Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Dan Morgenstern was born October 24, 1929 in Munich, Germany and was raised in Vienna, Austria and Copenhagen, Netherlands before arriving in the United States in 1947. He wrote for Jazz Journal from 1958–1961, then edited several jazz magazines: Metronome in 1961, Jazz from 1962–1963, and Down Beat from 1967-1973.
In 1976, he was named director of Rutgers–Newark’s Institute of Jazz Studies, where he continued the work of Marshall Stearns and made the Institute the world’s largest collection of jazz documents, recordings, and memorabilia.
Over the course of his career, Morgenstern has arranged concerts including the Jazz in the Garden series at the Museum of Modern Art, produced and hosted television and radio programs, taught jazz history at universities and conservatories, and served as a panelist for jazz festivals and awards across the U.S. and Europe.
Widely known as a prolific writer of comprehensive, authoritative liner notes, he has received eight Grammy Awards for Best Album Notes since 1973 for Art Tatum’s God Is in the House, Coleman Hawkins’ The Hawk Flies, Savoy Records Collection The Changing Face of Harlem, Erroll Garner: Master of the Keyboard, Clifford Brown, Brownie: The Complete Emarcy Recordings of Clifford Brown, Louis Armstrong, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Fats Waller, If You Got to Ask, You Ain’t Got It!, and The Complete Louis Armstrong Decca Sessions.
He has authored two books that have won ASCAP’s Deems Taylor Award: Jazz People in 1976 and Living with Jazz in 2004. In 2007, he received the A.B. Spellman Jazz Masters Award for Jazz Advocacy from the National Endowment for the Arts. Writer, editor, archivist and producer Dan Morgenstern continues his career at 87 years of age.
Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Whitney Lyon Balliett was born in Manhattan, New York on April 17, 1926. He was raised in Glen Cove, Long Island and attended Phillips Exeter Academy, where he learned to play drums. There he became part of a band that played “baggy Dixieland” and during the summer played gigs at a Center Island yacht club.
Drafted into the Army in 1946, interrupting Whitney’s freshman year at Cornell University, he returned to finish his degree in 1951. While matriculating he was a member of The Delta Phi Fraternity and after graduating went to work at The New Yorker, hired by Katherine White, one of the magazine’s fiction editors.
Among his many jazz wittings were: Such Sweet Thunder: 49 Pieces on Jazz, Super-drummer: A Profile of Buddy Rich, Alec Wilder and His Friends, Improvising: Sixteen Jazz Musicians and Their Art, Night Creature: A Journal of Jazz 1975-1980, American Musicians: Fifty-Six Portraits in Jazz, American Singers: Twenty-seven Portraits in Song, and Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2000.
Acclaimed for his literary writing style, jazz critic, book reviewer and author Whitney Balliett passed away on February 1, 2007, aged 80, from cancer.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Gary Giddins was born on March 21, 1948 in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, New York. He graduated from Grinell College in Iowa in 1970 and began freelance work as a music and film critic. By 1974 he landed a position as a columnist with the Village Voice writing a column called Weather Bird, a position he held until 2003.
In 1986 Gary along with John Lewis, pianist and music director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, created the American Jazz Orchestra, which presented concerts using a jazz repertory with musicians such as Tony Bennett.
Of his many accolades and honors in writing, film and broadcasting Giddins has won a Grammy for liner notes on Sinatra: The Voice, six ASCAP–Deems Taylor Awards, Jazz Times Readers Poll, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Peabody Award in Broadcasting, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, ARSC Award for Excellence in Historical Sound Research and the Bell Atlantic Award for Visions of Jazz: The First Century in 1998.
He has authored Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams-The Early Years 1903-1940, Weatherbird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century, Faces in the Crowd, Natural Selection, and biographies of Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker.
Jazz and film critic, author, and director, Gary Giddins is currently the Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
George Thomas Simon was born on May 9, 1912 in New York City into a wealthy and talented family, with his brother co-founding the publishing house Simon & Schuster and also his niece, singer Carly Simon. He began as a drummer and was an early drummer in Glenn Miller’s orchestra.
After graduating from Harvard University in 1934 he began working for the Metronome magazine the following year, then became editor-in-chief from 1939 to 1955and shifted it, from writing technical articles, to being a chronicler of the swing era. Simon was probably the most influential jazz commentator during the swing era and with his inside connections in the jazz world, he was able to report information about bands and their personnel with great accuracy.
Leaving Metronome he went to the Jazztone Society, consulted for the Timex Jazz Shows, wrote about jazz for the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Post newspapers. He also did liner notes for a variety of jazz musicians including Thelonious Monk who was stylistically quite different from the swing-era musicians Simon championed.
In 1978, he won a Grammy Award for Best Album Notes, was inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame and on February 13, 2001 after years of suffering from Parkinson’s disease, he died of pneumonia in New York City.
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Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Big Bill Bissonnette was born February 5, 1937 in Bridgeport, Connecticut who became a jazz trombonist and producer. A strong advocate of New Orleans jazz played by Black musicians in the Sixties he led his group The Easy Riders Jazz Band.
During that period Bill also established his own Jazz Crusade label and organized northern tours for such veterans as Kid Thomas Valentine, George Lewis and Jim Robinson. After a period off the jazz scene, Bill successfully published of his 1992 memoirs, “The Jazz Crusade” that told many stories about New Orleans’ musicians.
Bissonnette reactivated his label and began to play trombone again. He has produced and recorded over 100 jazz sessions for his Jazz Crusade label, appearing as trombonist or drummer on over 50 recording sessions of New Orleans jazz.
He has spent much of the 1990s documenting the British jazz scene with his “Best of the Brits” CD series. He published a newsletter several times a year. Trombonist, drummer, producer, bandleader and writer retired from music and now resides in Concord, North Carolina in 2006.
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