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Home>The Final Curtain
Passings - jazz (and jazz influenced) artists who have passed on.
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 Herman Leonard
Abby Lincoln
Hank Jones
Frank Morgan
Oscar Peterson
Teo Macero
Wilfred Middlebrooks
Humphrey Lyttleton
Jimmy Giuffre
Jack Varney
Bob Florence
Gerald Wiggins
Bobby Durham
Bruce Clark
Johnny Griffin
Lee Young
Danny Moss
Arne Domnérus
William Claxton
Neal Hefti
Dave McKenna
Pat Crumley
Derek Wadsworth
Freddie Hubbard
David "Fathead" Newman
Hank Crawford
Blossom Dearie
Louie Bellson
Ian Carr
Victor Lewis
Bud Shank
Buddy Montgomery
Jack Nimitz
Chris Connor
Ed Thigpen
Sir John Dankworth
Jake Hanna
Herb Ellis
John Bunch
Gene Lees
Joe Zawinual
| Herman Leonard | |  21/08/2010
Herman Leonard, a photographer best known for his iconic images of such jazz greats as Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, has died. He was 87.
Leonard became famous for the smoky, backlighted black-and-white photos he took in dark jazz clubs beginning in the late 1940s.
I took advantage of being a photographer to get myself into the clubs so I could sit in front of Charlie Parker," he told The Times in March before the opening of an exhibit on jazz photography at the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles. "I got to listen to music in person. That enriched me. The money didn't. And I tried to make images that would satisfy me."
The images did much more than that. They documented a musical era and cemented Leonard's status.
"He knows how to capture, and to make, the natural beauty, artistry and individuality of musicians shine through — shine through the paper and the chemicals and the book and the gallery and the years," John Edward Hasse, of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, told the Morning Call in Allentown, Pa., in 1999. "He's an artist."
He was born in Allentown in 1923 and became interested in photography early on thanks to his older brother. He attended Ohio University to study photography but that was interrupted by a stint in the Army from 1943 to 1945. Leonard returned to college and graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1947.
After working as an apprentice for famed portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh, Leonard moved to New York in 1948 and started becoming immersed in the jazz scene. Using a 4-by-5 Speed Graphic camera, he shot Art Tatum, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan and countless other jazz greats.
Ellington watching Ella Fitzgerald sing in 1948. Dexter Gordon sitting, holding a cigarette and balancing his saxophone on a knee. There was music, amazing access and plenty of smoke.
"The smoke was part of the atmosphere of those days and dramatized the photographs a lot, maybe over-stylized them a bit," he told The Times in 1990.
He spent 1956 as a personal photographer for actor Marlon Brando on a trip to the Far East. Then he moved to Paris and did commercial work, including for Playboy magazine, and kept shooting jazz.
"Ninety-nine percent of everything I shot was off the cuff," he said in 2001. "I wanted to capture what was really there untainted by anything I would do. My whole principle was to capture the mood and atmosphere of the moment."
The negatives of his jazz photos had been put away when he left the United States; but beginning in the 1980s he rediscovered them, and his first book, "The Eye of Jazz," was published in 1985. The first exhibition of Leonard's jazz photos was held in London in 1988.
More exhibitions and praise followed.
Leonard's work showed an intimacy that "comes from a true insider whose genuine friendship with the musicians allowed him to capture moments that are personal and insightful," David Houston, chief curator of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, told the Morning Call in 2005. "You could teach the personal and musical evolution of jazz in the '50s through his work."
Leonard moved to New Orleans in 1992. His home was flooded by Hurricane Katrina and he lost thousands of prints. But his 60,000 negatives were safe, having been sent before the hurricane to the Ogden Museum. His return to New Orleans was chronicled in the 2006 documentary "Saving Jazz."
"When I was photographing Miles or Dizzy in the early days, I knew these were good and important musicians, but not as important as they turned out to be," he told the Chicago Tribune in 1999. "I had no idea. If I had any inkling, I would have shot 10 times as many pictures."
Herman Leonard died Saturday, August 21-2010 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles at the age of 87. He had been living in Los Angeles since Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, flooding his home and destroying thousands of prints
Leonard is survived by children Valerie, Shana, Michael and David; and six grandchildren.
keith.thursby@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times
Click on "The PictureGallery" to see the incredible jazz photographs of Herman Leonard. Top
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| Abby Lincoln | |  14/08/2010
Abbey Lincoln, an acclaimed jazz singer, songwriter and actress who evolved from a supper-club singer into a strong voice for civil rights, has died at the age of 80.
Lincoln built a career as an actress and singer in the late 1950s through the turbulent 1960s, then stepped away during the 1970s and, years later, returned to prominence as a singer praised for her songwriting abilities.
There was a passion to what she did," said jazz critic Don Heckman, who noted that Lincoln's songwriting made her a rarity among jazz singers. "She was not someone who was just singing a song. She had an agenda, and a lot of it had to do with civil rights.... She expressed herself in dramatic and impressive fashion in what she said and how she sang."
Her voice was a "special instrument, producing a sound that is parched rather than pure or perfect," wrote the New York Times' Peter Watrous in 1996. "But her limitations infuse her singing with honesty. More important, she understands the words she sings, declaiming them with a flare of memory that seems to illuminate all the lost love and sadness people experience."
She was often compared with Billie Holiday, one of her early influences. Times jazz writer Leonard Feather, writing after a Lincoln performance in 1986, said he could see glimpses of Holiday. "Not so much vocally as visually — a slight toss of the head, a jutting of the jaw," he wrote. "As Lincoln said, 'We all stand on the shoulders of those who preceded us.' "
And Lincoln made an impact on the next generation.
"She opened up doors, not just in the sense of career possibilities but as empowerment to be myself when I sang," singer Cassandra Wilson told the Wall Street Journal in 2007.
Lincoln was born Anna Marie Wooldridge on Aug. 6, 1930, in Chicago, the 10th of 12 children. The family soon moved to rural Michigan.
She moved to California in 1951 and performed in local clubs, then spent two years singing in Honolulu before coming back to Los Angeles. And she became Abbey Lincoln, inspired by Westminster Abbey and Abraham Lincoln. Her manager, songwriter Bob Russell, thought of the name.
Lincoln had a role in the 1956 film "The Girl Can't Help It" in which she wore a dress once worn by Marilyn Monroe. The appearance, coupled with her first album, "Abbey Lincoln's Affair: A Story of a Girl in Love," gave her a glamorous image. That changed when she started working with jazz drummer Max Roach, whose music would reflect the coming civil rights struggle. They married in 1962.
"I started out being a sexy young thing in a Marilyn Monroe dress," she told The Times in 2000, "And Max Roach freed me from that."
The 1960 release "We Insist! Freedom Now Suite" included Lincoln's wordless, sometimes screaming duet with Roach and was a landmark musical statement of the civil rights movement.
Lincoln "was like an OK supper singer," critic and producer Nat Hentoff told The Times in 1993. "Then I went down to the Village Gate here in New York where Max and she were doing the 'Freedom Now Suite.' It was just extraordinary, the power of it."
Critics were divided. "We all paid a price, but it was important to say something," she told the Wall Street Journal in 2007. "It still is."
Movie roles followed, including "Nothing But a Man" in 1964 and "For Love of Ivy" in 1968, in which she starred with Sidney Poitier.
Lincoln "was a really gifted person and a truly wonderful actress. She was the kind of person you expected to live forever," Poitier told The Times on Saturday.
"She was gifted in so many ways. She was quite productive, and it was quite rewarding for those of us who heard her sing and watched her act."
Lincoln and Roach divorced in 1970, and she returned to California to "cleanse her spirit," she told The Times in 1993. She taught at what is now Cal State Northridge, did some television work and performed only occasionally.
Her career took off again in the late 1980s, with works including two 1987 albums paying tribute to Holiday. Living in New York, she moved to the Verve Music Group and had commercial and artistic success with "The World Is Falling Down" in 1990 and "You Gotta Pay the Band" in 1991, in which she performed with saxophone great Stan Getz. Her final new release was "Abbey Sings Abbey" in 2007.
Lincoln died Saturday, August 15-2010 at her home said Evelyn Mason, her niece. No cause was given, but she had been in failing health
Abby Lincoln is survived by brothers David and Kenneth Wooldridge and a sister, Juanita Baker.
keith.thursby@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles TimesTop
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| Hank Jones | |  16/05/2010
Hank Jones, whose self-effacing nature belied his stature as one of the most respected jazz pianists of the postwar era.
He died at Calvary Hospital Hospice. Mr. Jones lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and also had a home in Hartwick, N.Y.
Mr. Jones spent much of his career in the background. For three and a half decades he was primarily a sideman, most notably with Ella Fitzgerald; for much of that time he also worked as a studio musician on radio and television.
His fellow musicians admired his imagination, his versatility and his distinctive style, which blended the urbanity and rhythmic drive of the Harlem stride pianists, the dexterity of Art Tatum and the harmonic daring of bebop. (The pianist, composer and conductor André Previn once called Mr. Jones his favorite pianist, “regardless of idiom.”)
But unlike his younger brothers Thad, who played trumpet with Count Basie and was later a co-leader of a celebrated big band, and Elvin, an influential drummer who formed a successful combo after six years with John Coltrane’s innovative quartet, Hank Jones seemed content for many years to keep a low profile.
That started changing around the time he turned 60. Riding a wave of renewed interest in jazz piano that also transformed his close friend and occasional duet partner Tommy Flanagan from a perpetual sideman to a popular nightclub headliner, Mr. Jones began working and recording regularly under his own name.
Reviewing a nightclub appearance in 1989, Peter Watrous of The New York Times praised Mr. Jones as “an extraordinary musician” whose playing “resonates with jazz history” and who “embodies the idea of grace under pressure, where assurance and relaxation mask nearly impossible improvisations.”
Mr. Jones further enhanced his reputation in the 1990s with a striking series of recordings that placed his piano in a range of contexts — including an album with a string quartet, a collaboration with a group of West African musicians and a duet recital with the bassist Charlie Haden devoted to spirituals and hymns.
Henry W. Jones Jr. was born in Vicksburg, Miss., on July 31, 1918. One of 10 children, he grew up in Pontiac, Mich., near Detroit, where he started studying piano at an early age and first performed professionally at 13. He began playing jazz even though his father, a Baptist deacon, disapproved.
Mr. Jones worked with regional bands, mostly in Michigan and Ohio, before moving to New York in 1944 to join the trumpeter and singer Hot Lips Page’s group at the Onyx Club on 52nd Street.
He was soon in great demand, working for well-known performers like the saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and the singer Billy Eckstine. “People heard me and said, ‘Well, this is not just a boy from the country — maybe he knows a few chords,’ ” he told Ben Waltzer in a 2001 interview for The Times.
He abandoned the freelance life in late 1947 to become Ella Fitzgerald’s accompanist and held that job until 1953, occasionally taking time out to record with Charlie Parker and others.
