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Biographies
A
Armstrong Louis
Real Name: Louis Daniel Armstrong
Profile: Jazz trumpeter and singer from New Orleans, Louisiana.
Born: 4 August 1901, New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A.
Died: 6 July 1971, New York, New York State, U.S.A. (aged 69)
Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901, in New Orleans, Louisiana, the birthplace of jazz. He is considered the most important improviser in jazz, and he taught the world to swing. Armstrong, fondly known as "Satchmo" (which is short for "Satchelmouth" referring to the size of his mouth) or "Pops," had a sense of humor, natural and unassuming manner, and positive disposition that made everyone around him feel good. With his infectious, wide grin and instantly recognizable gravelly voice, he won the hearts of people everywhere. He had an exciting and innovative style of playing that musicians imitate to this day. Throughout his career, Armstrong spread the language of jazz around the world, serving as an international ambassador of swing. His profound impact on the music of the 20th century continues into the 21st century.
Armstrong grew up in a poor family in a rough section of New Orleans. He started working at a very young age to support his family, singing on street corners for pennies, working on a junk wagon, cleaning graves for tips, and selling coal. His travels around the city introduced him to all kinds of music, from the blues played in the Storyville honky tonks to the brass bands accompanying the New Orleans parades and funerals. The music that surrounded him was a great source of inspiration. A born musician, Armstrong had already demonstrated his singing talents on the streets of the city and eventually taught himself to play the cornet. He received his first formal music instruction in the Colored Waif's Home for Boys, where he was allegedly confined for a year and a half as punishment for firing blanks into the air on New Year's Eve.
As the young Armstrong began to perform with pick-up bands in small clubs and play funerals and parades around town, he captured the attention and respect of some of the older established musicians of New Orleans. Joe "King" Oliver, a member of Kid Ory's band and one of the finest trumpet players around, became Armstrong's mentor. When Oliver moved to Chicago, Armstrong took his place in Kid Ory's band, a leading group in New Orleans at the time. A year later, he was hired to work on riverboats that traveled the Mississippi. This experience enabled him to play with many prominent jazz musicians and to further develop his skills, learning to read music and undertaking the responsibilities of a professional gig.
In 1922, Oliver invited Armstrong to Chicago to play second cornet in his Creole Jazz Band. As a member of Oliver's band, Armstrong began his lifetime of touring and recording. In 1924, he moved on to New York City to play with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra at the Roseland Ballroom. Armstrong continued his touring and recording activities with Henderson's group and also made recordings with Sidney Bechet, Ma Rainey, and Bessie Smith. In 1925, Armstrong returned to Chicago and made his first recordings as a band leader with his Hot Five (and later his Hot Seven). From 1925 to 1928 he continued a rigorous schedule of performing and recording, which included Heebie Jeebies, the tune that introduced scat singing to a wide audience and West End Blues, one of the most famous recordings in early jazz. During this period, his playing steadily improved, and his traveling and recording activities introduced his music to more and more people.
In 1929, Armstrong returned to New York City and made his first Broadway appearance. His 1929 recording of Ain't Misbehavin' introduced the use of a pop song as material for jazz interpretation, helping set the stage for the popular acceptance of jazz that would follow. During the next year, he performed in several U.S. states, including California, where he made his first film and radio appearances. In 1931, he first recorded When It's Sleepytime Down South, the tune that became his theme song. In 1932, he toured England for three months, and during the next few years, continued his extensive domestic and international tours, including a lengthy stay in Paris.
When Armstrong returned to the U.S. in 1935, Joe Glaser became his manager. Not only did Glaser free Armstrong from the managerial battles and legal difficulties of the past few years, he remained his manager for the duration of his career and helped transform Armstrong into an international star. Under Glaser's management, Armstrong performed in films, on the radio, and in the best theaters, dance halls, and nightclubs. He worked with big bands, playing music of an increasingly commercial nature as well as small groups that showcased his singing of popular songs.
In 1942, Armstrong married Lucille Wilson, a dancer at the Cotton Club where his band had a running engagement. The following year, they purchased a home in Corona, Queens, where they lived for the rest of their lives. In 1947, Armstrong formed a small ensemble called the All-Stars, a group of extraordinary players whose success revitalized mainstream jazz. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, he continued to appear in popular films and made numerous international tours, earning him the title "Ambassador Satch." During a trip to West Africa, Armstrong was greeted by more than one hundred thousand people. In the early 1960's, he continued to record, including two albums with Duke Ellington and the hit Hello Dolly, which reached number one on the Billboard charts. Armstrong performed regularly until recurring health problems gradually curtailed his trumpet playing and singing. Even in the last year of his life, he traveled to London twice, appeared on more than a dozen television shows, and performed at the Newport Jazz Festival to celebrate his 70th birthday. Up until a few days before his death, on July 6, 1971, he was setting up band rehearsals in preparation to perform for his beloved public.
