattan home. He was 71.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lyle Stephanovic was born Miko Stefanovic to Serbian émigré parents in Berlin, Germany on August 19, 1908. Better known in the jazz world as Spud Murphy, he grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah where he took the name of a childhood friend. Murphy studied clarinet and saxophone when young and took trumpet lessons from Red Nichol’s father.
He worked with Jimmy Joy in 1927-28 and with Ross Gorman and oboist Slim Lamar in 1928. He worked the early 1930s as saxophonist-arranger for Austin Wylie, Jan Garber, Mal Hallett and Joe Haynes, and then became a staff arranger for Benny Goodman from 1935 to 1937. At the same time he also contributed charts to the Casa Loma Orchestra, Isham Jones, Les Brown and many others.
From 1937 to 1940 Murphy led a big band and recorded for Decca and Bluebird Records in 1938-39. In the 1940s he relocated to Los Angeles where he did work in the studios and with film music, in addition to authoring and teaching the 1200-page “System of Horizontal Composition” also known as the “Equal Interval System”. The Equal Interval System is a modern system of music composition, developed by Murphy over a lifetime of research.
Spud recorded two jazz albums in the 1950s, but his later career was focused on classical and film music. In 2003, orchestra leader Dean Mora, a close friend of Murphy’s, recorded some two dozen of his arrangements in a tribute CD, “Goblin Market”.
Multi-instrumentalist, bandleader and arranger Spud Murphy died in Los Angeles, two weeks short of his 97th birthday on August 5, 2005.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Oscar Brashear was born August 18, 1944, in Chicago, Illinois. After studying at trumpet and music at DuSable High School and Wright Jr. College under John DeRoule, he worked briefly with Woody Herman before going on to join Count Basie from 1968-69, then returning to freelance in Chicago. There her worked with Sonny Stitt, Gene Ammons, Dexter Gordon and James Moody.
A move to Los Angeles in 1971, he worked with Gerald Wilson, Harold Land, Oliver Nelson, Shelly Manne, Quincy Jones, Horace Silver and Duke Pearson.
To date Brashear has contributed to more than five-dozen recording sessions with Teddy Edwards, Jimmy Smith, Sonny Rollins, Benny Golson, Bobby Hutcherson,, B.B. King, Bobby Bland, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Farrell, The Crusaders, McCoy Tyner, Gene Harris, Earth Wind and Fire, Carole King, Ry Cooder and Frank Sinatra among many others. He continues to perform and record as a session player.
Take A Dose On The Road
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Benny Bailey was born Ernest Harold Bailey on August 13, 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio. Having some training in piano and flute in his youth, he switched to trumpet, concentrating on the instrument while at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He was influenced by his hometown colleague, Tadd Dameron, seven years his elder, and subsequently had a significant influence on other prominent Cleveland musicians including Bill Hardman, Bobby Few, Albert Ayler, Frank Wright and Bob Cunningham.
In the early 1940s he worked with Bull Moose Jackson and Scatman Crothers. He later worked with Dizzy Gillespie, toured with Lionel Hampton and while on the European tour with Hampton, decided to stay and spend time in Sweden. This Swedish period saw him working with Harry Arnold’s big band. His preference for big bands over small groups associated him with several European big bands including the Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland Big Band.
For a while her worked with Quincy Jones returning to the States briefly in 1960. During this time, he worked with Tony “Big T” Lovano and recorded with Freddie Redd’s sextet invited to the studio as part of Freddie Redd’s sextet on the Blue Note Records album Redd’s Blues. Shortly thereafter, he returned to Europe first to Germany, and later to the Netherlands where he would settle permanently.
In 1969 he played on the Eddie Harris/Les McCann project Swiss Movement, recorded live at the Montreux Jazz Festival that included a memorable unrehearsed solo on “Compared To What”. Then in 1988 he worked with British clarinetist Tony Coe and kept producing albums until 2000 when he was in his mid-70s. He recorded 18 albums as a leader and another half-dozen as a sideman working with such luminaries as Eric Dolphy, Benny Golson, Randy Weston and Jimmy Witherspoon. Bebop and hard bop trumpeter Benny Bailey died at home in Amsterdam on April 14, 2005.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bill Coleman was born William Johnson Coleman on August 4, 1904 in Paris, Kentucky. In 1909 his family moved from Kentucky to Cincinnati and his first musical explorations were on clarinet and C melody saxophone, but he eventually settled on trumpet. He studied with Cincinnati trumpeter Theodore Carpenter and played in an amateur band led by trombonist J.C. Higginbotham. He began professional work in Cincinnati with bands led by Clarence Paige, Wesley Helvey and then Lloyd and Cecil Scott.
In 1927 he traveled to New York City and played with the Scott brothers to New York City, and continued to work with them until 1929, when he joined the orchestra of pianist Luis Russell. His first recording session was with Russell and he soloed on the tune “Feelin’ the Spirit”. Over the next couple of years he floated between Russell and Scott participating in recording sessions with each of them. By 1933 Bill was on his first European tour with Lucky Millinder, then in October returned to New York, worked with the bands of Benny Carter and Teddy Hill and sat in on a recording session with Fats Waller and laying down a number of memorable sides.
Coleman returned to Europe, played a residency in Paris with entertainer and vocalist Freddy Taylor, recorded with guitarist Django Reinhardt and made several freelance sessions under his own name. In late 1936 he traveled to Bombay, India playing with Leon Abbey’s Orchestra, then back to Paris to join saxophonist William T. Lewis. Returning to the States found him playing with Benny Carter, Teddy Wilson, Andy Kirk, Ellis Larkins, Mary Lou Williams, Sy Oliver, John Kirby, Lester Young, Billie Holiday and Coleman Hawkins.
Due to racial segregation Bill Coleman returned to France in 1948 and lived out his days there touring and performing in clubs and concert halls all over Europe. In 1974 he received the Ordre National du Merite and in 1978, he performed at the first Jazz in Marciac festival (along with tenor saxophonist Guy Lafitte, later becoming an honorary president of the festival organization.
Jazz trumpeter Bill Coleman passed away in Toulouse, France on August 24, 1981. His sound and phrasing were immediately recognizable with a style of the swing era musicians.
Dose A Day – Blues Away
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