He kept busy after leaving Fitzgerald. Among other activities, he began an association with Benny Goodman that would last into the 1970s, and he was a member of the last group Goodman’s swing-era rival Artie Shaw led before retiring in 1954. But financial security beckoned, and in 1959 he became a staff musician at CBS.
He also participated in a celebrated moment in presidential history when he accompanied Marilyn Monroe as she sang “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy, who was about to turn 45, during a Democratic Party fund-raiser at Madison Square Garden in May 1962.
Mr. Jones remained intermittently involved in jazz during his long tenure at CBS, which ended when the network disbanded its music department in the mid-’70s. He was a charter member of the big band formed by his brother Thad and the drummer Mel Lewis in 1966, and he recorded a few albums as a leader. More often, however, he was heard but not seen on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and other television and radio programs.
“Most of the time during those 15 or so years, I wasn’t playing the kind of music I’d prefer to play,” Mr. Jones told Howard Mandel of Down Beat magazine in 1994. “It may have slowed me down a bit. I would have been a lot further down the road to where I want to be musically had I not worked at CBS.”
But, he explained, the work gave him “an economic base for trying to build something.”
Once free of his CBS obligations, Mr. Jones began quietly making a place for himself in the jazz limelight. He teamed with the bassist Ron Carter and the drummer Tony Williams, alumni of the Miles Davis Quintet, to form the Great Jazz Trio in 1976. (The uncharacteristically immodest name of the group, which changed bassists and drummers frequently over the years, was not Mr. Jones’s idea.)
Two years later he began a long run as the musical director and onstage pianist for “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” the Broadway revue built around the music of Fats Waller, while also playing late-night solo sets at the Cafe Ziegfeld in Midtown Manhattan.
By the 1980s, Mr. Jones’s late-blooming career as a band leader was in full swing. While he had always recorded prolifically — by one estimate he can be heard on more than a thousand albums — for the first time he concentrated on recording under his own name, which he continued to do well into the 21st century.
He is survived by his wife, Theodosia.
Mr. Jones was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 1989. He received the National Medal of Arts in 2008 and a lifetime achievement Grammy Award in 2009. And he continued working almost to the end. Laurel Gross, a close friend, said he had toured Japan in February and had plans for a European tour this spring until doctors advised against it.
Reaching for superlatives, critics often wrote that Mr. Jones had an exceptional touch. He himself was not so sure.
“I never tried consciously to develop a ‘touch,’ ” he told The Detroit Free Press in 1997. “What I tried to do was make whatever lines I played flow evenly and fully and as smoothly as possible.
“I think the way you practice has a lot to do with it,” he explained. “If you practice scales religiously and practice each note firmly with equal strength, certainly you’ll develop a certain smoothness. I used to practice a lot. I still do when I’m at home.” Mr. Jones was 78 years old at the time.
Hank Jones died on Sunday, May 16-2010 in the Bronx. He was 91.
The above article was compiled by Peter Keepnews and was taken from the New York Times on-line obituary page.
The picture is also from the New. York Times and shows Mr. Jones performing “Willow weep for Me” (www.youtube.com)
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| Oscar Peterson | |  23/12/2007
Oscar was born in Montreal, Canada on August 15th – 1925.
Oscar Peterson was one of the jazz world’s most influential and awarded pianists.
The piano player was a master of many jazz styles, from stride piano to swing, bebop and the blues.
During the 1940s he was very popular on Canadian radio and also played in various clubs in the Montreal area.
Oscar’s early trios included the iconic bassist Ray Brown and guitarist Herb Ellis.
He performed with some of jazz’s most iconic figures, including Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Milt Jackson, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie , Duke Ellington, Sonny Stitt, Ella Fitzgerald, Lester Young, Buddy Rich and Harry Edison to name just a handful.
What made Peterson so unique as a piano player was his command of the instrument, his technical virtuosity, very imaginative improvisation and his sense of swing.
Oscar’s six decade career saw him win numerous international awards, among the most significant included eight Grammys, and in 1997 he was honored with a Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Canada, his country of birth where he lived most of his life made him a Champion of the Order Of Canada, which is the nation’s highest award given to a civilian. Peterson was also the first living Canadian to be depicted on a postage stamp.
Oscar Peterson passed away on December 23rd – 2007 at the age of 82.
Part of the above material on Oscar Peterson was taken from The Los Angeles Times obituary section published on December 25 – 2007.
The picture of Oscar Peterson (above) is from ”The Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Sixties” by Leonard Feather and published by Bonanza Books. (Photograph – Limelight Records)
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| Teo Macero | | 10/02/2008
Born in Glen Falls, New York on October 30th – 1925 jazz producer Teo Macero worked with Miles Davis and other big names from the world of jazz.
His innovative work as a producer of jazz albums in the 1960s and '70s helped define the recorded sound of artists such as Miles Davis and redefine the meaning of studio production
Macero helped make some of the most enduring jazz recordings of the era. He was musical editor for Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus.
For many years he produced Davis, including albums such as "Bitches Brew," "In a Silent Way" and "Sketches of Spain." Although Davis had the final say, Macero was given wide latitude -- and he used all the space given him to express his creativity.
In an interview posted on Perfect Sound Forever, an online music magazine, Macero said, "in 25 or 30 years he was there maybe four or five times. So I had carte blanche to maneuver, do things with his music that I couldn't do with other people's. Teo’s parents owned a restaurant, said his sister, Lydia Edwards. Early in his life, he took up the saxophone, and music became his passion.
After serving in the Navy in the mid-1940s, Macero earned a bachelor's degree in 1951 and a master's degree in 1953 from Juilliard School of Music. He received Guggenheim Fellowships twice in the 1950s and played saxophone with Mingus and many others.
The list of artists he worked with as producer includes Dave Brubeck, Mahalia Jackson and Leonard Bernstein. After more than 20 years at Columbia, Macero left and continued to work as a producer. He also composed for several ballet companies and was a composer and conductor with several symphony orchestras.
Teo Macero passed away at a hospital in Riverhead, New York on February 10th -2008 at the age of 82.
The above is was taken form The Los Angeles Times and compiled by Jocelyn Stewart.
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| Wilfred Middlebrooks | | 13/03/2008
Wilfred Middlebrooks, the double bassist whose elegant, understated sound was heard in the band that backed jazz great Ella Fitzgerald and in the Paul Smith Trio, has died of heart attack.
Middlebrooks was born July 17, 1933, in Chattanooga, Tenn., into a family of musicians. By age 11, he was studying with the principal bassist for the Chattanooga Symphony.
Wilfred landed a gig with Ella Fitzgerald, who was playing a Las Vegas show. In the audience that day were Nat "King" Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., Pearl Bailey and Jane Russell.
"I was so scared," Middlebrooks said in a 2001 article in the Chattanooga Times Free Press. "I thought if I can just make it through this one show, that'll be it."
Wilfred's longevity with somebody of Ella's talent had a lot to do with his impeccable intonation, sensitivity and just sympathetic nature," said fellow bassist Richard Simon.
"He loved Ella," Middlebrooks' wife said. "He called her Fitz. She called him Junior. He was her youngest bass player."
In 1960, while playing with Fitzgerald, Middlebrooks met pianist Paul Smith. They later played together for 13 years at the Velvet Turtle in Redondo Beach, California.
Offstage, Middlebrooks was a family man, who helped raise two of his grandchildren. For a time, he taught free music at the Chattanooga African American Museum.
Bass player Wilfred Middlebrooks always remained passionate about his instrument.
He passed away on March 13th 2008 at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, California. He was 74.
The above was compiled by Jocelyn Y. Stewart Los Angeles Times Staff Writer.
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| Humphrey Lyttleton | | 25/04/2008
A longtime jazz fanatic, trumpeter and BBC Radio host Humphrey was born into a prominent British family and educated at the elite Eton College.
A self taught musician he was an accomplished trumpet player, who Louis Armstrong once said was Britain’s best trumpeter.
Lyttleton’s varied experiences included service in the Grenadier Guards during World War II, a cartoonist with Britain’s “Daily Mirror” and author of several books on music.
Lyttleton hosted the radio show “I’m Sorry, I haven’t a Clue” which was launched in 1972. The game show format which attracted a dedicated audience was filled light heated silliness and innuendo. Lyttleton was a master of double- entendres and ribald lines all delivered in his upper class British accent.
Humphrey Lyttleton passed away on April 25 - 2008 at the age of 86.
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| Jack Varney | |  19/05/2008
Born on January, 15 -1918 in Port Melbourne, Victoria Jack was one of Australia’s most versatile and respected musicians, who played the banjo, guitar, piano and the vibraphone.
His music career was interrupted during the war years when he saw service as a pilot with the RAAF.
Jack Varney was a member of the internationally acclaimed Graeme Bell Australian Jazz Band which toured Europe, and appeared on the BBC and a several European radio networks.. He played both banjo and guitar with the band as well as doubling on piano for Graeme Bell.
During his two years in Europe Jack shared billings with such jazz legends as Erroll Garner, Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Humphrey Lyttleton and The Dutch Swing College Band.
At the time Jack was named as one of the top four banjo players in the world.
On his return to Australia he played in orchestras and bands that accompanied such star artists that included Frank Sinatra and drummer Gene Krupa.
Jack’s extensive music career included 17 years as A and R Manger with Australia’s W and G Records, during which time he produced scores of recordings for some of the biggest names in the early days of the Australian recording industry. Included were two very successful groups that he formed - “The City Slickers” and “Happy Jack and the Bar Room Boys”- winners of four Gold Albums. He was also involved in writing commercial jingles.
Outside the recording studio Jack played in television studio orchestras, and also in various groups at Melbourne’s top night spots
Jack Varney was a life member of the Musicians’ Union of Australia, and also a former President and Trustee of the Melbourne branch.
Jack Varney was married to Glen an accomplished pianist and music teacher, who also has several albums to her credit.
The couple can be heard together on a “cocktail style” album with Jack on vibes and Glen on both piano and organ.
Together they also formed a Keyboard Academy in Melbourne which was won a National award in 1981 and ’82.
After a long battle with Parkinson’s disease Jack Varney passed away in his 91st year on May 19th - 2008.
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| Bob Florence | |  15/05/2008
A native of Southern California, Bob was born on May, 20th- 1932 in Los Angeles. His mother played the piano for silent movies during the 1920s.
Florence had his first piano lesson before he was 4 years of age. His teacher discovered that the youngster had perfect pitch, the immediate ability to discern the pitch of any given note. At 7 he gave his first recital and was on a course for a career in classical music when he attended Los Angeles City College and joined the jazz band.
After leaving college Bob wrote arrangements and played with Les Brown going on to write for Harry James, Louie Bellson and Sy Zentner.