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B
Sidney Bechet
Real Name: Sidney Joseph Bechet
Profile: Clarinet & soprano saxophone player, from New Orleans,Louisiana.
Born:14 May 1897 New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A
Died: 14 May 1959 Garches France (aged 62)
Sidney Bechet grew up in a musical family, and all of his four brothers played instruments; Leonard (Victor) Bechet (1886-1952) was briefly a professional trombonist before becoming a dentist, and his son, Leonard, Jr. (1927-), played saxophone and was his uncle's manager for a while. Sidney Bechet took up clarinet as a young boy. He studied sporadically with the older clarinetists Lorenzo Tio, Jr., Big Eye Nelson, and George Baquet, but was principally self-taught. By about 1910 he was working with some of the incipient jazz bands in the city, but around 1916 he left New Orleans to wander (a habit which stayed with him into middle age), playing in touring shows and carnivals throughout the South and Midwest. He arrived in Chicago in 1917, and played with bands led by the New Orleans pioneers Freddie Keppard,King Oliver, and Lawrence Duhé.
In 1919 Bechet was discovered by Will Marion Cook, who was about to take his large concert band, the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, to Europe. The orchestra played mainly concert music in fixed arrangements with little improvising, but featured Bechet (who could not read music) in blues specialties. In London the Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet heard the band, and in an article that has been widely reprinted referred to Bechet as "an extraordinary clarinet virtuoso" and an "artist of genius."
Bechet first discovered the curved soprano saxophone in Chicago; while in London he purchased a straight model and taught himself to play it. It became his primary instrument for the rest of his life, though he continued to play clarinet frequently. The soprano, although difficult to play in tune, has a powerful, commanding voice, and with it Bechet was able to dominate jazz ensembles.
In 1919 Bechet broke away from the Southern Syncopated Orchestra to work in England and France with a small ragtime band led by Benny Peyton; throughout the 1920s he traveled constantly between Europe and the USA, even touring Russia with a jazz band. Crucially, in 1924, he worked for two or three months in New York with the Duke EllingtonOrchestra. In 1923 the band had acquired the trumpeter Bubber Miley, a growl specialist under the influence of King Oliver. Miley had awakened Ellington's musicians to the new jazz music, but the band was in a transitional period, still playing much ordinary jazz-flavored popular music. Bechet had by this time acquired a capacity to swing that was matched only by that of Louis Armstrong, and his example led the band further towards jazz. Not long afterwards Bechet opened his own club, the Club Basha, in Harlem, and engaged Johnny Hodges from Boston to play in his band. Hodges was profoundly influenced by Bechet, and from his commanding position in the Ellington orchestra from 1928 he extended this influence widely and deeply.
In 1924 and 1925 Bechet made a group of recordings with Armstrong which were variously issued under the names Clarence Williams's Blue Five and the Red Onion Jazz Babies. These constitute one of the most important bodies of New Orleans jazz, and were influential with musicians of the time. (On one of these numbers Bechet played sarrusophone — the only known example of this instrument on a jazz recording.) Through the next few years Bechet continued to wander, traveling in Europe and the USA. In the 1930s, as hot dance music lost its popularity to more sentimental styles, Bechet dropped into obscurity, playing when he could find work. He organized the New Orleans Feetwarmers in 1932 with Tommy Ladnier, but largely owing to the group's musical style it was short-lived, and the following year the two men briefly managed a tailor's shop. However, with the New Orleans revival, from about 1939 Bechet was extolled by critics as one of the greatest jazz pioneers and his fortunes improved. He made several recordings, notably several fine titles with the Big Four and a series with Mezz Mezzrow for King Jazz. In 1949 he returned to Europe for the first time in almost 20 years. He was received there with adulation and reverence, and in 1951 he settled permanently in France, where he lived out his final years as a show business star.
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C
Coltrane John
Real Name: John William Coltrane
Profile: Jazz saxophonist and composer.
Born: 23 September 1926 in Hamlet, North Carolina USA
Died: 17 July 1967 in New York City, New York USA. (aged 40)
John Coltrane was, after Charlie Parker, the most revolutionary and widely imitated saxophonist in jazz. Coltrane grew up in High Point, North Carolina, where he learned to play E-flat alto horn, clarinet, and (at about the age of 15) alto saxophone. After moving to Philadelphia he enrolled at the Ornstein School of Music and the Granoff Studios; service in a navy band in Hawaii (1945-46) interrupted these studies. He played alto saxophone in the bands led by Joe Webb and King Kolax, then changed to the tenor to work with Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson (1947-48). He performed on either instrument as circumstances demanded while in groups led by Jimmy Heath, Howard McGhee, Dizzy Gillespie (with whom he made his first recording in 1949), Earl Bostic, and lesser-known rhythm-and-blues musicians, but by the time of his membership in Johnny Hodges's septet (1953-54) he was firmly committed to the tenor instrument. He performed infrequently for about a year, then leaped to fame in Miles Davis' quintet with Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones (1955-57).
