Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Edward Otha South, born November 27, 1904 in Louisiana, Missouri, studied classical music in Budapest, Hungary, Paris, France and Chicago, Illinois. In the 1920s he was a member of jazz orchestras led by Charlie Elgar, Erskine Tate, and Jimmy Wade.
In the early 1930s Eddie led a band that included Milt Hinton and Everett Barksdale. In 1937 he recorded in Paris with Stephane Grappelli, Django Reinhardt, and Michel Warlop. In 1945 he worked for the studio band at WMGM in New York City. During the 1950s, he was a guest on television with Fran Allison and Dave Garroway and on WGN in Chicago.
South was among hundreds of artists whose material was destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire. On September 2, 2020, The New York Times consulted violinist Mazz Swift, who selected Eddie South’s performance of Black Gypsy for a feature on 5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the Violin.
Violinist Eddie South passed away on April 25, 1962 in Chicago, Illinois.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Otto Lington was born on August 5, 1903 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The son of a clown, he showed an early interest in music and got his first professional arrangement as a musician at 14 years old. During the 1920s and 1930s he led his own orchestras and held jobs as a leader of orchestras, such as Kai Ewans in Denmark , Jack Harris in Sweden and Bernard Etté in Germany.
He was one of the pioneers of jazz in Denmark and was nicknamed The White Negro. In 1929, Otto performed the first major jazz concert in Denmark, where, among other things, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue was performed.
For many years during 1951 ~ 1952 and 1958 ~ 1972 Lington led the orchestra at the Tivoli in Copenhagen, but also at many theaters, revue establishments and the like.
Violinist., composer, music publisher and bandleader Otto Lington, was a pioneer of jazz in Denmark, passed away on December 15, 1992 and interred at Søndermark Cemetery in Frederiksberg, Denmark.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jerry Gray was born Generoso Graziano on July 3, 1915 in East Boston, Massachusetts. His father was a music teacher who began teaching his son violin at age seven. As a teenager he studied with Emanuel Ondříček and was a soloist with the Boston Junior Symphony. By age eighteen he had formed a jazz band and was performing in Boston clubs.
1936 saw Gray joining the Artie Shaw orchestra as lead violinist and studied musical arrangement under Shaw. A year later he became a staff arranger. Over the next two years he penned some of the band’s most popular arrangements, including Carioca, Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise, Any Old Time, and Begin the Beguine. After the band broke up in 1939, Glenn Miller offered him a job arranging
In November 1939, Shaw suddenly broke up the band and moved to Mexico. On the next day, Glenn Miller called Gray and offered him a job arranging for his band. During his time with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Jerry produced many of the most recognizable recordings of the era, arranging Elmer’s Tune, Moonlight Cocktail, Perfidia, and Chattanooga Choo-Choo among others, while his compositions among numerous others included Sun Valley Jump, The Man In The Moon, Caribbean Clipper, Pennsylvania 6-5000, and his most famous song, A String of Pearls. Many of his compositions became best-sellers.
The war years saw Jerry in Miller’s unit and became chief arranger for Miller’s “Band of the Training Command”, better known today as the Glenn Miller Army Air Forces Orchestra. He was the full orchestra’s assistant conductor, and conducted the orchestra’s first concert in Paris after Miller’s airplane disappeared over the English Channel.
After the war for a while he did radio and studio work around Los Angeles, California, including leading the band on a radio show called Club 15 that featured Dick Haymes. In 1949 he accepted a request from Decca Records to lead his own Miller-esque orchestra that was called Jerry Gray and the Band of Today.
Violinist, arranger, composer, and leader of swing big bands Jerry Gray, who continued to lead the Fairmont Hotel band into the 1970s, passed away of a heart attack on August 10, 1976 in Dallas, Texas. He was 61.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Lutz Templin was born Ludwig Templin on June 18, 1901 in Düsseldorf, Germany. He started out playing violin and saxophone, and studied composition before finding work playing and arranging in dance ensembles.
From 1941 to 1949 Lutz led a big band in Germany which recorded extensively and was broadcast on German radio. This ensemble also recorded as Charlie and his Orchestra, doing arrangements of American jazz hits with propagandistic lyrics inserted. These were broadcast on Nazi radio stations and whether he was forced to do so is unknown.
Templin’s ensemble operated out of Berlin until 1943, when Allied bombing resulted in their relocation to Stuttgart. He remained there after the war and continued performing there for most of the rest of his life. Bandleader Lutz Templin passed away on March 7, 1973 in Stuttgart, Germany.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Hugh Marsh was born June 5, 1955 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and brought up in Ottawa, Ontario, where he learned to play the violin from the age of five. While in high school, when trying to play the saxophone he was led to exploring jazz, funk and rhythm and blues. With his father’s encouragement, he transferred these improvisation skills to the electric violin.
By 1978, Marsh was invited by jazz musician Moe Koffman to perform with him in a concert series at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. This led to gigs at top Toronto clubs and to perform with Canadian jazz musicians Doug Riley, Claude Ranger, Sonny Greenwich and Don Thompson. In 1979 he joined Bruce Cockburn, recording and touring with him.
In 1984, he recorded his independent album The Bear Walks and was distributed by Duke Street Records. He was joined by Doug Riley on keyboards, Peter Cardinali on bass, and Michael Brecker on tenor saxophone. His next recording ventured into other genres mixed with jazz. Since 1990 HUgh has recorded and toured with Celtic songstress Loreena McKennitt, contributing to six multi-platinum albums and a number of world tours. He has worked with Turkish Sufi deejay Mercan Dede, and has worked with Turkish artists Ihsan Ozgen, Kani Karaca, Goksel Baktagir and Ozcan Deniz.
Marsh would go on to collaborate on film scoring projects with composers Harry Gregson Williams and Don Rooke, and with Hans Zimmer on scores for Tears of the Sun and The Da Vinci Code.
In 2004 he joined clarinetist Don Byron’s new quartet “Swiftboat”, along with bassist Kermit Driscoll, and drummer Pheeroan Aklaff. He toured as a member of trumpeter Jon Hassell’s new quartet with bassist Peter Freeman and percussionist Steve Shehan. A four-time winner of the Jazz Report Award for violinist of the year and a three-time recipient of the National Jazz Award for violinist of the year, he has been nominated for a 2007 Juno Award in the best contemporary jazz album category.
Violinist Hugh Marsh continues to perform and record across genres, regularly performing with Rheostatics.
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