Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Fred Stone was born on September 9, 1935 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and was the son of saxophonist Archie Stone. His initial musical studies were with his father. At the age of 14 he began studying the trumpet with Donald Reinhardt in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and spent every summer in that city from 1950–1955. At home he studied music theory and music composition with Gordon Delamont and John Weinzweig.
Commencing his performance career in 1951 at the age of 16 he played in Benny Louis’s big band. From 1955 to 1967 he was a trumpeter in various orchestras related to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, including the CBC Symphony Orchestra. During the late 1950s and 1960s he performed widely as a concert soloist with orchestras throughout North America. He was an active performer as a jazz musician, playing regularly with Ron Collier , Phil Nimmons , the Boss Brass, and Lighthouse and he toured North America and Europe with the Duke Ellington Orchestra.
Returning to Toronto in 1971, Stone became highly involved with his work as a teacher, and operated his own private studio where he taught improvisational theory and music composition. His performance career virtually ceased for the remainder of the decade, although he remained active as a composer. Between 1971 and 1983 he mainly focused on his work as a composer and teacher, making only periodic public performances, and often with ensembles composed largely of his students.
In 1984 he formed Freddie’s Band, a jazz ensemble in residence at The Music Gallery in Toronto. Flugelhornist, trumpeter, pianist, composer, writer, and music educator Fred Stone recorded eleven albums as a sideman before he transitioned on December 10, 1986.
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Three Wishes
From the Notes of Nica de Koenigswarter:
You can quote Satchmo as saying:
“Health is wealth! If I were sick, and I wanted to borrow a dime, d’you think that cat would cross the street to offer it to me? No, sir! I’d have to have my health to go and get it from him.”
“And people would never get sick if they didn’t get constipated. Why, I’ve never had an operation in my life, because I never let myself get constipated.”
*Excerpt from Three Wishes: An Intimate Look at Jazz Greats ~ Compiled and Photographed by Pannonica de Koenigswarter
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Sy Johnson was born on April 15, 1930 in New Haven, Connecticut and learned to play the piano in his youth. He first performed in New York City with Charles Mingus at the jazz club Showplace, with Booker Ervin on tenor, Ted Curson on trumpet, Dannie Richmond on drums, and Mingus on bass. and on his first night with Mingus, Eric Dolphy performed on alto, bass clarinet, and flute.
In 1971, eleven years later, Mingus gave Johnson Let My Children Hear Music to arrange, which featured two Mingus pieces, Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife (Are Some Jiveass Slippers) and Don’t Be Afraid, the Clowns Afraid Too. The album’s emergence was heralded with a live concert, Mingus And Friends At Philharmonic Hall, also arranged by Johnson and released as an album.
Performing We Did It on Soul Train in 1973 and continued to work with Mingus until his death from Lou Gehrig’s disease in 1979. Mingus recorded two of Johnson’s compositions, Wee and For Harry Carney, and nominated Johnson for a Guggenheim award following his own in Jazz Composition.
Johnson continues to work with Sue Mingus arranging charts for all the Mingus repertory ensembles—the Mingus Big Band, the Mingus Orchestra and the Mingus Dynasty. He would go on to collaborate with arrangements for Joe Williams, Frank Sinatra, Wes Montgomery, Roy Eldridge, Ben Webster, Quincy Jones, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Mel Torme, Terry Gibbs, Lee Konitz and Sarah Vaughan, among others.
He has also worked on Broadway and in films such as the1984 movie The Cotton Club. Arranger Sy Johnson is also a jazz photographer, writer, pianist, singer, and teacher.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Charles Frederic Ramsey, Jr. was born on January 29, 1915 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Taking his BA at Princeton University in 1936, then went to work at Harcourt Brace in the late Thirties. The early Forties had him at the United States Department of Agriculture and Voice of America.
With Charles Edward Smith, Ramsey wrote Jazzmen in 1939, an early landmark of jazz scholarship particularly noted for its treatment of the life of King Oliver. After receiving Guggenheim fellowships, he visited the American South in the middle of the 1950s to make field recordings and do interviews with rural musicians, some of which were used in releases by Folkways Records and in a 1957 documentary, Music of the South.
He curated an anthology of early jazz recordings for Folkways, titled simply Jazz. Ramsey worked with the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University from 1970. He researched Buddy Bolden’s life with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and continued with a Ford Foundation grant. He presented early jazz interviews on National Public Radio in 1987. The writer of jazz and record producer Charles Ramsey passed away on March 18, 1995 in Paterson, New Jersey.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Joseph P. Muranyi was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio on January 14, 1928 and studied with Lennie Tristano, however, he was primarily interested in early jazz styles such as Dixieland and swing. After playing in a United States Army Air Forces band, he moved to New York City in the 1950s and attended the Manhattan School of Music and Columbia University.
During the 1950s he played under Eddie Condon, collaborating with Jimmy McPartland, Max Kaminsky, Yank Lawson, Bobby Hackett, and Red Allen. During that decade he also played with the Red Onion Jazz Band, Danny Barker, and Wingy Manone.
1963 saw him playing with The Village Stompers, a Dixieland band that reached the pop charts with its song Washington Square. From 1967 to 1971 he was the clarinetist with the Louis Armstrong All-Stars. After initially struggling to pronounce Muranyi’s Hungarian family name, Armstrong introduced him on stage as “Joe Ma Rainey”, to Muranyi’s own amusement. Following this stint, he played with Roy Eldridge, World’s Greatest Jazz Band, Cozy Cole, Lionel Hampton, Herman Autrey, Wild Bill Davison, Zutty Singleton, and others.
He worked extensively as a record producer and wrote liner notes for hundreds of albums. Clarinetist, producer, writer and critic Joe Muranyi, who was also an enthusiastic vocalist and played both soprano and tenor saxophone, passed away in Manhattan, New York on April 20, 2012.