Coltrane turned to increasingly radical musical styles in the mid-1960s. These controversial experiments attracted large audiences, and by 1965 he was surprisingly affluent. From autumn 1965 his search for new sounds resulted in frequent changes of personnel in his group. New members included Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane (his wife), Rashied Ali (a second drummer until Jones' departure), several drummers as seconds to Ali, and a number of African-influenced percussionists. In his final years and after his death, Coltrane acquired an almost saintly reputation among listeners and fellow musicians for his energetic and selfless support of young avant-garde performers, his passionate religious convictions, his peaceful demeanor, and his obsessive striving for a musical ideal. He died at the age of 40 of a liver ailment. A videotape tracing his development, The Coltrane Legacy, produced by David Chertok and Burrill Crohn, was issued in 1987.
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D
Davis Miles
Real Name: Miles Dewey Davis III
Profile: Trumpeter, bandleader, composer and one of the most important figures in jazz music history,and music history in general.
Born: 26 May 1926 in Alton, Illinois, USA.
Died: 28 September 1991 in Santa Monica, California, USA. (aged 65)
An original, lyrical soloist and a demanding group leader, Miles Davis was the most consistently innovative musician in jazz from the late 1940s through the 1960s. Davis grew up in East St. Louis, and took up trumpet at the age of 13; two years later he was already playing professionally. He moved to New York in September 1944, ostensibly to enter the Institute of Musical Art but actually to locate his idol, Charlie Parker. He joined Parker in live appearances and recording sessions (1945-8), at the same time playing in other groups and touring in the big bands led by Benny Carter and Billy Eckstine.
In 1948 he began to lead his own bop groups, and he participated in an experimental workshop centered on the arranger Gil Evans. Their collaborations with Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, and Johnny Carisi culminated in a series of nonet recordings for Capitol under Davis' name and later collected and reissued as Birth of the Cool. In 1949 Davis performed with Sonny Rollins and Art Blakey, and with Tadd Dameron, until heroin addiction interrupted his public career intermittently from mid-1949 to 1953. Although he continued to record with famous bop musicians, including Parker, Rollins, Blakey, J. J. Johnson, Horace Silver, and members of the Modern Jazz Quartet, he worked in clubs infrequently and with inferior accompanists until 1954.
In 1955 Davis appeared informally at the Newport Jazz Festival. His sensational improvisations there brought him widespread publicity and sufficient engagements to establish a quintet (1955-7) with Red Garland, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones, and John Coltrane, who in 1956 was joined and later replaced by Rollins. In May 1957 Davis made the first of several remarkable solo recordings on trumpet and flugelhorn against unusual jazz orchestrations by Gil Evans. In the autumn he organized a quintet, later joined by Cannonball Adderley, that proved short-lived; in the same year he wrote and recorded music in Paris for Louis Malle's filmAscenseur pour l'echafaud.
Upon his return to the USA he re-formed his original quintet of 1955 with Adderley as a sixth member. For the next five years Davis drew the rhythm sections of his various sextets and quintets from a small pool of players: the pianists Garland, Bill Evans (1958-9), and Wynton Kelly, the drummers Jones and Jimmy Cobb, and bass player Chambers. Personnel changes increased in early 1963, and finally Davis engaged a new rhythm section as the nucleus of another quintet: Herbie Hancock (1963-8), Ron Carter (1963-8), and Tony Williams (1963-9). To replace Coltrane, who had left in 1960, Davis tried a succession of saxophonists, including Sonny Stitt, Jimmy Heath, Hank Mobley (1961), George Coleman (1963-4), and Sam Rivers; ultimately he settled on Wayne Shorter (1964-70).
Upon his return to the USA he re-formed his original quintet of 1955 with Adderley as a sixth member. For the next five years Davis drew the rhythm sections of his various sextets and quintets from a small pool of players: the pianists Garland, Bill Evans (1958-9), and Wynton Kelly, the drummers Jones and Jimmy Cobb, and bass player Chambers. Personnel changes increased in early 1963, and finally Davis engaged a new rhythm section as the nucleus of another quintet: Herbie Hancock (1963-8), Ron Carter (1963-8), and Tony Williams (1963-9). To replace Coltrane, who had left in 1960, Davis tried a succession of saxophonists, including Sonny Stitt, Jimmy Heath, Hank Mobley (1961), George Coleman (1963-4), and Sam Rivers; ultimately he settled on Wayne Shorter (1964-70).
