Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Helen Merrill was born Jelena Ana Milcetic on July 21, 1930 in New York City to Croatian immigrants. The internationally renowned jazz vocalist began singing in jazz clubs in the Bronx at the age of fourteen. By the time she was sixteen, she had taken up music full time and in 1952 made her recording debut when asked to sing “A Cigarette For Company” with the Earl Hines Band that was released on their Xanadu album.

As a result of this exposure she received two subsequent singles recorded for Roost Records and was then signed by Mercury for their new Emarcy label. In 1954, she recorded her first and one of her most acclaimed LP simply titled “Helen Merrill” featuring legendary jazz trumpeter Clifford Brown and bassist/cellist Oscar Pettiford, among others. The album was produced and arranged by Quincy Jones, who was then just twenty-one years old. The success of the album got her signed to an additional four-album contract with Mercury.

Her follow-up 1956 album Dream of You arranged by Gil Evans was the precursor to the musical foundations for his Miles Davis years. By the 60s she was in Europe touring and enjoying greater commercial success than in the States. Developing a following in Japan that remains strong to this day, she not only recorded in Japan, Merrill became involved in producing albums for Trio Records and hosting a show on a Tokyo radio station.

Helen returned to the U.S. in 1972 and has continued recording and regular touring since then. Her later career has seen her experiment in different music genres, recording a bossa nova album, a Christmas album a Rodgers and Hammerstein album, as well as resurrecting “Dream of You” in 1987 with fresh arrangements titled “Collaboration” and co-producing “Billy Eckstine Sings With Benny Carter” and singing on duet on two ballads. By 1995 she recorded “Brownie: Homage to Clifford Brown in tribute to the late trumpeter.

Helen Merrill’s career has spanned six decades with no fade in her popularity and has recorded and performed with some of the most notable figures in the American jazz scene such as Chet Baker, San Getz and Romano Mussolini, among many, many others.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

William Clarence Eckstine was born on July 8, 1914 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania but grew up in Washington, DC of Prussian and African American heritage. He began singing at the age of seven, entering amateur talent shows while dreaming of a football career that was sidelined when he broke his collarbone. Focusing on music he worked his way west to Chicago, joining Earl Hines’ Grand Terrace Orchestra as vocalist and occasionally trumpeter from1939 – 1943. During his tenure he  made a name for himself through the Hines band’s radio shows with such jukebox hits as “Stormy Monday Blues” and his own “Jelly Jelly”.

Eckstine formed the first bop big band in 1944 making it a fountainhead for young musicians who would reshape jazz by the end of the decade, including Dizzy Gillespie, Dexter Gordon, Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Charlie Parker, Fats Navarro and Sarah Vaughn, with Tadd Dameron and Gil Fuller were among the band’s arrangers. Billy hit the charts often during the mid-’40s, with Top Ten entries including “A Cottage For Sale” and “Prisoner of Love”.

Breaking down barriers throughout the Forties as a leader of the original bop big band and as the first romantic black male in popular music, Mr. B, as he was affectionately known, went solo in 1947. His seamless transition to string-filled balladry saw him recording more than a dozen hits by the end of the decade and winning numerous awards from Esquire, Down Beat and Metronome magazines. His 1950 appearance at New York’s Paramount Theatre greatly surpassed Sinatra’s audience draw at the same venue.

Over the course of the next two decades Billy appeared on every major television variety show from Ed Sullivan to Nat King Cole, Jack Paar, Steve Allen, Joey Bishop, Flip Wilson and Playboy After Dark. After a long series of hit tunes and recordings by the 70’s Billy’s recordings came sparingly although he still performed before adoring audiences throughout the world. He made his final Grammy-nominated recording singing with Benny Carter in 1986.

Billy Eckstine, vocalist, bandleader, trumpeter, valve trombonist and guitarist passed away on March 8, 1993, at age 78, in his hometown of Pittsburgh.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Della Reese was born Delloreese Patricia Early on July 6, 1931 in Detroit, Michigan to an African-American steelworker and Cherokee cook. At age 6 she began singing in church becoming an avid Gospel singer. Her mother would take her to the movies on weekends to see the portrayals of glamorous life by Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and Lena Horne, whereupon afterwards she would act out scenes from each movie. By 1944 she was directing the young people’s choir, nurturing her acting and her obvious musical talent.

