Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Billy Barber was born John William Barber on May 21, 1920 in Hornell, New York in 1920 and was known professionally as Bill or Billy. He started playing tuba in high school and studied at the Juilliard School of Music. After graduating, he travelled west to Kansas City, Missouri, where he played with the Kansas City Philharmonic and various ballet and theatre orchestras.
Joining the United States Army in 1942, he played in Patton’s 7th Army Band for three years. After the war, he started playing jazz, joining Claude Thornhill’s big band where he became friends with trombonist Al Langstaff, pianist Gil Evans and saxophone player Gerry Mulligan in 1947. Barber was one of the first tuba players to play in a modern jazz style, playing solos and participating in intricate ensemble pieces.
Becoming a founding member of Miles Davis’s nonet in 1949 in what became known as the Birth of the Cool recording sessions. He then worked in the theatre pit orchestras of The King and I, Paradiso, and the City Center Ballet. He joined up with Davis and Gil Evans in the late 1950s to record the albums Sketches of Spain, Miles Ahead and Porgy and Bess. Barber also played tuba on John Coltrane’s album Africa/Brass released in 1961.
Barber completed a master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music and became an elementary school music teacher at Copiague, New York. He continued to play where possible including with the Goldman Band. In 1992, he recorded and toured with a nonet led by Gerry Mulligan, reworking material from Birth of the Cool. From 1998 to 2004 he was part of The Seatbelts, New York musicians who played the music of the Japanese anime Cowboy Bebop.
He is considered by many to be the first person to play tuba in modern jazz. Tubist Billy Barber passed away on June 18, 2007. of heart failure in Bronxville, New York.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Edward Louis Smith was born on May 20, 1931 in Memphis, Tennessee. After graduating from Tennessee State University he attended graduate school at the University of Michigan. While studying at the University of Michigan, he played with visiting musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Thad Jones and Billy Mitchell.
He went on to play with Sonny Stitt, Count Basie, Al McKibbon, Cannonball Adderley, Percy Heath, Philly Joe Jones, Lou Donaldson, Donald Byrd, Kenny Dorham and Zoot Sims. Deciding to forgo being a full-time musician to take a job as a director of Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington High School, where he recorded two albums for Blue Note.
The first, Here Comes Louis Smith, originally recorded for the Boston-based Transition Records, featured Cannonball Adderley, then under contract to Mercury, played under the pseudonym Buckshot La Funke, Tommy Flanagan, Duke Jordan, Art Taylor and Doug Watkins. Replacing Donald Byrd for Horace Silver’s Live at the Newport 1958 set, and his playing was one of his best efforts and was described by one critic as monstrous.
He was a prolific composer and successful band director leaving Booker T. Washington to become director of the Jazz Ensemble at the University of Michigan and a teacher in Ann Arbor’s public school system. He would later record for the SteepleChase label.
Suffering a stroke in 2006, he enjoyed live jazz around the Detroit/Ann Arbor area, but did not return to performing. Trumpeter Louis Smith passed away on August 20, 2016 at age 85.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Walter Sylvester Page was born on February 9, 1900 in Gallatin, Missouri on to parents Edward and Blanche Page. Showing a love for music as a child, in 1910 with his mother moved to Kansas City, Missouri and exposed him to folksongs and spirituals, a critical foundation for developing his love of music. He gained his first musical experience as a bass drum and bass horn player in the brass bands of his neighborhood. Under the direction of Major N. Clark Smith, he took up the string bass in his time at Lincoln High School. During that time he also drew inspiration from bassist Wellman Braud, who he had the opportunity to see when he came to town with John Wycliffe.
After completing high school, he went on to study to become a music teacher at the University of Kansas at Lawrence. In college,Walter completed a three-year course in music in one year, in addition to taking a three-year course on gas engines. Between the years 1918 and 1923, he moonlighted as a tuba, bass saxophone, and string bass player with the Bennie Moten Orchestra. In 1923 he left Moten and began an engagement with Billy King’s Road Show, and with Jimmy Rushing and Count Basie, toured the Theater Owners’ Booking Association (TOBA) circuit across the United States.
Walter Page and the Blue Devils was a territory band founded in 1925, based out of the Oklahoma City~Wichita, Kansas area that included Basie, Rushing, Buster Smith, Lester Young, and Hot Lips Page. By 1929 the Blue Devils faced defections of key players, booking problems and musicians’ union conflict, he relinquished control to James Simpson and joined Moten’s band in 1931, staying until 1934. After his second stint with Moten, he moved to St. Louis, Missouri to play with the Jeter-Pillars band. Following the death of Moten in 1935, however, Basie took over the former Moten Band, which Page rejoined.
Staying with the Count Basie Orchestra from 1935 to 1942, Walter was an integral part of what came to be called the “All-American Rhythm Section. Together with drummer Jo Jones, guitarist Freddie Green, and pianist Basie, the rhythm section pioneered the “Basie Sound”, a style in which Page, as bass player, clearly established the beat, allowing his band mates to complement more freely. Until this point, the rhythm of a jazz band was traditionally felt in the pianist’s left hand and the kick of the bass drum on all four beats. In a sense, the classic Basie rhythm section were liberators.
After his first departure from the Count Basie Orchestra, Walter worked with various small groups around Kansas City. He returned to the Basie Band in 1946 for three more years. Bassist and multi-instrumentalist Walter Page, best known for his groundbreaking work with Walter Page’s Blue Devils and the Count Basie Orchestra, passed away of kidney ailment and pneumonia at Bellevue Hospital on December 20, 1957 in New York City.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Bob Stewart was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota on February 3, 1945. He received his Bachelor of Music Education degree from the Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts and his master’s degree in education from Lehman College Graduate School.
Stewart taught music in Pennsylvania public schools and at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in New York City. He is now a professor at the Juilliard School and is a distinguished lecturer at Lehman College.
Stewart has toured and recorded with such artists as Charles Mingus, Gil Evans, Carla Bley, Muhal Richard Abrams, David Murray, Taj Mahal, Dizzy Gillespie, McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard, Don Cherry, Nicholas Payton, Wynton Marsalis, Charlie Haden, Lester Bowie, Bill Frisell and many others in the United States, Europe, and Eastern Asia.
He was a frequent collaborator with saxophonist Arthur Blythe from the 1970s into the early 2000s, often taking the place of the string bass that traditionally supports a jazz ensemble. In their review of Blythe’s album Lenox Avenue Breakdown, the editors of The Penguin Guide to Jazz called Stewart’s title track solo “one of the few genuinely important tuba statements in jazz. Tubist Bob Stewart continues to be a part of the jazz scene.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jim Lanigan was born on January 30, 1902 in Chicago, Illinois. Learning piano and violin as a child, he played piano and drums in the Austin High School Blue Friars before specializing on bass and tuba.
A member of the Austin High Gang, he played with Husk O’Hare in1925), the Mound City Blue Blowers and Art Kassel from 1926 to 1927, the Chicago Rhythm Kings, the Jungle Kings, and the 1927 McKenzie and Condon’s Chicagoans recordings.
From 1927 to 1931 he was with Ted Fio Rito and worked in orchestras for radio, including NBC Chicago. Performing sideman duties in the 1930s and 1940s with Jimmy McPartland, Bud Jacobson’s Jungle Kings, Bud Freeman, and Danny Alvin, he began to concentrate more on music outside of jazz at that time. He played with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1937 to 1948, and did extensive work as a studio musician.
Bassist and tubist Jim Lanigan, who never recorded as a leader, played reunion gigs for the Austin High Gang, passed away on April 9, 1983.
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