Because of his irascible temperament and his need for frequent periods of inactivity, these sidemen were by no means entirely faithful to Davis. Nevertheless, the groups of 1955-68 were more stable than his later ones of 1969-75. Often the instrumentation and style of his ever-changing recording ensembles (up to 14 players) diverged considerably from that of his working groups (generally sextets or septets). Influential new members joined him in the late 1960s and early 1970s: Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, Keith Jarrett, John McLaughlin, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, Bill Cobham, Al Foster, and Airto Moreira. As with Davis's previous colleagues, the excellence of these sidemen bore eloquent witness to his stature among jazz musicians.
For years Davis, who trained as a boxer, had always been physically equal to the exertions of playing jazz trumpet; however, in the mid-1970s serious ailments and the effects of an automobile accident obliged him to retire. He suffered for five years from pneumonia and other afflictions. But in 1980 he made new recordings, and in the summer of 1981 began to tour extensively with new quintets and sextets. Although he was incapacitated by a stroke in February 1982, he resumed an active career in the spring of that year. Only Foster remained with Davis, serving as a sideman to 1975 and again from 1980 to 1985. New young members of his groups have included Bill Evans (1980-84), Branford Marsalis (1984-5), Bob Berg (from 1985), John Scofield (1982-5), and the synthesizer player Robert (Bobby) Irving III (1980, from 1983). In the 1980s Davis was described as a "living legend," a title he detested because it went against his continuing inclination to be associated with new popular music and energetic youthful activities, but one that was nonetheless accurate, reflecting his position as the former partner of both Parker and Coltrane. He received an honorary Doctorate of Music from the New England Conservatory in 1986 in honor of his longstanding achievements.
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E
Ellington Duke
Real Name:Edward Kennedy Ellington
Profile: Was an American composer, pianist, and big band leader.
Born: April 29, 1899 Washington, DC USA
Died: May 24, 1974 New York City, NY USA (aged 75)
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was the most prolific composer of the twentieth century in terms of both number of compositions and variety of forms. His development was one of the most spectacular in the history of music, underscored by more than fifty years of sustained achievement as an artist and an entertainer. He is considered by many to be America's greatest composer, bandleader, and recording artist.
The extent of Ellington's innovations helped to redefine the various forms in which he worked. He synthesized many of the elements of American music — the minstrel song, ragtime, Tin Pan Alley tunes, the blues, and American appropriations of the European music tradition — into a consistent style with which, though technically complex, has a directness and a simplicity of expression largely absent from the purported art music of the twentieth century. Ellington's first great achievements came in the three-minute song form, and he later wrote music for all kinds of settings: the ballroom, the comedy stage, the nightclub, the movie house, the theater, the concert hall, and the cathedral. His blues writing resulted in new conceptions of form, harmony, and melody, and he became the master of the romantic ballad and created numerous works that featured the great soloists in his jazz orchestra.
This elegant representative of American culture was born in Washington, DC, on April 29, 1899. Ellington studied piano from age seven and was influenced by stride piano masters such as James P. Johnson, Willie "the Lion" Smith, and Fats Waller. By 1923, he had moved to New York City and had his own band, the Washingtonians. He later formed the Duke Ellington Orchestra, which by 1930 had grown to include 12 musicians and achieved national prominence through radio broadcasts, recordings, and film appearances.
By the early 1940s, Ellington experimented with extended composition and his orchestra toured the US and Europe extensively. In 1943, Ellington inaugurated a series of annual concerts at Carnegie Hall with the premiere of Black, Brown, and Beige. He continued to expand the scope of his compositions and activities as a bandleader throughout his life. His foreign tours became increasingly frequent and successful; his travel experiences served as the inspiration for his many works about people, places and trains. He wrote nearly two thousand compositions before his death in 1974.
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F
Fitzgerald Ella
Real Name: Ella Jane Fitzgerald
Profile: Dubbed "The First Lady of Song," Ella Fitzgerald was the most popular female jazz singer in the United States for more than half a century. In her lifetime, she won 13 Grammy awards and sold over 40 million albums
Born: April 25, 1917 in Newport News, Virginia USA
Died: June 15, 1996 in Beverly Hills, California USA (aged 79)
Ella Fitzgerald was orphaned in early childhood and moved to New York to attend an orphanage school in Yonkers. In 1934, she was discovered in an amateur contest sponsored by the Apollo Theatre in New York City. This led to an engagement with Chick Webb's band, and she soon became a celebrity of the swing era with performances such as A-tisket, A-tasket(1938) and Undecided (1939). When Webb died in 1939, Fitzgerald took over the direction of the band, which she led for three years. She then embarked on a solo career, issuing commercial and jazz recordings, and in 1946 began an association with Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic, which eventually brought her a large international following.