Bob Florence’s extensive career included television scoring and musical direction, writing, arranging and accompaniment with Julie Andrews, Jack Jones and Vicki Jones. In the late ‘60s he worked simultaneously on television variety shows of Red Skelton, Andy Williams, Dean Martin and “The Tonight Show”.
As an arranger Bob Florence’s ingenious harmonic imagination transformed the original thematic material into virtually new compositions.
Up until the start of his illness he led the Bob Florence Limited Edition Big Band..
Bob passed away on May 15th -2008 at Barlow Respiratory Hospital in Los Angeles after a lengthy bout of pneumonia. He was 75.
The above information written by Don Heckman, Special to the Times along with the picture of Bob Florence came from The Los Angeles Times.
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| Gerald Wiggins | |  15/07/2008
Pianist Gerald Wiggins was born May 12, 1922, in New York City. Although he studied classical piano from the age of 4, he did so reluctantly.
Gerald’s long career embraced numerous recordings with his trio and performances with Louis Armstrong, Benny Carter, Roy Eldridge, Zoot Sims and other high profile jazz musicians.
He also accompanied Lena Horne and Nat "King" Cole, and gave vocal coaching to Marilyn Monroe. The actress once gave Gerald a photo autographed with, "For Gerry. I can't make a sound without you. Love you, Marilyn."
Wiggins was very often called upon for television, film and recording studio work.
Versatility was Gerald Wiggins's stock in trade, but the foundation of his playing was his work with a variety of trios -- especially with a unit that included bassist Andy Simpkins and drummer Paul Humphrey.
A performance by the trio in 1998 was described in a Time Magazine review as "a set that defined the manner in which jazz can be simultaneously imaginative, elegant and swinging."
The above information is by Don Heckman and taken from The Los Angeles Times.
The photograph (above) by Ken Hively of the Los Angeles Times was taken at the Central Avenue (L..A.) Jazz Festival and shows Bob Maize on bazz and Gerald Wiggins at the piano.
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| Bobby Durham | |  7/07/2008
Bobby Durham, a jazz drummer of impeccable taste and versatility who teamed with Oscar Peterson and Ella Fitzgerald and became a fixture of the Jazz at the Philharmonic touring concert series, died July 7 at a hospital in Genoa, Italy. He was 71 and had lung cancer and emphysema.
His death was confirmed by Sandra Fuller, a family friend.
Durham's personality on drums ranged from exuberant to unobtrusive.
John S. Wilson, the late New York Times jazz critic, noted Durham's "remarkable displays of technical virtuosity" in a 1968 concert with Peterson, a pianist known for his understated swing.
Norman Granz, the impresario behind Jazz at the Philharmonic, became an admirer of Durham's skills and used him frequently as a supporting studio and stage musician for a wide variety of star performers from the 1960s to the '80s.
In the '70s, Durham also spent several years in small groups fronted by singer Fitzgerald and pianists Monty Alexander and Tommy Flanagan, as well as one led by trombonist Al Grey and saxophonist Jimmy Forrest.
Robert Joseph Durham was born Feb. 3, 1937, in Philadelphia, the son of tap dancers.
He learned trombone, bass and vibraphone before concentrating on a drumming career in rhythm and blues groups after serving in the Marine Corps in the late '50s. In later years, he developed a talent for improvised singing known as scat.
After settling in New York in 1960, Durham accompanied jazz, R&B and soul entertainers, including Marvin Gaye and James Brown. In 1967, he began working in Duke Ellington's band but quickly become a part of Peterson's trio.
Starting in the '80s, Durham performed with organist Shirley Scott, among other jazz stars as a freelancer. He also reunited with Peterson in the late '80s, playing in a trio with the pianist and bassist Ray Brown that received high praise.
Durham made many trips to Europe, leading trios and recording several albums for an independent Italian music label, Azzurra. He spent the final years of his life dividing his time between homes in Basel, Switzerland, and Isola del Cantone, near Genoa.
Survivors include two daughters and four grandchildren.
The above was taken from the Los Angeles Times. It was compiled by Adam Bernstein, Washington Post. The photograph (above) of Bobby Durham is by Marco Bizzotte.
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| Lee Young | |  31/07/2008
Drummer Lee Young was the young brother of tenor saxophonist Lester Young.
Lee was a very successful musician, who played on scores of recordings with some of the who’s who of jazz. He also led his own band. Lee Young made his first recordings with the great piano player Fats Waller
In the late 1930s he worked for MGM Studios where he taught Mickey Rooney how to play drums for the film “Strike up the Band”.
In 1946 Lee Young was the first African American hired for a staff position with a Hollywood studio orchestra. However he found the work unchallenging and left after two years.
Lee who was born on March14th – 1914 grew up in a musical family, which included his famous brother Lester Young and his sister Irma who was also a saxophonist.
His father Willis who was often referred to as Professor, was a multifaceted musician who player several instruments and was a very successful music teacher.
Lee and his brother Lester Young were like “night and Day” The former was a leader, an extrovert, a consummate business man, dependable, organized, health conscious, a terrific golfer and a great drummer.
In 1952 Lee started an association with Nat King Cole, serving as the singer’s musical director and drummer until 1962.
On July 31st Lee passed away at his home in Los Angeles at the ripe old age of 94.
Lee survived his brother Lester by nearly half a century. Lester Young died on March 15th – 1959 at the age of 50.
The above information was in part compiled by Jon Thurber, staff writer with The Los Angeles Times. The photograph of Lee Young also came from the L.A. Times.
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| Danny Moss | |  29/05/2008
Britain has produced a number of world-class tenor saxophonists, and Danny Moss was in the top three or four. He was happy to acknowledge the many American players on whose playing his style was founded. He would have been aware of the sagacity of Steve Race's remark of 70 years ago: "There is no such thing as British jazz. There is only American jazz played by British musicians."
"I'm part of the Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster school," said Moss, "but there are so many others that influenced me, like Don Byas, Lucky Thompson, Zoot Sims, Bud Freeman or Eddie Miller. My conception of jazz improvisation is based on three principles: melodic lines, swing and sound."
In his younger years, Moss was constantly in demand as a sideman and the eclectic selection of bands he worked in included those led by Ted Heath, Humphrey Lyttelton, Johnny Dankworth and Geraldo.
In 1945 Danny was called into the RAF for three years. In 1950-51, Moss had a well-paid but musically frustrating year in the dance band of Oscar Rabin and then learned about really hard drinking with eight months in the Squadronaires.
In May 1952 he joined Ted Heath, the most prestigious although not necessarily the most jazz-oriented job a musician could get. Moss earned five times as much as he had done before.
Moss was dismayed to find that he was expected to play the same solo, note for note, on every number: "Horrific. This was death to an improvising musician.
After three years, Moss left and joined Geraldo, whose band he regarded as far superior to Heath's. He stayed for two years until March 1957 when he was asked into the Johnny Dankworth big band where he instantly became one of the most featured soloists.
Moss found a new fan in Count Basie. "I wish the young guys would play that way," Basie said of Moss's playing. "That's a real Texas tenor. That's the way it should sound."
Moss was appointed MBE in 1990. Danny Moss married singer Jeannie Lamb
in 1964 and they worked together for the rest of Moss's life.
During the Seventies he recorded with Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Sarah Vaughan and Rosemary Clooney, and also played in various symphony orchestras.
He first toured Australia in 1983 with Jeannie Lamb and was a member of the occasional big band formed by the drummer Charlie Watts in 1985.
He and his wife loved Australia and in 1989 settled in Perth. From there they toured annually in the United States and Britain, eventually giving up the US trips and settling for long visits to Britain every year.
In 2005 Moss was diagnosed with cancer, but he continued working and touring with his wife and their bassist son Danny Moss Jnr.
To help pay for the expensive treatment he required, benefit concerts led by musicians like John Dankworth and Acker Bilk were held in England and Australia.
Dennis "Danny" Moss, tenor saxophonist and clarinettist: born Redhill, Surrey 16 August 1927 died Perth, Western Australia 29 May 2008.
The above article by Steve Voce was from the British paper “The Independent
Pictured above is the album “Steam Power” which was released in 2002 on the Nagel Hever label. Danny Moss, tenor sax; Roy Williams, trombone; John Pearce, piano; Len Skeat, bass; Charly Antolini, drums.
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| Arne Domnérus | |  2/09/2008
Arne Domnérus was a jazz pioneer in post-war Europe and a leading figure in Scandinavian jazz throughout his career.
(Right photograph – AP)
Arne Domnérus, who died in Stockholm was a jazz pioneer in post-war Europe and a leading figure in Scandinavian jazz throughout his career; like his British counterpart, John Dankworth, he played the alto saxophone in a clear, lucid style, led a successful band and served as a model for aspiring musicians of several generations.
Born in the Stockholm suburb of Nalen on December 20 1924 hetook up the clarinet at the age of 11. His sole ambition, he later claimed, was to get into his school’s marching band because he liked the look of the uniform. Within a few years, as a member of an amateur orchestra, he was winning prizes as an outstanding clarinet soloist.
Arne took up the saxophone and, on leaving school, became a professional musician, notably with the bands of Simon Brehm and Thore Ehrling.
The Paris Jazz Fair of 1949 marked the debut of European modern jazz on the world stage. For the first time young local players were able to meet and play informally alongside great figures such as Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Max Roach. Domnérus and his band scored a great success, putting Sweden firmly on the jazz map.
If Paris was the European capital of jazz in the 1950s, Stockholm quickly became its Second City. Virtually every prominent American soloist stopped off there to play and to record.
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From 1956 to 1965 Domnérus was a featured soloist with the Swedish Radio Big Band, taking over the leadership when it was reformed as Radiojazzgruppen in 1966 and remaining until 1978. At the same time he led many temporary bands of his own and branched out into theatre and ballet music, appearing as both saxophone and clarinet soloist with choirs and even symphony orchestras. He gave a concert in London in 1999, as part of Swedish Jazz Week.
Among Arne’s many later recordings special mention must be made of the albums Downtown Meeting (1977), with the trumpeter Clark Terry; Skyline Drive (1992), with his early hero, Benny Carter; Happy Together (1995) with the clarinettist Putte Wickman, and several duet recordings with Bengt Hallberg, his contemporary, whose gentle, lyrical piano promptings always brought out the best in him.
Arne passed away on Tuesday, September 3-2008 at the age of 83.
The above information is from the London Telegraph.Top
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| Neal Hefti | |  11/10/2008
Neal Hefti was the former big band trumpeter, arranger and composer who worked with Count Basie and Woody Herman and later composed the memorable themes for the movie "The Odd Couple" and the campy hit TV series "Batman," has died. He was 85.
Described as "one of the most influential big band arrangers of the 1940s and '50s" in "The Encyclopedia of Popular Music," Hefti turned his attention to composing for film and television in the 1960s.
