Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Charles Tolliver was born on March 6, 1942 in Jacksonville, Florida and while still a child received his first trumpet from his grandmother. He attended Howard University in the early Sixties as a pharmacy student, but when he decided to pursue music as a career he moved to New York City.
Coming to prominence in 1964, playing and recording on Jackie McLean’s Blue Note albums, seven years later he and Stanley Cowell founded Strata-East Records. The label was one of the pioneer jazz artist-owned and Tolliver released many albums and collaborations as a leader.
Following a long hiatus, he reemerged in the late 2000 decade, releasing two albums arranged for big band “With Love” that was nominated in 2007 for a Grammy award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble and “Emperor March: Live at the Blue Note” in 2009.
He has recorded with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Paul Chambers, Gary Bartz, Cecil McBee, Jimmy Hopps, Alvin Queen, Jon Faddis, Charles McPherson, Reggie Workman, John Hicks, Billy Harper, Robert Glasper, Max roach, Horace Silver and McCoy Tyner to name a few. Hard bop, post bop, modern big band, trumpeter Charles Tolliver continues to be a force in the jazz idiom.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
De De Pierce was born Joseph De Lacroix Pierce on February 18, 1904 in New Orleans, Louisiana. A trumpeter and cornetist, his first gig was with Arnold Dupas in 1924. During his time playing in New Orleans nightclubs he met Billie Pierce, who became his wife as well as a musical companion. They took residence as the house band at the Luthjens Dance Hall from the 1930s through the 1950s.
They released several albums together but stopped performing in the middle of the 1950s due to illness, which left De De Pierce blind. By 1959 they had returned to performing with De De touring with Ida Cox and playing with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band before further health problems ended his career.
On November 23, 1973, De De Pierce, best remembered for the songs “Peanut Vendor” and “Dippermouth Blues”, passed away at the age of 69.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Walter “Rosetta” Fuller was born on February 15, 1910 in Dyersburg, Tennessee, first learning to play the mellophone as a child before settling on trumpet. He played in a traveling medicine show from age 14, then played with Sammy Stewart in the late 1920s.
Fuller In 1930 he moved to Chicago and played with Irene Eadie and Her Vogue Vagabonds. In 1931 he began a longtime partnership with Earl Hines, remaining with him until 1937, when he left to join Horace Henderson’s ensemble. After a year with Henderson he returned to Hines’ band but once again left Hines in 1940 to form his own band, playing at the Grand Terrace in Chicago and the Radio Room in Los Angeles. Among his sidemen were Rozelle Claxton, Quinn Wilson, Omer Simeon and Gene Ammons.
Fuller got the nickname “Rosetta” based on his singing on the 1934 Hines recording of the song of the same name. He would lead bands on the West Coast for over a decade and play as a sideman for many years afterward. On April 20, 2003 trumpeter and vocalist Walter Fuller passed away in San Diego, California.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Don Goldie was born Donald Elliott Goldfield on February 5, 1930 in Newark, New Jersey. While still a young boy, Goldie had started learning the violin, the trumpet, and the piano, and he was good enough on the trumpet to earn a $1,000 scholarship to the New York Military Academy, later studying with the New York Philharmonic’s Nathan Prager.
After Army service he relocated to Miami, Florida in 1954 winning the Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scout Award. This was followed with a gig with Bobby Hackett in New York and subsequent engagements and recording work with Lester Lanin, Neal Hefti and Jackie Gleason.
Catching the attention of Jack Teagarden, he joined the band in 1959 and was a part of Teagarden’s first Roulette recording “At The Roundtable”. Over the next three years he distinguished himself as a soloist and sharing the vocals including a perfect impersonation of Louis Armstrong.
After leaving the group, Don led his own band for a time, but by the late ’60s was working with Jackie Gleason in Miami Beach, as well as playing jazz and pop gigs of his own. He cut albums for Chess Records’ Argo offshoot and the Verve label in the early ’60s, and in the 1970s reemerged with his own Jazz Forum label, for which he cut a string of eight LPs, each dedicated to the works of a single composer. He released his final LP, “Don Goldie’s Dangerous Jazz Band” on the Jazzology label in 1982.
With declining health, mostly associated with diabetes, he was forced into retirement and on November 25, 1995 trumpeter Don Goldie committed suicide.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Kid Thomas was born Thomas Valentine on February 3, 1896 in Reserve, Louisiana and moved to New Orleans in his youth. Gaining a reputation as a hot trumpet man in the early 1920s, he started his own band in 1926, basing himself in the New Orleans suburb of Algiers.
Unaffected by the influence of Louis Armstrong and later developments of jazz, Kid Thomas had perhaps the city’s longest lasting old-style traditional jazz dance band, continuing to play in his distinctive hot, bluesy sometimes percussive style. Although Valentine played popular tunes of the day even into the rock and roll era, he played everything in a style of a New Orleans dance hall of the early 1920s.
Kid Thomas Valentine started attracting a wider following with his first recordings in the 1950s and played regularly at Preservation Hall from the 1960s through the 1980s. He toured extensively for the Hall, including a Russian tour, as a guest at European clubs and festivals, and working with various local bands as well as his own. During the 1960s Kid Thomas recorded extensively for the Jazz Crusade and GBH labels both with his own band and with Big Bill Bissonnette’s Easy Riders Jazz Band. He made over 20 tours with the Easy Riders in the U.S. Northeast.
By the mid 1980s, as Thomas’s strength started to wane, Preservation Hall management brought in Wendell Brunious, who took over much of his trumpet duties, though Kid continued to lead the band. On June 18, 1987, trumpeter Kid Thomas Valentine passed away.
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