She also sang in a jazz group led by her husband, Ray Brown (1948-52). Early in 1956, Fitzgerald severed her longstanding connection with Decca to join Granz's newly founded Verve label. Among their first projects was a series of 11 songbooks dedicated to major American songwriters. The series made use of superior jazz-inflected arrangements by Nelson Riddle and others and succeeded in attracting an extremely large non-jazz audience, establishing Fitzgerald among the supreme interpreters of the popular-song repertory. Thereafter, her career was managed by Granz, and she became one of the best-known international jazz performers. She issued many recordings for Granz's labels and made frequent appearances at jazz festivals with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Oscar Peterson, Tommy Flanagan, and Joe Pass. Among her many honors was a Grammy Award in 1980. Her collection of scores and photographs is now in the library of Boston University.
For decades Fitzgerald has been considered the quintessential female jazz singer and has drawn copious praise from admirers as diverse asCharlie Parker and the singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Her voice is small and somewhat girlish in timbre, but these disadvantages are offset by an extremely wide range (from d to C'), which she commands with a remarkable agility and an unfailing sense of swing. This enables her to give performances that rival those of the best jazz instrumentalists in their virtuosity, particularly in her improvised scat solos, for which she is justly famous. Unlike trained singers, she shows strain about the break in her voice (d' and beyond) which, however, she uses to expressive purpose in the building of climaxes. Fitzgerald also has a gift for mimicry that allows her to imitate other well-known singers (from Louis Armstrong to Aretha Franklin) and jazz instruments. As an interpreter of popular songs she is limited by a certain innate cheerfulness from handling drama and pathos convincingly, but is unrivaled in her rendition of light material and for her ease in slipping in and out of the jazz idiom. She influenced countless American popular singers of the post-swing period and also international performers such as the singer Miriam Makeba.
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G
Gillespie Dizzy
Real Name: John Birks Gillespie
Profile: Was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, singer, and composer.
Born: October 21 1917, Cheraw, South Carolina, U.S.A.
Died : January 6 1993, Englewood, New Jersey, U.S.A. (aged 75)
Dizzy Gillespie was one of the principal developers of bop in the early 1940s, and his styles of improvising and trumpet playing were imitated widely in the 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, he is one of the most influential players in the history of jazz.
Gillespie was the youngest of nine children. His father, a bricklayer and weekend bandleader, died when he was ten. Two years later, he began to teach himself to play trombone and trumpet and later took up cornet. His musical ability enabled him to attend Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina in 1932 because the school needed a trumpet player for its band. During his years there, he practiced the trumpet and piano intensively, still largely without formal guidance.
In 1935, he left school to join his family, who had moved to Philadelphia. Soon he joined a band led by Frankie Fairfax, which also included Charlie Shavers. Shavers knew many of the trumpet solos of Roy Eldridge, and Gillespie learned them by copying Shavers (he had previously known only a handful of phrases by Eldridge, the man who became his early role model). While he was in Fairfax's band, Gillespie's clownish behavior earned him the nickname he has carried ever since. Gillespie left Philadelphia in 1937 and moved to New York to try and become better known as a jazz player. After sitting in with many different bands and at many jam sessions, he earned a job with Teddy Hill's big band, largely because he sounded much like Eldridge, who had been Hill's trumpet soloist. The band toured France and Great Britain for two months shortly after Gillespie joined. On returning to New York, he again worked in several groups, including Al Cooper's Savoy Sultans and the Afro-Cuban band of Alberto Socarras, before returning to Hill's band.
In 1939, he joined Cab Calloway's big band, one of the highest-paid black bands in New York at the time. While in this group, he began to develop an interest in the fusion of jazz and Afro-Cuban music, largely because of his friendship with Mario Bauzi, who was also in Calloway's band. During the same period, he was beginning to diverge from Eldridge's playing style both formally, in his solos with the band such asPickin' the Cabbage (1940), and in an informal context with the group's double bass player Milt Hinton. While on tour in 1940, Gillespie metCharlie Parker in Kansa City. Soon he began participating in after-hours jam session in New York with Parker, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, and others. This group of young, experimenting players gradual developed the new, more complex style of jazz that was to be called bop. Recordings, such as Kerouac (1941), made at Minton's Playhouse, exemplify this emergent style.
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H
Holiday Billie
Real Name: Eleanora Fagan Gough
Profile: was an American jazz singer and songwriter. Nicknamed Lady Day by her loyal friend and musical partner Lester Young, Holiday was a seminal influence on jazz and pop singing..
Born: April 7 1915 Philadelphia Pennsylvania U.S.A
Died : July 17 1959 New York City, New York, U.S.A (aged 44)
Billie Holiday was the daughter of Clarence Holiday. Her early life is obscure, as the account given in her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, is self-serving and inaccurate. Her father abandoned the family early and refused to acknowledge his daughter until after her first success. At some point in her childhood, her mother moved to New York, leaving her in the care of her relatives who, according to Holiday, mistreated her. She did menial work, had little schooling, and in 1928 went to New York to join her mother.