Among his credits as a film composer are "Sex and the Single Girl," "Harlow" (one of his most famous tunes, “Girl Talk” came out of the score), "How to Murder Your Wife," "Boeing Boeing," "Duel at Diablo," "Barefoot in the Park," "A New Leaf," "Last of the Red Hot Lovers" and “The Odd Couple” whose theme he reprised for the 1970s TV series.
Hefti also gained wide notice for composing the energetic title theme for “Batman” the over-the-top 1966-68 superhero series that became an overnight sensation.
It was, Hefti later said, the hardest piece of music he ever wrote.
Hefti's "Batman" tune became a Top 40 hit -- for both the Hefti and the Marketts' versions -- and won a 1966 Grammy Award for best instrumental theme.
In 1945, Hefti married the Woody Herman band's lead female vocalist, Frances Wayne. They remained married until her death in 1978.
As a composer and arranger for Basie in the 1950s, Hefti composed numerous tunes that were featured on various Basie albums.
That included the Grammy Award-winning album "Basie," which Hefti produced. Known as "Atomic Basie" because of the atomic explosion pictured on the cover, the album featured 11 songs composed and arranged by Hefti, including "Splanky," "Kid From Red Bank" and “Lil’ Darlin’” which Hefti wrote for his daughter.
"If it weren't for Neal Hefti," legendary trumpeter Miles Davis said in a 1955 interview, "the Basie band wouldn't sound as good as it does."
In the early '60s, Hefti arranged and conducted "Sinatra and Basie: A Historical Musical First" and "Sinatra and Swingin' Brass."
He retired in 1976.
Neal Hefti passed away on Saturday, October 11 – 2008 at the age of 85.
The above was written by Dennis McLellan, staff writer at the Los Angeles Times.Top
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| Pat Crumley | |  28/09/2008
A close friend of the late Ronnie Scott and a fellow saxophonist, Pat Crumly was the man whom Scott always asked to deputise for him at his jazz club when he was indisposed. After Scott’s death, from 1997 until 2003, and again earlier this year, Crumly and the pianist John Critchinson co-led the Ronnie Scott Legacy Band, to keep his memory alive.
Patrick John Crumly was born in Oxford and grew up there, taking up the clarinet at 14 and the saxophone two years later. In the 1960s the city had an active university jazz club.
By the start of the 1970s Crumly was well established locally and wrote a jazz column for the Oxford Times and presented a weekly programme on BBC Radio Oxford.
In 1973 he deputised for Don Rendell in the John Dankworth Orchestra where he formed a long association with Dankworth and his wife Cleo Laine, frequently returning to play in the big band or sextet, but also becoming involved in teaching from the mid-1970s at the Dankworths’ regular summer schools.
Crumly had a big, warm tone on the tenor sax, and an agility that allowed him to tackle most parts of the modern jazz repertoire with ease. From now on his career was a balancing act between his first love of playing jazz, mainly in his own quartet, nine-piece group and occasional big band, and the more lucrative world of playing rock or rhythm ’n’ blues. He backed vocalist Jimmy Witherspoon and also Jack Jones, Salena Jones and Trini Lopez.
Pat Crumly died unexpectedly of heart failure while visiting Italy. He was 66. He is survived by his third wife, Hannah Jackson, and two sons.
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| Derek Wadsworth | |  3/12/2008
Derek Wadsworth, who died aged 69, was among the most gifted and versatile composers for film and television of his generation. He was also a superb jazz trombonist.
Derek Wadsworth was born at Cleckheaton, Yorkshire, on February 5, 1939, and began playing the trombone at the age of 11. As a teenager he was a member of the celebrated Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band, and at 19 he joined Keith Smith's Jazz Cardinals in Huddersfield.
His introduction to film music was as an arranger, beginning in 1970 with Spring and Port Wine. This was followed by Alfie Darling (1975), starring Alan Price, and the television series Space:1999 (1976), in which Wadsworth attempted to predict what the music of the future might sound like. This series later acquired the status of a cult classic, making the composer something of a celebrity among science fiction fans.
Among his many film credits are The Man Who Fell To Earth (directed by Nicholas Roeg, 1976), Britannia Hospital (Lindsay Anderson, 1983) and the Woody Allen documentary Wild Man Blues (1997).
Wadsworth was working not only as a composer, arranger and conductor, but also as an instrumentalist.
Among those with whom he recorded as a player were George Harrison, Diana Ross, Tom Jones, Dionne Warwick and Tony Bennett.
He arranged and conducted for Judy Garland, Kate Bush, Nina Simone, Shirley Bassey, Randy Crawford and Cat Stevens, and had a particularly close working relationship with Alan Price, for whom he arranged the album Between Today And Yesterday (1974). This contained The Jarrow Song, a brilliant marriage of pop and brass-band idioms.
Among the 200-odd television commercials for which he provided the music, his favourite was one for Imodium-Plus. "There I was, conducting a whole symphony orchestra in Methodist Central Hall – all very dignified and proper. And the voice-over says: 'One of these musicians had diarrhoea half an hour ago. Get Imodium-Plus today!” He was also quite proud of Pick It Up!, the jolly little song he composed to accompany Ken Livingstone's anti-litter campaign.
Derek Wadsworth was working at full stretch until his sudden death on December 3. His wife, Betty, died in 1987 and he is survived by his partner, Patsy Halliday, and a son and a daughter of his marriage.
Pictured is Derek Wadsworth at the 100 Club in London, 1982.
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| Freddie Hubbard | |  26/12/2008
Freddie Hubbard was widely regarded as the most gifted jazz trumpeter of the post-bebop 1960s and '70s.
Hubbard's playing was characterized by its strength and assurance, its capacity to roam confidently across the trumpet's entire range, and his gift for spontaneous melodic invention.
He was barely out of his teens in the late 1950s and working with such established jazz figures as drummer Philly Joe Jones, trombonist Slide Hampton, saxophonist Sonny Rollins and composer/arranger Quincy Jones. His identification as an important new arrival gained him a Down Beat Critics Poll Award when he was in his early 20s.
Hubbard was capable of quickly grasping the subtleties as well as the specific elements of a startlingly wide range of stylistic areas, from the hard bop of his work with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers to the most avant-garde music of the decade.
Freddie was born Frederick DeWayne Hubbard in Indianapolis on April 7, 1938. He was the youngest of six children in a musical household that included his sister who played classical piano and sang spirituals. His mother played the piano by ear, and his brother played the bass and tenor. Freddie once said “you'd hear somebody singing, somebody playing the piano, and always a record playing."
He took up the trumpet in junior high school, and also played fluegelhorn, piano, French horn, sousaphone and tuba.
Moving to New York City in 1958, when he was 20, Hubbard quickly became known as one of the important new jazz arrivals. In the early '70s, his career well-established, he moved to Los Angeles, settling in the San Fernando Valley.
Freddie Hubbard died at Sherman Oaks Hospital in Los Angeles. He was 70.
The cause of death was attributed to complications from a heart attack he suffered Nov. 26, according to Dave Weiss, his longtime manager.
The above information is by Don Heckmen and came from the Los Angeles Times. The photograph of Freddie Hubbard is by Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times.
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| David "Fathead" Newman | |  20/01/2009
David "Fathead" Newman, a jazz saxophonist who was a key member of Ray Charles' band for a dozen years and later became a high-profile session player..
Newman's saxophone can be heard on many of Charles' landmark hits, including "I Got a Woman," "What'd I Say" and "Lonely Avenue." And it was Charles who helped Newman get his first album as a leader with the 1958 Atlantic Records release "Fathead: Ray Charles Presents David Newman."
Newman was born in Corsicana, Texas, on Feb. 24, 1933, but grew up in Dallas, where he studied first the piano and then the saxophone.
He earned the nickname "Fathead" from his high school band teacher because he stubbornly refused to learn to read music, preferring instead to take it in by ear.
He went off to Jarvis Christian College on a music and theology scholarship but quit school after three years and began playing professionally, mostly jazz and blues, with a number of musicians, including Buster Smith, Lloyd Glenn, Lowell Fulson and T-Bone Walker.
"I was brought up a bebop musician but it wasn't so acceptable, especially in Dallas," Newman told the Dallas Morning News some years ago. "You couldn't make a living doing that, so I had to play rhythm and blues. I adapted to it easily, being from an area where blues was prevalent."
"Fathead" was playing in Smith's band in the early 1950s when he met Charles, who was then a piano-playing sideman for Fulson. The two hit it off immediately. Charles loved Newman's sound for its lyricism and sweetness and vowed to bring him aboard when he started his own band, which he did in 1954. The multifaceted Newman first played baritone saxophone for Charles but switched to tenor and became a star soloist.
"He really extended my music because he was into so many different types of music," Newman told the Canadian newspaper Ottawa Citizen in 2007. "I didn't really appreciate anything except bebop before I met Ray."
"In 1960 he started having a big band, an orchestra," Newman told the Tennessean newspaper some years ago. "Ray did all the arranging. He wouldn't even touch the piano, and he never wrote anything in Braille. He had perfect pitch. He would dictate a part and all you had to do was take notation and you'd have the arrangement. Ray Charles was a phenomenal musician."
After leaving Charles' band, Newman moved on to play with Herbie Mann's band in 1970-71 and recorded several more albums for Atlantic as well as Warner Bros., Fantasy Records and Muse.
Newman's versatility on reed instruments made him a first-call session player, and he worked with a wide variety of A-list players, including Aretha Franklin, B.B. King, Joe Cocker, and Dr. John, and with Natalie Cole on her "Unforgettable" album.
He orchestrated music for scores of films and played and appeared in the Robert Altman film "Kansas City." He later did a national tour with the band from that 1996 film for Verve records.
Newman himself became a character in "Ray," the 2004 biopic of Charles' life that starred Jamie Foxx. And while Newman thought that Foxx did a remarkable job capturing the life of a legend, he wasn't pleased with the way he was portrayed in the Taylor Hackford film.
In the movie, the character called Fathead is depicted as a brash young musician who turned Charles on to hard drugs. The soft-spoken Newman had said Charles had been using drugs for several years before they met.
"Drug use was prevalent at the time, even fashionable," Newman told the Columbia Daily Tribune. The movie, he added, "didn't really say that."
Newman died on Tuesday, January, 20 - 2009 of pancreatic cancer at a hospital in Kingston, N.Y., according to his wife and manager, Karen Newman.
He is survived by his wife, four sons, seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
The above is from the Los Angels Times and compiled by John Thurber.
The photograph of "Fathead" Newman is also from the L.A.
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| Hank Crawford | |  29/01/2009
Hank Crawford was the bluesy alto saxophonist who was a mainstay of Ray Charles' band in the late 1950s and early '60s.
Crawford, who also wrote arrangements for Charles and served as his musical director before forging his own career as a band leader,
He was the third leading saxophonist from Charles' groups to die in the early weeks of 2009. Leroy Cooper died of heart failure on Jan. 15 at 80 and David "Fathead" Newman died of pancreatic cancer on Jan. 20 at 75.