She was often chosen on radio, as a regular singer and by age thirteen she was hired to sing with Mahalia Jackson’s Gospel group. Upon entering Cass Technical High School in Detroit, attending with Edna Rae Gillooly, later known as movie star Ellen Burstyn, Reese was a brilliant, no-nonsense student. She continued touring with Mahalia and with higher grades she was the first in her family to graduate from high school in 1947, at only 15.

After graduation Della formed her own gospel group called the Meditation Singers but her mother’s death and father’s illness interrupted her singing and education at Wayne State University. Taking odd jobs as a truck driver, dental receptionist and even elevator operator she continued to perform in clubs but realizing her name was too long for the marquee, shortened it to Della Reese.

Della’s career has spanned more than half a century and during that time she has taken her gospel roots and added jazz, pop and R&B. Her string of singles topped or landed in the top 10 of all the music charts at one time or another. She was voted Most Promising Singer in 1957 by Billboard, Cashbox and other magazines, following with her biggest hit at the time “Don’t You Know?” that would become her early career signature song.

She has received four Grammy nominations, recorded numerous albums, played Vegas for nine years, toured worldwide, ventured into acting on stage, film and television successfully with “Touched By An Angel”, has been a game show panelist, talk show host, spokeswoman for the American Diabetes Association, has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and is an ordained minister.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born June 30, 1917 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Descended from African, European and Native American heritage, her family belonged to what W.E.B. DuBois called “The Talented Tenth”, the upper stratum of middle-class, well-educated blacks.

Her father, Edwin “Teddy” Horne, a numbers kingpin, left the family when she was three and moved to the Hill District in Pittsburgh while her actress mother, Edna Scottron, travelled extensively with a black theatre troupe leaving Lena to be mainly raised by her grandparents. Throughout her formative years she travelled with her mother, lived in Fort Valley and Atlanta, Georgia with a final move back to New York in her teens.

 Horne joined the mike chorus of the Cotton Club at 16 becoming a nightclub performer before moving to Hollywood, where she had small parts in numerous movies, and more substantial parts in the films “Cabin in the Sky” and “Stormy Weather. Due to the Red Scare and her left-leaning political views, Horne found herself blacklisted and unable to get work in Hollywood.

Returning to her roots as a nightclub performer, Horne took part in the March of Washington in August 1963, and continued to work as a performer, both in nightclubs and on television, while releasing well-received record albums. She announced her retirement in March 1980, but the next year starred in a one-woman show, “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music”, which ran for more than three hundred performances on Broadway and earned her numerous awards and accolades. She continued recording and performing sporadically into the 1990s, disappearing from the public eye in 2000. Lena Horne died on May 9, 2010 in New York City of heart failure.

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Daily Dose Of Jazz…

Tierney Sutton was born in Omaha, Nebraska on June 28, 1963. A choirgirl as a child, she attended Nicolet High School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She matriculated through Wesleyan University where she was introduced to jazz and then went on to Berklee College of Music. The singer took a semi-finalist slot in 1998 in the Thelonious Monk Jazz Vocal Competition, and received an Indie Award nomination for Best Jazz Vocal Album for her 1999 debut recording.

Versatile in the studio and on stage, the three-time Grammy Nominee for “Best Jazz Vocal Album”, has fronted the Tierney Sutton Band for the past 16 years. The group is an incorporated unit that makes all musical and business decisions together, tours worldwide and has played such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall, the Hollywood Bowl and Jazz at Lincoln Center.

She has lent her voice to films like The Cooler with Alec Baldwin and William H. Macy; Twisted with Samuel L. Jackson, Andy Garcia and Ashley Judd; and an indie titled Blue In Green. Her voice has been heard on commercials for BMW, Dodge, J.C. Penny and Coca-Cola. Tierney has also been performing in a trio format with flautist Hubert Laws and guitarist Larry Koonse.

Sutton also wears an educator’s hat having taught in the Jazz Studies Department at the University of Southern California for 11 years and since 2008 has been the Vocal Department Chair at Los Angeles Music Academy in Pasadena, California. She continues to give workshops and clinics throughout the world.

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