According to her own story, she was recruited for a brothel and was eventually jailed briefly for prostitution. At some point after 1930, she began singing at a small club in Brooklyn, and in a year or so moved to Pods' and Jerry's, a Harlem club well known to jazz enthusiasts. In 1933, she was working in another Harlem club, Monette's, where she was discovered by the producer and talent scoutJohn Hammond. Hammond immediately arranged three recording sessions for her with Benny Goodman and found engagements for her in New York clubs. In 1935, he began recording her regularly, usually under the direction of Teddy Wilson, with studio bands that included many of the finest jazz musicians of the day. These recordings, made between 1935 and 1942, constitute a major body of jazz music; many include work by Lester Young, with whom Holiday had particular empathy. Though aimed mainly at the black jukebox audience, the recordings caught the attention of musicians throughout America and soon other singers were working in Holiday's light, rhythmic manner.
Popularity with a wider audience came more slowly. Holiday joined Count Basie in 1937 and Artie Shaw in 1938, becoming one of the first black singers to be featured with a white orchestra. Then, in 1939, she began an engagement at Cafe Society (Downtown), an interracial nightclub in Greenwich Village, which quickly became fashionable with intellectuals and the haut monde, especially those on the political left. At about the same time, she recorded for Commodore Records a song about the lynching of blacks called Strange Fruit; it was admired by intellectuals, and very quickly Holiday began to acquire a popular following. She started to have success with slow, melancholy songs of unrequited love, particularly Gloomy Sunday (1941), a suicide song, and Lover Man (1944). By the end of the 1940s, she was a popular star, and in 1946 took part in the film New Orleans with Louis Armstrong and Kid.
At the same time her career was taking off, Holiday's private life was deteriorating. She started using hard drugs in the early 1940s and was jailed on drug charges in 1947 after a highly publicized trial. She compulsively attached herself to men who mistreated her, and she began drinking heavily. Her health suffered; she lost most of her by then substantial earnings, and her voice coarsened through age and mistreatment. Although she continued to sing and record, and to tour frequently until the mid-1950s, it was no longer with her former spirit and skill.
Holiday is often considered the foremost female singer in jazz history, a view substantiated by her influence on later singers. Her important work is found in the group recordings made mostly for Hammond between 1936 and 1944. Her vehicles were mainly popular love songs, some of them long forgotten, others among the best of the time. Her voice was light and untrained, but she had a fine natural ear to compensate for her lack of musical education. She always acknowledged her debt to Armstrong for her singing style, and it is certainly in emulation of him that she detached her melody line from the ground beat, stretching or condensing the figures of the melody, as on the opening of Did I Remember? (1936).
More than nearly any other singer, Holiday phrased her performances in the manner of a jazz instrumental soloist, and accordingly she has to be seen as a complete jazz musician and not merely a singer. Nevertheless, her voice, even in the light and lively numbers she often sang during her early period, carried a wounded poignancy that was part of her attraction for general audiences. Although Holiday claimed also to have taken Bessie Smith as her model, she sang few blues, and none in the powerful, weighted manner of Smith. She was, however, a master of blues singing, as for example on Fine and Mellow (1939), which she built around blue thirds descending to seconds to create an endless tension perfectly suited to the forlorn text.
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J
Jobim Antonio Carlos
Real Name: Antônio Carlos Brasileiro de Almeida Jobim
Profile: Was a Grammy Award winning Brazilian songwriter, composer, arranger, singer, and pianist/guitarist. A primary force behind the creation of the bossa nova style, his songs have been performed by many singers and instrumentalists within Brazil and internationally.
Born: January 25, 1927, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Died : December 8, 1994, New York City, New York (aged 67)
Pianist Antonio Carlos Jobim's subtle lyricism helped spark a worldwide craze for the music of Brazil, and his compositions, which combine classical impressionism with advanced jazz harmonies and Brazilian rhythms, have become much-loved standards of the jazz repertoire.
Jobim was born on January 25th, 1927 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Jorge de Oliveira Jobim and Nilza Brasileiro de Almeida. Antonio’s father died when he was very young, and his mother remarried Celso Person, who encouraged the young boy to take up music.
Jobim’s mother started him out on classical piano lessons around the age of thirteen. This occurred during the same time she founded the College of Almeida, a private school. Jobim started off playing classical music on the piano with Hans Koellreuter, and continued his classical studies with Lucia White and Alceu Bocchino.
In 1949, he married his Thereza Hermanny, and their first son Paulo Jobim was born in 1950. In 1957, Jobim and his wife Thereza had a daughter named Elizabeth, who later became a visual artist and sang with her father towards the latter part of his career.