Crawford was a college senior majoring in music theory and playing baritone saxophone at Tennessee State University when Charles came to Memphis on tour in 1958. Cooper had just left the band, and Crawford was recommended to Charles as a replacement for the one-night gig. Three months later, Charles asked him to join the band permanently and Crawford left school.
Hank Crawford quickly emerged as an arranger and musical director for Charles when the entertainer decided to turn to a big-band format in the early 1960s. Crawford later said he was the first stand-up band leader that Charles employed.
By the early 1960s, he had switched to alto saxophone and begun recording what was to be a series of albums for Atlantic Records. The first one, "The Art of Hank Crawford," featured the full Ray Charles band.
He was born Bennie Ross Crawford Jr. in Memphis on Dec. 21, 1934. One of seven children, he learned piano as a child and was soon playing for the church choir.
Crawford grew up playing bebop, blues and country music. He was given the name Hank because his sound resembled that of Hank O'Day, a local musician.
After leaving Charles in 1963 to form his own sextet, Crawford forged a significant recording career with scores of albums for the Atlantic, Kudu and Milestone labels.
Crawford once told The Times that he played for "the average listener, rather than the jazz die-hard."
Hank Crawford died Jan. 29 - 2009 at his home in Memphis, Tenn. His sister, Delores, told the Commercial Appeal newspaper that Crawford had been in declining health for much of the past year with complications from a stroke in 2000.He was 74.
The above was compiled by Jon Thurber of the Los Angeles Times.
Pictured is Hank Crawford taken from the Los Angeles Times website.
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| Blossom Dearie | |  7/02/2009
Blossom Dearie was the singer and songwriter whose sweet soprano voice, harmonically innovative piano stylings and sophisticated performances made her a popular attraction in jazz and cabaret for nearly half a century.
Critic Leonard Feather once described Dearie as "chic, sleek and squeaky clean, a voice in a million" and while she was clearly classified as a jazz vocalist, she found that description incomplete.
"I don't want to be called a jazz singer," she told Feather some years ago, "though I certainly have some roots there. I'm not a cult singer either . . . and after being called a legend, that sounds too much like an epitaph. I think of myself as a songwriter's singer. All the great Broadway and Hollywood teams are in my repertoire, along with contemporary people like Dave Frishberg. . . . Writers bring their songs to me because they rely on me to define their work with respect. That's very flattering."
Marguerite Blossom Dearie was born in East Durham, N.Y., on April 19, 1926. She got her unusual middle name from a neighbor who delivered peach blossoms to her house the day she was born.
Dearie studied classical music as a child, switched to jazz as a teenager and played with her high school dance band.
She moved to New York in the 1940s to pursue a serious musical career and was hired by Woody Herman to sing with his Blue Flames, a vocal group within his big band. She later had a similar gig in Alvino Rey's band.
In the early 1950s, she moved to Paris and formed an eight-member vocal group, the Blue Stars.
They had a hit in Paris and the United States with a French version of "Lullaby of Birdland." Dearie contributed several of the group's popular arrangements.
While in Paris, she worked with singer Annie Ross and was later signed to a contract with Verve Records by producer Norman Granz. She made six solo albums for Verve, including the highly regarded "My Gentleman Friend."
After returning to New York in the mid-1950s Dearie came to prominence leading trios with guitarist Herb Ellis and bassist Ray Brown. She started to make her mark on television as a guest on shows hosted by Jack Paar, Dave Garroway and Merv Griffin.
But by the early 1970s, major record labels were switching to rock 'n' roll and showed little interest in her work. She started her own company, Daffodil Records, and one of her early albums, "My New Celebrity Is You," included eight of her own compositions. The album's title number was written by Johnny Mercer and is believed to be one of his last compositions before his death in 1976.
As a songwriter, Dearie was best known for her collaborations on "I'm Shadowing You," again with lyrics by Mercer; "I Like You, You're Nice," "Sweet Georgie Fame," "Inside a Silent Tear" and "Hey John."
In the 1970s, she lent her voice to the children's educational program "Schoolhouse Rock!" on songs, including "Mother Necessity," "Figure Eight" and "Unpack Your Adjectives."
Dearie was also known for performing several songs by Frishberg, including "Peel Me a Grape," "I'm Hip" and "My Attorney Bernie."
Survivors include her older brother, Barney.
Dearie died on Saturday February, 7 – 2009 at her home in New York City, her manager Donald Schaffer told The Times. He said she had been in failing health for several years and died of natural causes. She was 82.
The above was taken from The Los Angeles Times and compiled by Jon Thurber. The photograph of Blossom Dearie is also from the L.A. Times.
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| Louie Bellson | |  14/02/2009
Louie Bellson was best known as a superlative big band drummer as a result of his work in the 1940s and '50s with Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Harry James, Duke Ellington and others, Bellson was also an adept small group player. His more than 200 recorded appearances as leader and sideman encompass sessions with Jazz at the Philharmonic, Woody Herman, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, James Brown and dozens of others, including Ellington's Big Four alongside guitarist Joe Pass and bassist Ray Brown.
Bellson often said that he regarded his tenure with Ellington as one of the significant points in his career. Performing with the orchestra in the early '50s triggered a forward leap in his development as an instrumentalist and his confidence as a composer.
A pair of his best-known big band works, "The Hawk Talks" and "Skin Deep" became popular staples of the Ellington repertoire -- but not without some initial reservations from Bellson.
In a 2006 interview he said he had written "The Hawk Talks" with Harry James in mind.
"Harry was called 'The Hawk,' " Bellson recalled. "But I wrote it when I was with Duke, and it took a lot of coaxing from [trombonist] Juan Tizol to make me bring it to Duke. I told Juan, 'Are you crazy? You want me to bring music in to a place with Duke and Billy Strayhorn? Geniuses like that? No way.' I brought it in anyhow and lo and behold, Duke recorded it right away.
"But it was Duke who taught me how to write. How to be original. How to know what to do with the rhythm section, with the horns."
Ellington returned Bellson's high regard, noting, "Not only is Louie Bellson the world's greatest drummer . . . he's the world's greatest musician!"
Other artists concurred. Oscar Peterson described Bellson as "the epitome of musical talent. . . . I consider him one of the musical giants of our age."
Bellson was born Luigi Paulino Alfredo Francesco Antonio Balassoni, on July 6, 1924, in Rock Falls, Ill. Drawn to percussion as early as age 3, he was urged by his father, who owned a music store, to study keyboards, harmony and theory.
After serving in the Army for three years, Bellson returned to the Goodman band in 1946 for a year before moving on to play with Dorsey and James. The arrival of bebop, however, shifted the jazz world's orientation toward smaller groups and a different style of rhythm playing. He was an instrumentalist and percussionist, more than simply a drummer, and immediately sought ways to adapt his own technique to the newly emerging styles.
While performing with Ellington from 1951 to 1953, Bellson met and married singer Pearl Bailey. Their interracial marriage, rare for the early '50s, coincided with Bellson's presence as the only white member of the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Pictured is an early photograph of Louie with Pearl Bailey.
He spent the next few decades alternating between leading his own small groups and big bands, serving as Bailey's music director and occasionally returning to work as a stellar sideman. A stint with Basie in 1961 was followed by a return to Ellington, performing the Concert of Sacred Music that Ellington described as "the most important thing I've ever done."
After Bailey's death in 1990, Bellson continued his growing activities as a jazz educator while leading various-sized ensembles, including a pair of on-call big bands available for performances on both coasts.
Bellson wrote more than 1,000 compositions and arrangements, including ballet music, sacred music. In addition to his numerous big band charts and small ensemble pieces. He wrote more than a dozen books and booklets on drums and percussion.
He received a Jazz Masters Award from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1994; a Living Jazz Legends Award from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 2007; a Jazz Living Legend Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers; and an American Drummers Achievement Award from the Avedis Zildjian Co.
Louie Bellson died Saturday, February 14th - 2009 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles of complications of Parkinson's disease following a broken hip in November. He was 84.
The above information was compiled by Don Heckman and taken from the Los Angeles Times. The pictures of Louie Bellson with Peal Bailey and Louie at the drums also came from The L.A. Times.
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| Ian Carr | |  23/02/3009
Trumpeter, composer, bandleader and author Ian Carr, was a champion of British jazz independence at a time when few believed that a creative offshoot of the music could grow in any soil but America's. He was a freethinker, a self-taught trumpeter who became an accomplished soloist, biographer, campaigner, journalist and dedicated teacher - and one of a handful, alongside Humphrey Lyttelton, John Dankworth, Michael Garrick, Stan Tracey, Courtney Pine and a few others, who changed the course of jazz in the UK.
Carr's sound, on both trumpet and flugelhorn, seemed like a strikingly elegant and unhurried adaptation of the legacies of early Miles Davis and Clifford Brown, but with his own slightly melancholy fire, applied in the late 1960s to the pianist/composer Garrick's subtle and engaging home-grown repertoire.
In perhaps the biggest decision of his career, he founded the pioneering jazz-rock band Nucleus in 1969 (to the consternation of some conservative acoustic jazz fans). Carr (and his co-writer Karl Jenkins, later to become a classical composer) had managed to make their repertoire a balance of shapely, long-lined, and rather English romantic lyricism with the new rock-driven electric sounds beginning to be adopted by Davis.
Carr could not help making jazz news. He took Nucleus to the Montreux jazz festival (where it won the European Broadcasting Union prize) and then to the Newport jazz festival in the US in 1970, where it became one of the few British bands to make a big impact. But he also found time to research and write a book, Music Outside (1973, republished last year) about the playing and the politics of the contemporary British scene. He also played in fusion bands, big bands and occasionally even free-improv groups, though he was never convinced by the latter idiom.
In 1982 Carr wrote the much-acclaimed Miles Davis: A Critical Biography, and became an associate professor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London. In 1991 he published Keith Jarrett: The Man and his Music, a rich profile of the pianist, and collaborated with Digby Fairweather and Brian Priestley on the reference book Jazz: The Rough Guide. He also ran workshops for the younger generation, including the pianists Julian Joseph and Nikki Yeoh, the vocalist Cleveland Watkiss, and the Mondesir brothers.
Carr was born in Dumfries, Scotland, and grew up in the north-east of England. Although first inspired by Louis Armstrong, Harry James and Lyttelton, through his years studying English at Newcastle University and subsequent military service with the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, his interest in the trumpet remained peripheral.
After two years of European travels, he returned to Tyneside in 1960 to find his younger brother, Mike, an organist, running a local hard-bop band, the EmCee Five, with John McLaughlin as the occasional guitarist and a superb saxophonist, Gary Cox. Carr then studied the trumpet devotedly for a year while he made a living as a teacher. By late 1961 he was recording with the EmCee Five for Columbia, and though shortlived, the group came to acquire cult status among the cognoscenti.