The young Jobim worked for a brief period of time in an architect's office. He was also playing and learning the music of tenor saxophonist Alfredo Filho, who went by the name Pixinguinha. Pixinguinha was a master improviser and composer who elevated improvisation's role in the traditional choro music of Rio de Janeiro to the standards of the era's best North American jazz, and had a profound impact on all of Brazilian popular music in the 1940s.
Jobim was also one of a select group of jazz enthusiasts in Rio who were experimenting with ways to combine sophisticated jazz harmonies with the Brazilian traditions of choro and samba canção, or lyric samba. This group, which included Jobim, poet Vinicius de Morães and guitarist João Gilberto called their creations bossa nova, which means "the new way of doing things."
Jobim first worked as a composer in 1956, when he, de Morães and guitarist Luis Bonfá began to work on songs for a play, Orfeu de Conçeicão.The play adapted the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice to fit the events of the annual carnival celebrations in Rio de Janeiro. The songs for the play, which includeManhã de Carnaval, O Nosso Amor and A Felicidade, became hits worldwide after the play was adapted by Frenchman Marcel Camus into a film, Black Orpheus, which won the Palme D'Or award at the 1959 Cannes film festival.
Black Orpheus was released in the United States and won an Oscar in 1960 for Best Foreign Language Film. Jobim was featured on piano and vocals along with Luis Bonfá and Joao Gilberto on the version of“Manhã De Carnaval in the film.
In 1961, the U.S. State Department sponsored a group of American jazz musicians to tour Brazil. The group included flutist Herbie Mann and guitarist Charlie Byrd. Mann, Jobim and Gilberto then collaborated on the 1962 album Herbie Mann and Joao Gilberto with Antonio Carlos Jobim, which included Jobim's"One Note Samba." Byrd also recorded an album of Brazilian music, and introduced the music he had heard on the trip to his friend saxophonist Stan Getz.
As Brazilian music began to attract worldwide attention in the wake of the film, Getz released his 1962 album Jazz Samba. It featured several of Jobim’s songs, including "One Note Samba" and "Desafinado,"both of which became hits in the United States.
Following the success of this release, Getz teamed with Joao Gilberto in 1963 for the album Getz/Gilberto.The album again featured Jobim on piano and a number of his compositions, including "The Girl from Ipanema," "Corcovado," and "So Danço Samba."
The success of Getz/Gilberto, and in particular of the hit single “The Girl From Ipanema,” (which was sung by Gilberto's wife Astrud, only because she happened to be in the studio when Getz decided that one of the songs should be sung in English) was so huge that it sparked a worldwide interest in Brazil in general and bossa nova in particular. The single won the 1965 Grammy for Record of the Year.
In 1963, Verve signed Antonio Carlos Jobim, and he released his first album as a leader entitled Antonio Carlos Jobim the Composer of Desafinado, Plays. This album featured Jobim playing many of his best-known compositions, including and "Chega de Saudade," another collaboration with de Morães.
With the worldwide bossa nova craze now in full swing, Jobim’s songs were covered by a multitude of artists, including Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra. Making hay while the sun shined, Getz released a second album for Verve in 1963 entitled Jazz Samba Encore, which featured more Jobim originals, including "Insensatez (How Insensitive)."
The Beatles' arrival in the United States in November of 1963 marked the end of the popular craze forbossa nova, although the style remained popular amongst jazz performers, who appreciated the genre's lyricism and sophisticated harmonies, for a number of years. In 1967, Jobim teamed up with Frank Sinatra for the album Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim, with an orchestra conducted by German Claus Ogerman. Featured on the album were "Corcovado," "Meditation," and the Irving Berlin song"Change Partners."
Jobim continued to release his own albums after the worldwide bossa nova craze died down including A Certain Mr. Jobim in 1967 and Stone Flower in 1967. On Stone Flower, Jobim's compositions were darker and more adventurous than his earlier work. The album was arranged by Brazilian Eumir Deodato and featured Joe Farrell on tenor saxophone and Ron Carter on bass.
In 1973, Jobim’s first grandson, Daniel, was born. Daniel later became a musician playing with his father Paulo following Antonio’s death. In 1976, Antonio’s first granddaughter, Dora, was born.
By the mid 1970s, Antonio had split from his Thereza and began seeing a ninteen-year-old photographer, Ana Beatriz Lontra. They eventually married in 1986. Before their marriage, Ana gave birth to a son, John Francis, in 1979.
Jobim continued to release albums, and in 1976 Warner Brothers released Urubu, which once again featured Ron Carter on bass and Airto Moreira on percussion. In the 1980s, Jobim was falling into a more relaxed pace as he got older, though he continued to tour. Albums of the from this period include Gabrielafrom 1983, Passarim from 1985, and Echoes of Rio in 1989. Jobim’s second wife also sang with him in the late 1980s during live performances.