Arriving in London in 1962, he worked with the saxophonist Don Rendell. The Rendell-Carr Quintet, which played from 1963 to 1969, consistently figured in Melody Maker's jazz polls, both for the quality of its improvisation and the distinctiveness of its unflinching, standards-averse repertoire, particularly after Garrick joined in 1965.
But by the end of the decade, he was growing restless and became increasingly attracted to electric jazz-rock possibilities. A personal catastrophe lent momentum to his desire for a new start. In 1967 his wife, Margaret, died in childbirth. Only his responsibilities to his baby daughter, Selina, and his work helped him recover from the shock, though depression stalked him in those years.
Carr was a consultant for television films about Davis and Jarrett, and fronted a six-part Radio 3 Jazz File on Davis's life in 2006. The same year, the writer and broadcaster Alyn Shipton published a biography of Carr, Out of the Long Dark. A succession of mini-strokes prevented him from playing in Nucleus reunions, but he received citations from both the BBC jazz awards and the Parliamentary jazz awards in 2006. However, Alzheimer's disease had by then turned him into a spectator at other people's celebrations of his achievements.
He divorced his second wife, Sandy Major, in the late 1980s and is survived by Selina.
Ian Henry Randall Carr, jazz trumpeter, composer, writer and broadcaster, born 21 April 1933; died 25 February 2009
The above has been taken from London’s “Gaurdian” and was compiled by John Fordham.
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| Victor Lewis | |  9/02/2009
Frequently described as the British Stan Kenton, Vic Lewis formed a close friendship with the American bandleader he so admired and played a large part in keeping his music alive after Kenton’s death in 1979. Between them the two bandleaders helped to bring about a change of heart in the Musicians Union on both sides of the Atlantic, resulting in the first exchange of bands between Britain and America.
Originally planned to be between Stan Kenton and Vic Lewis, it was decided Ted Heath would mean more to American audiences and in 1956 Heath played at Carnegie Hall, New York, while Kenton played at the Royal Albert Hall, London.
Victor Joseph Lewis was born in London in 1919 and learnt to play guitar, cornet and eventually trombone, becoming a force to be reckoned with on the British music scene after the Second World War. No other British bandleader changed style quite as often, ranging from Dixieland to big-band jazz.
His first six-piece band, in the mid-1930s, included three blind musicians, one of whom was George Shearing. In 1938 Lewis went to New York, where he recorded with Bobby Hackett, Eddie Condon and other American jazzmen.
The Vic Lewis Band went on to record Stan Kenton arrangements. Not everyone took to the new music, including the BBC, which after the first broadcast threatened that it could be the last. In spite of the opposition, the band played to full houses.
Another change for the band came in 1950 with a 20-piece line-up, attracting huge crowds to the Hammersmith Palais on Monday nights where no one danced, just listened. But other ballroom managers were not interested, and within six months Lewis dropped the curtain on “Music for Moderns”, going back to playing variety theatres, often with visiting Americans such as Frankie Laine, Johnny Ray and Nat “King” Cole.
Touring US bases in Europe, Lewis was backstage for a Stan Kenton concert in Paris when the trombonist Bob Fitzpatrick was taken ill. Persuaded by Kenton to borrow a trombone, he found himself alongside Carl Fontana in the section about to play Concerto to End All Concertos. “I looked at the part and thought, ‘Oh my God’ and the fellas said to me, ‘What you don’t know don’t play’!”
By the 1960s Lewis had become involved in management, working closely with Brian Epstein on the Beatles tour of Japan in 1966.
He was fanatical about cricket, forming the Vic Lewis Cricket Club in 1957 which, until it was disbanded in 1984, raised more than £3 million for charity. Players included such luminaries as Sir Garfield Sobers, Sir Viv Richards, Ken Barrington and Freddie Truman playing alongside many showbusiness stars.
A member of the Lord’s Taverners, Lewis had a collection of 5,000 cricket club ties. He was appointed MBE in 2007. His wife, Jill, predeceased him, and he is survived by a daughter.
Vic Lewis, MBE, bandleader, was born on July 29, 1919. He died on February 9, 2009, aged 89
The above information and photograph of Vic Lewis came from the London Times.
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| Bud Shank | |  2/04/2009
Bud Shank, the alto saxophonist was a key figure in the West Coast jazz scene of the 1950s..
A versatile musician with an adventurous nature, Shank also played flute and -- during a productive period of studio work -- had pivotal solos on the popular 1960s pop tunes "California Dreamin' " by the Mamas and the Papas and "Windy" by the Association. He had an early interest in music without borders, playing and recording with Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almeida several years before the Bossa Nova craze. In 1962, he recorded an album with Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar.
Born Clifford Everett Shank Jr. in Dayton, Ohio, on May 27, 1926, Shank was raised on a farm. He started playing clarinet at 10 and tenor saxophone at 12. He was a music major at the University of North Carolina but quit school to go on the road with a band that broke up after just a few weeks.
He decided to try his luck in Los Angeles instead of returning to the classroom. While rooming with a couple of other young musicians, he added flute to his repertoire, picking up lessons from a roommate who was learning from a professional instructor.
Shank was in bands led by Charlie Barnet and Alvino Rey before joining Kenton's new Innovations in Modern Music Orchestra in the early 1950s. Kenton's group featured a who's who of West Coast jazz talent, including Art Pepper, Shelly Manne, Bob Cooper, Shorty Rogers and Almeida.
Despite the talent, however, the end result was far less than it could have been. Author Ted Gioia wrote in "West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945-1960" that the band "often sagged under the weight of Kenton's Wagnerian ambitions."
Shank also expressed mixed feelings about the group.
Shank joined the Lighthouse All-Stars in Calfornia, in August 1953 and stayed with them until early January 1956.
According to jazz writer Doug Ramsey, who wrote an essay that became the booklet for the Mosaic label boxed set "The Pacific Jazz Bud Shank Studio Sessions," Shank's major contribution to the All-Stars was as a "first-rank alto player."
"But he also played flute to Bob Cooper's oboe," Ramsey said. "He and Cooper did an album playing flute and oboe, and from that point on the flute became a substantial part of his arsenal."
Shank led his own quartet from 1956 until 1963 and recorded a number of albums for the World Pacific and Pacific Jazz labels from the mid-1950s to the late '60s. He spent much of the '60s working as a studio musician for a diverse array of recordings and film scores, including the original version of "The Thomas Crown Affair," "The Sandpiper" and "The Summer of '42." He also scored the Bruce Brown surfing movies "Slippery When Wet" and "Barefoot Adventure."
In the 1970s, he, bassist Ray Brown, Almeida and a revolving cast of drummers played in the L.A. Four, which fused "cool-toned bop, Brazilian-oriented music and ballads," jazz writer Scott Yanow wrote in the "All Music Guide to Jazz." Some critics didn't know what to think of the sound and dismissed it as bland. The group recorded eight albums for Concord Records before disbanding in the early 1980s.
For much of his career, Shank believed that the musical accomplishments of the West Coast jazz era -- his own and his colleagues' -- were underappreciated. His playing over the last 30 years took on a harder-edged, more powerful sound more reminiscent of Phil Woods than Lee Konitz. He also dropped the flute and concentrated primarily on the alto sax.
His last gig in the Los Angeles area was at the Jazz Bakery in January, 2009.
Bud Shank died Thursday, April 2nd - 2009 at his home in Tucson of pulmonary failure, friends said. He was 82.
The above is from the L.A.Times and compiled by Jon Thurber - jon.thurber@latimes.com
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| Buddy Montgomery | |  15/05/2009
Charles "Buddy" Montgomery, the pianist and vibraphonist was one of the jazz-playing Montgomery brothers that included the legendary guitarist Wes Montgomery.
.Buddy was the youngest of the three brothers who made their names in music. In addition to Wes and Buddy, Monk Montgomery was one of the first significant electric bassists in jazz. Buddy, Wes and Monk played together in the Montgomery-Johnson Quintet and as part of the Montgomery Brothers. Buddy and Monk were also in a group called the “Mastersounds”
Montgomery was born in Indianapolis on Jan. 30, 1930. His musical family also included a brother, Thomas, who played the drums but died of pneumonia at 19, and a sister, Ervena, who played piano.
Buddy started out on piano and by 18 was touring with blues singer Big Joe Turner. He later played with trombonist and arranger Slide Hampton.
After a stint in the Army during the Korean War, Buddy led the Montgomery-Johnson Quintet from 1955 to 1957 with his brothers Wes on guitar and Monk on bass. Alonzo "Pookie" Johnson played alto saxophone and Sonny Johnson was on drums.
By 1956, Buddy had switched to the vibraphone, an instrument he became interested in as a teenager after seeing Lionel Hampton. In 1957, Buddy and Monk formed the Mastersounds, with Benny Barth on drums and Richie Crabtree on piano. Richard Bock, the owner of Pacific Jazz Records, released several albums of their work, and the group found steady gigs in San Francisco. On Buddy's suggestion, one of their albums, "The King and I: A Modern Jazz Interpretation by the Mastersounds," featured music from the hit Broadway show. Two of their other albums were thematic excursions through Broadway productions, "Kismet: An Interpretation by the Mastersounds" and "Flower Drum Song: A Modern Jazz Interpretation by the Mastersounds."
In 1959, the group recorded its only live album at what was then Pasadena Junior College before disbanding late in the year.
Through much of the '60s, the three Montgomery brothers played together and recorded albums including "Groove Brothers" and "Groove Yard" as the Montgomery Brothers.
After Wes Montgomery's death from a heart attack in 1968, Buddy moved to Milwaukee and worked the hotel circuit there for much of the next decade. In the early 1980s, he lived in the Bay Area recording for Landmark and Riverside. Monk died in 1982.
Montgomery was active in jazz education, organizing the Milwaukee Jazz Alliance and later the Oakland Jazz Alliance, which brought jazz into the public schools in each city.
Montgomery died May 14 of heart failure at his home in Palmdale, according to his family
Montgomery's survivors include his wife, Ann; a son, David; a daughter, Charla; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He is also survived by his
The above is by Jon Thurber of the Los Angeles Times - the photograph of Buddy Montgomery is also from the L.A. Times.
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| Jack Nimitz | |  10/06/2009
Jack Nimitz was a jazz baritone saxophonist who played in the Woody Herman and Stan Kenton big bands and in the group "Supersax."
Born in Washington, D.C., in 1930 Nimitz began playing clarinet at an early age and alto saxophone at 14. He was still a teenager when he began playing professional gigs at Howard Theatre in Washington.
He soon fell in love with the baritone saxophone. "It sounded so warm and nice and dark and rich," he told The Times some years ago. "The bottom notes are the best notes in the whole orchestra, because if you don't have a good bottom, nothing really works."
He bought his first baritone saxophone at the age of 20 and three years later was playing baritone in Herman's band. Through the 1950s, he played with Herman, Kenton and, later, Herbie Mann.
On the advice of colleagues in Kenton's band, he came to Los Angeles in the early 1960s and established himself as a first-rank studio musician for scores of film soundtracks and recording sessions. He worked frequently for songwriter Johnny Mandel. He also played with such jazz luminaries as Benny Carter, Gerald Wilson and the Lighthouse All-Stars.
In the early 1970s, he added his baritone to the Charlie Parker tribute band "Supersax."
His first album as a leader was the 1995 session on Fresh Sound records called "Confirmation," which focused heavily on bebop tunes.
"Bebop is the most sophisticated form of jazz," he told The Times. "It's very challenging but also rewarding because it feels so good when it happens."
A memorial service will be held Saturday at 3 p.m. at Chapel of the Hills, Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills.
Jack Nimitz died Wednesday, June 10-2009 of complications from emphysema at his home in Studio City. He was 79.
The above information and photograph were taken from the L.A.Times on-line obituary page.
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| Chris Connor | |  30/08 2009
Chris Connor, was the smoky-voiced jazz vocalist who gained renown for her recording of "All About Ronnie" and other singles with the Stan Kenton Orchestra before going solo in 1953 and having success with songs such as "Trust in Me" and "About the Blues,"
In a more than 50-year singing career that began in the late 1940s with the Claude Thornhill Orchestra, Connor recorded with bandleader Herbie Fields and sang with Jerry Wald's big band before joining Kenton in early 1953.
Known for what has been described as her "warm, cello-like tones" and using little or no vibrato, she achieved her greatest acclaim beginning in the mid-1950s singing with small groups made up of established jazz musicians.
"She, along with Carmen McRae, really pioneered jazz trio singing where they'd stand in front of a mike and, supported by piano, bass and drums, created enormous intimacy," said jazz historian and journalist Marc Myers.
Connor's first album, recorded in 1954, was "Chris Connor Sings Lullabys of Birdland," with the Ellis Larkins Trio.
"What you begin to hear with Chris are breathy vocals and a slick-chick delivery that was both sexy and savvy," he said. "You never got the feeling with Chris that she was a helpless female, but you never got the feeling that she was bossy, either. And, as a result, almost everyone who heard her fell in love with her."
The interesting thing about Connor, said jazz critic Don Heckman, was that "she came along at a time when there was a concept of coolness coming into jazz -- the Miles Davis 'Birth of the Cool' recordings and the general sense of coolness that was associated with West Coast jazz, which was becoming very popular.
"The clear sound of her vibrato-less vocals and her cool onstage manner always reminded me of the detachment of the [Alfred] Hitchcock heroines of the time."
Connor was born Mary Loutsenhizer in Kansas City, Mo., on Nov. 8, 1927. Although she studied clarinet for eight years, she later said that she always wanted to be a singer.
"I never took lessons," she told the Buffalo News in 1996. "I like a natural singer better."
While working as a secretary after graduating from high school, she spent weekends singing with a Kenton-influenced college jazz band at the University of Missouri.
In 1949, after moving to New York City, she joined the Claude Thornhill Orchestra as a member of the four Snowflakes, Thornhill's singing group.
Connor was singing with Jerry Wald's band when former Kenton vocalist June Christy heard her on a radio broadcast from a New Orleans hotel and recommended her to Kenton.
As a singer, Connor was often compared to Christy and Anita O'Day, who preceded them in the Kenton band. But, Myers said, "she didn't set out to be like them. It so happened her voice had similar characteristics."
In a 1986 interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune, Connor acknowledged that she "went to school" on O'Day but also studied the style of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Christy.
"I may have spent more time studying Anita and June because I made up my mind early on I wanted to sing with the Kenton band," she said.
Connor's recording of the ballad "All About Ronnie" and other recordings with Kenton brought her national acclaim. But tired of the grind of performing on the road, she left Kenton in mid-1953 and soon launched her solo career.
After a year and a half with Bethlehem Records, Connor signed with Atlantic Records, where she recorded from 1956 to 1962.
Although her career took a downturn after leaving Atlantic, she continued recording for other labels until 2003. Her last appearance was at the Iridium Jazz Club in New York City in 2004.
Connor died of cancer on Saturday, August 30-2009 at Community Medical Center in Toms River, N.J. U.S.A. She was 80 years of age.
The above was compiled by Dennis McLellan of the Los Angels Times and came from the L.A. Times on-line obituary page. The photograph of Chris Connor is also from the same website page.
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| Ed Thigpen | |  13/01/2010
Jazz drummer Ed Thigpen was often described as "Mr. Taste" for his sensitive accompaniment of instrumentalists and singers such as Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Bud Powell and Billy Taylor and many others.
In addition to the "Mr. Taste" label, Thigpen also was identified as a musician's drummer, a player who set a standard for blending subtle, propulsive swing with an adaptability that allowed him to function in a wide range of musical settings.
"Even though he seldom ever wanted to show all of the skills that he had -- which was a matter of his good taste and selectivity," said drummer and friend Ed Shaughnessy, "he had a great deal of ability on the drum set. He wasn't a dogmatic player. He could be as perfect as he was with Oscar Peterson, and then he could be completely different in another context."
Universally admired for the subtle range of timbres he extracted from his drum kit, Thigpen was adept with the use of brushes -- a technique that he believed had been largely abandoned by a younger generation of drummers.
"Since the emergence of rock, which for the most part has always required heavy drumming," he told Leonard Feather in The Times in 1986, "the brushes were set aside, or, for most of the young players who began during this period, have never been used at all. My father and many others -- Jo Jones, Art Blakey, Buddy Rich, Max Roach, Shelly Manne, Elvin Jones -- all had a great influence on my use of the brushes, which I still believe must remain an important part of any drummer's performance."
Born in Chicago on Dec. 28, 1930, Edmund Leonard Thigpen moved to St. Louis with his parents, Ben and Mary, while still an infant. When his parents separated, he was taken to Los Angeles by his mother, who died when he was a teenager.
After attending Jefferson High School -- an educational launching pad for such other well-known jazz artists as drummer Chico Hamilton, trumpeter Art Farmer and saxophonist Dexter Gordon -- he attended Los Angeles City College, then moved back to St. Louis with his father, a drummer with the Andy Kirk Orchestra. Working with Peanuts Whalum's Orchestra, he occasionally jammed with Miles Davis, a St. Louis native.
In 1951, Thigpen made the move to New York City that was vital for any ambitious young jazz player of the period. After performing with Cootie Williams' band, he was drafted into the Army, serving during the Korean War from 1951 to 1953. Returning to New York, he soon established himself as one of the up-and-coming jazz drummers. His ability to play a creative supportive role made him the drummer of choice in a wide range of musical settings.
In the mid-'50s, his performances and recordings reached from singer Dinah Washington, saxophonists Johnny Hodges and Paul Quinichette to such cutting-edge artists as Lennie Tristano and Gil Melle. From 1959 to 1966, he joined with bassist Ray Brown as the rhythm team for Oscar Peterson, forming one of the classic jazz trios, recording dozens of albums with the high-powered pianist.
"When you're in a band like Oscar Peterson's," said drummer Bobby Colomby, "it's as much supporting as it is getting out of the way, which, for a drummer, is quite a talent. And Thigpen added something that was perfect for the context of that situation, and for whatever music he was playing."
After his relocation to Copenhagen in 1972, Thigpen became the drummer of choice for touring American jazz artists while balancing his performance schedule with an active career as an educator and clinician. Teaching in the conservatories of Copenhagen and other European cities, he sometimes included seminars at U.S. universities during his occasional American tours. Articulate, and soft-spoken, he was an imaginative teacher whose insights enlightened his student musicians with a mixture of practical advice and metaphoric insights.
"The role of a drummer," he told Mike Zwerin in the International Herald Tribune in 2000, "is like that of a chariot driver who 'has to hold all those horses in rein. Your ears have to be open to everybody.' "
He supported his quest for a revival of brush technique with the instruction book, "The Sound of Brushes." He also wrote extensively about other aspects of jazz drumming in the books "Talking Drums," "Rhythm Analysis and Basic Coordination" and "Rhythm Brought to Life."
Thigpen recorded dozens of performances with other artists. His own albums include "Out of the Storm," "The Element of Swing," "It's Entertainment" and "Mr. Taste."
Thigpen passed away on Wednesday ,13, 2010 at Hvidovre Hospital in Copenhagen, Denmark at the age of 79.
Ed Thigpen, who suffered from Parkinson's disease, was hospitalized before Christmas 2009 with heart and lung problems. His son, Michel, noted on Thigpen’s website that his father "passed away very peacefully . . . in the company of his friends and family."
In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Denise; and a granddaughter, Nikita.
The above information compiled by Don Heckman was taken from the Los Angeles Times. Don Heckman is a freelance jazz writer.
The above photograph of Ed Thigpen by Mel Melcon also came for the L.A.Times
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| Sir John Dankworth | |  6/02/2010
Sir John Dankworth, the British jazz composer, saxophonist and bandleader was the husband of jazz singer Dame Cleo Laine.
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John Phillip William Dankworth was born Sept. 20, 1927, in London. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music from 1944 to 1946.
According to "The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz" by Leonard Feather and Ira Gitler, Dankworth from 1947 to 1948 played with ships' bands making transatlantic crossings and visited clubs to "reinforce his interest in modern jazz and Charlie Parker's strong influence."
Dankworth explained on the CBS show "Sunday Morning" in 1990 how those trips influenced jazz in postwar England.
"We used to go back and remember all the licks we could and take them back," he said. "Very lucky to be there at the right place and the right time."
He led the John Dankworth Seven from 1950 to 1953, then formed a big band that played regularly, including at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1959. According to "The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz," his large jazz orchestra featured a three-piece saxophone section and Laine as the featured singer.
Dankworth, who worked with such jazz greats as Nat "King" Cole and Ella Fitzgerald, became musical director for Cleo Laine in 1971 and scaled down the band's size. During the 1980s, he toured with his own quintet. In the early 1990s, he and his son, Alec, formed the Dankworth Generation Band.
Dankworth, who also played the clarinet, might be best known for his appearances touring with Laine, but he also was a composer and conductor.
The films he scored include "Modesty Blaise," and he wrote the theme of the television show "The Avengers.”
In 1969, Dankworth and Laine founded the Wavendon Allmusic Plan, a musical education charity, and established a theater in the old stable block on their property about 50 miles north of London.
Laine was made a dame in 1997, and Dankworth was knighted in 2006 by Queen Elizabeth II for service to music.
Along with Laine, whom he married in 1958, and their son, his survivors include their daughter, Jacqui.
Alec and Jacqui both performed during the anniversary concert.
Laine announced Dankworth's death before the finale of an anniversary concert at the Stables, the theater they founded together.
Monica Ferguson, the theater's chief executive, said that Laine had told the artists before the concert, " 'I'll go on and I'll have a lump in my throat, and I might crack.' But she didn't crack."
Sir John Dankworth died Saturday, February 6- 2010 at a London hospital after a long illness. He was 82.
The above information was taken from the Los Angeles Times on-line obituary page. The photo of Sir John Dankworth is by the Associated Press. news.obits@latimes.com
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| Jake Hanna | |  12/02/2010
Drummer Jake Hanna, known for his unerring sense of time, was at home playing with big bands and small groups. He performed with Woody Herman, Maynard Ferguson, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Marian Mc Partland among others.
Jake Hanna, a versatile drummer who was a longtime member of the band on Merv Griffin's television show
In 1957 he performed with Woody Herman in 1957 and the early 1960s, then joined Merve Griffin's band, in which he played until 1975. Hanna moved to the West Coast when the show relocated from New York to Los Angeles.
Jake Hanna was "highly regarded for his unerring sense of time, his ability to control a band at any tempo and his refined musical taste."
He also led a group with trombonist Carl Fontana and worked regularly with the group Supersax.
John Edwin Hanna was born April 4, 1931, in Dorchester, Mass.
He started playing drums as a teenager. "My father played all the early records. Benny Goodman, when Gene [Krupa] was with the band. It was easy for me," he told the Sacramento Bee in 2002.
Hanna served in the Air Force from 1951 to 1953.
In 1977, he met his future wife while he was playing in a quartet accompanying Bing Crosby.
Jake Hanna passed away on Friday February 12-2010 at Kaiser Permanente West Los Angeles Medical Center of complications from a bone marrow disease, said his wife, Denisa.
Besides his wife, whom he married in 1984, Hanna is survived by his sisters, Mary Howard and Eleanor Judge.
keith.thursby@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
The photograph of Jake Hanna came from www.drummerworld.com
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| Herb Ellis | |  4/08/1921
Herb Ellis was born in McKinley, Texas on August 4th – 1921.
During the 1950s Herb was a member of the Oscar Peterson trio, which served as the house recording band for Verve Records. He accompanied the who's-who of jazz greats, including Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge, Harry "Sweets" Edison and Ben Webster.
It has been said that in Herb Ellis, virtuoso jazz pianist Peterson found his truest musical peer.
In his youth, Herb Ellis played with big bands including the Caso Loma Orchestra and the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra.
After a five-year stint with Oscar Peterson's trio in the 1950s, Herb toured with Ella Fitzgerald and then settled in southern California, where he worked in movie and television studios before launching his own small jazz groups.
One of his most memorable ventures was creating the Great Guitars with fellow jazz guitarists Barney Kessel and Charlie Byrd. At every show, these three peers challenged each other's dexterity in musical conversation.
Perhaps the greatest tribute to Ellis are these words from guitarist Les Paul, who said - "If you're not swinging, he's gonna make you swing. Of the whole bunch of guys who . play hollow-body guitar... I think Herb Ellis has got the most drive."
Herb had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease – He passed away at his home in Los Angeles on Sunday, March 28 into his 89th year.
The above by Terence McArdie was taken from the Washington Post website.
Pictured is the photograph on th album cover "Oscar Peterson Hello Herbie"
MPS 821 846-2 CD Recorded Villingen, Germany `Nov. 5th and 6th 1969.
From left, Bobby Durham, drums; Herb Ellis, guitar; Oscar Peterson, piano; Sam Jones, bass. The photograph was taken by Atelier F. Hugel.Top
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| John Bunch | |  4/04/2010
Jazz pianist John Bunch speculated that one reason why Benny Goodman liked his playing was because he "knew what to leave out."
"I suppose if he'd heard me say it, he'd probably deny it, but I think it was true," Mr. Bunch said.
John Bunch whose spare, elegant style kept him busy throughout a career that spanned more than 70 years. Mr. Bunch was still performing in Manhattan clubs a month before his death.
In a 2009 interview, Mr. Bunch listed his piano influences, and they included Bud Powell, Hank Jones and even Thomas "Fats" Waller. But he said "his greatest inspiration" was Teddy Wilson, another Goodman sideman.
In addition to playing with Goodman, Mr. Bunch was singer Tony Bennett's musical director for six years.
They met in Los Angeles in 1966 when Mr. Bunch was playing with Buddy Rich's band. Rich asked Bennett to come onstage and sing, and Mr. Bunch accompanied him on the piano.
A few weeks later, Mr. Bunch got a call from Bennett's manager asking him to join him.
"I guess Tony must have liked something he heard," Mr. Bunch said.
John Bunch was born in Tipton, Ind., a small farming community north of Indianapolis.
His family knew the 8-year-old boy had a gift when he sat at a piano and repeated the melody crackling over the radio. His first teacher was the local barber.
"His advertising went, 'Learn how to play the piano in 10 easy lessons,' and that's what I did," Mr. Bunch said.
It wasn't long before he was making good money ("two, three dollars a week," he said) performing with "grown-ups" at a black night club in nearby Anderson.
Mr. Bunch was well into his career as a musician when World War II started. He ended up serving as a bombardier. He was shot down, taken prisoner and held at Stalag Luft III, famous for "The Great Escape," which had taken place earlier.
After the war, he attended Indiana University to pursue a speech communications degree. But he kept his hand in music, playing in a dance band headed by Med Flory, who later formed Grammy-award-winning Supersax.
After graduating, Mr. Bunch moved to Indianapolis, where he jammed with Leroy Vinnegar, Benny Barth, Lee Katzman and the gifted African-American guitarist Wes Montgomery.
Despite the segregation still in force throughout the country in the mid '50s, Mr. Bunch said, black and white jazz musicians felt comfortable performing together in Indianapolis.
"Back when it was dangerous for a mixed band to go down south, they were good friends up north," he said.
"Jazz musicians were way ahead of the game as far as that goes."
In 1956, he headed to Los Angeles and started playing with Woody Herman, Maynard Ferguson, Georgie Auld and Rich, Bennett's friend.
In 1962, Mr. Bunch was part of the Goodman band that made the State Department-sponsored tour of the Soviet Union.
"I think maybe one thing he liked about me other than my piano playing was I wasn't afraid of him," Mr. Bunch said. "I'd heard all the other stories way before I went with him, so nothing shocked me. I wouldn't let him shock me."
John Bunch died of cancer of cancer in New York City on Tuesday in New York. He was 88.
The above information was taken from the Chicago Sun -Times on-line publication on April 4 -2010.
The writer was Bonnie Layton
The photograph of John Bunch is by Alan Nahigian and was taken from the on-line service of the New York Times.
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| Gene Lees | |  22-04-2010
Gene Lees, a jazz historian and critic was known for his pugnacious, highly personal essays and biographies of such jazz greats as Oscar Peterson, Woody Herman and Johnny Merce.r,
Lees had struggled for many years with heart disease, said family friend Leslie A. Westbrook.
A Canadian by birth who moved to Ojai more than 30 years ago, Lees was also a lyricist and composer who wrote the words for a number of classics, including the English lyrics for Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars." As a collaborator, Lees also wrote "Waltz for Debby" with pianist Bill Evans and "The Right to Love" with composer Lalo Schifrin.
Lees also had the distinction of collaborating with a pope: He translated poems written by Pope John Paul II when the latter was a Polish priest named Karol Wojtyla. The result was a cycle of songs recorded in 1985 called "One World, One Peace." Sarah Vaughan was the vocalist.
A former editor of Downbeat, the influential jazz magazine, Lees was most prolific as a critic and historian, writing essays on jazz and other topics for the Gene Lees Jazzletter, a private monthly newsletter he founded in 1981 that had more than 1,000 subscribers, including many musicians.
Former New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb, who excerpted two Lees pieces in his 1996 anthology "Reading Jazz," described Lees as "a strong presence in jazz" who was "equally fierce as advocate and enemy —outspoken, passionate, even polemical."
Gottlieb said Lees was "at his formidable best" in the appreciations he wrote on musicians he knew intimately, such as Evans, the influential pianist whose heroin habit contributed to an early death in 1980 at 51. Lees, as critic Nat Hentoff once wrote, was "one of the relatively few chroniclers left who has known the musicians he writes about long and well."
Among Lees' 18 books are "The Modern Rhyming Dictionary: How to Write Lyrics" (1981), "Oscar Peterson: The Will to Swing" ( 1988), "Waiting for Dizzy" (1991), "Cats of Any Color: Jazz Black and White" (1994), "Leader of the Band: The Life of Woody Herman" (1995) and "You Can't Steal a Gift: Dizzy, Clark, Milt and Nat" (2001). He recently completed a biography of band leader Artie Shaw.
Eugene Frederick John "Gene" Lees was born Feb. 8, 1928, in Hamilton, Canada. He attended Ontario College of Art in Toronto and from 1948 to 1955 worked as a journalist at several Canadian newspapers.
In 1955 he moved to Kentucky, and for the next three years he was a critic and editor for the Louisville Times.
In 1959 he became editor of Downbeat but stayed for less than two years. He gave a number of explanations for leaving in 1961, including his refusal to stop putting black musicians on the cover.
After leaving Downbeat he joined a State Department tour of South America with the Paul Winter Sextet. In Brazil he met Jobim. "I told Jobim that his songs could be done in English and I showed him what could be done. . . . I wrote ‘Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars' on a bus going to Belo Horizonte and mailed it back to him in Rio. It was my first professional lyric," he told Harrigan Logan for an article published in 2006 on the website of the Robert Farnon Society.
After "Quiet Nights" became a hit in the United States, Lees had more collaborations with Jobim and other bossa nova artists. Lees "helped take bossa nova into a broader American market by writing English lyrics," said jazz critic Don Heckman.
Lees' love of jazz began when he was 12. While riding his bike near Niagara Falls, he noticed a crowd of people outside a ballroom and sneaked through a side door, where he glimpsed "this amazing scene of these gleaming instruments and these dapper, self-contained men." Those men were members of the Duke Ellington band. "They started out with ‘Take the A Train' and wham! It took my breath away," he recalled in a 1993 Newsday interview. "I got hopelessly strung out on that music from then on."
A couple of decades later, as Downbeat editor, he began to meet the jazz greats whose music he loved and eventually shared a stage with some of them, including Dizzy Gillespie. In his piece "Waiting for Dizzy," he wrote: "There is a gesture he has, a notion that always reminds me of a great batter leaning into a hit. He has a way of throwing one foot forward putting his head down a bit as he silently runs the valves, and then the cheeks bloom out in the way that has mystified his dentist for years, and he hits into the solo. When that foot goes forward like that, you know that John Birks Gillespie is no longer clowning. Stand back."
Lee's wife of 39 years, Janet Suttle Lees, plans to continue publishing the Jazzletter. He is also survived by a son from a previous marriage, Phillippe; a
Gene Less died in his home on Thursday, June 22-2010. He was 82.
The above was compiled by Elaine Woo of the L.A. Times.
The photograph of Mr. Less was also from the L.A. Times
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
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