In 1994, at the age of sixty seven, Jobim died in New York City at Mount Sinai hospital from heart failure. Following his death, Rio de Janeiro renamed their airport Antonio Carlos Jobim International Airport. Jobim left behind a legacy of lyrical compositions which remain classics of the jazz repertoire. He changed not only the way music sounded in Brazil, but the way jazz was performed around the world.
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Monk Thelonious
Real Name: Thelonious Sphere Monk
Profile: Was an American jazz pianist and composer who, according to The Penguin Guide to Jazz, was "one of the giants of American music".
Born: October 10, 1917 in Rocky Mount, NC, U.S.A
Died : February 17, 1982 in Weehawken, New Jersey U.S.A (aged 64)
Although he remained long misunderstood and little known, both his playing and his compositions had a formative influence on modern jazz. When Monk was four his family moved to New York, which was his home until he retired. In the early 1940s he worked as a sideman in jazz groups and became house pianist at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem. Here he encouraged the young jazz pianist Bud Powell (who achieved success far earlier than Monk himself) and was first recorded in 1941 in Minton's house quartet, when Charlie Christian was making a guest appearance. In these and similar performances with visiting musicians, such as Don Byas, Roy Eldridge, and Helen Humes, Monk helped to formulate the emerging bop style.
In 1944 Monk made his first known visit to a recording studio, as a member of the Coleman Hawkins Quartet; in the same year his well-known tune Round about Midnight was recorded by Cootie Williams, who collaborated with him in its composition. By this time Monk was playing at the Spotlite Club on 52nd Street with Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra. Three years later, in 1947, Monk made the first recordings under his own name in a sextet session for Blue Note, which included his compositions Humphand Thelonious. These and five other recordings issued by Blue Note between 1947 and 1952, including such masterpieces as Evidence, Criss Cross, and a bizarre arrangement of Carolina Moon, are regarded as the first characteristic works of Monk's output, along with the recordings he made as a sideman for Charlie Parker in 1950, which included Bloomdidoand My Melancholy Baby.
In 1952 Monk acquired a contract from Prestige Records, with which he remained associated for three years. Although this was perhaps the leanest period in his career in terms of live performances, he recorded such notable works as the remarkable Little Rootie Tootie (dedicated to his son), a daring version of Jerome Kern's Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, and perhaps his finest solo performance, Bags' Groove, in a memorable session with the Miles Davis All Stars on Christmas Eve 1954. Two months earlier he had recorded an album with Sonny Rollins, and in June 1954 he made his first solo album, in Paris for Swing Records. This album offers great insight into the audacity of Monk's music, his version ofEronel in particular being outstanding for its considerable pianistic demands.
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Nelson Oliver
Real Name: Oliver Edward Nelson
Profile: Was an American jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, arranger andcomposer.
Born: June 04, 1932 Saint Louis, MO, United States
Died : October 28, 1975 Los Angeles, CA, United States (aged 43)
Many know saxophonist Oliver Nelson for what may be the best-titled jazz album of all time, 1961's Blues and the Abstract Truth. But Nelson was also a gifted arranger whose film scores kept him in high demand in Hollywood. He arranged music for Nancy Wilson, James Brown, and Diana Ross, and toured and recorded with Eric Dolphy, Quincy Jones, and Bill Evans before his untimely death of a heart attack at the age of forty-three.
Oliver Edward Nelson was born on June 4th, 1932 in Saint Louis, Missouri. He was born into a musical family. His brother was a saxophonist who played with Cootie Williams’ big band, while his sister played piano. The boy began to play the piano when he was a toddler, but soon moved on to the saxophone by the time he turned eleven.
In the 1940s he played in several local bands around Saint Louis, which included the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra and the George Hudson big band. He joined Louis Jordan’s big band in 1950, and played around New York with him that year, after which he left for military service. After being discharged from the Marines, Nelson studied composition and music theory formally at Washington University in Saint Louis, and graduated in 1957 with a bachelor’s degree. In 1958, he earned a master's degree in music from Lincoln University in Missouri.
Nelson moved to New York City after graduating college, where he soon found work playing with the bands of Erskine Hawkins and Wild Bill Davison. He also gained invaluable experience working as the house arranger for the Apollo Theatre. In 1959, Nelson released his debut album entitled Meet Oliver Nelson,which featured Kenny Dorham on piano, Ray Bryant on piano, and Art Taylor on drums. In 1960, Nelson recorded four albums which included Taking Care of Business, Screamin’ the Blues, Soul Battle, andNocturne.
Nelson toured with Quincy Jones’s big band off and on between 1960 and 1961, and performed with the trumpeter/arranger in both the United States and Europe. He also filled in for saxophonist Russell Procope for two weeks in Duke Ellington’s band in 1961.
Nelson recorded his best-known album, Blues and the Abstract Truth, in 1961. Nelson’s captivating tenor lines are at their best on this album, which featured Bill Evans on piano, Eric Dolphy on also saxophone, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Paul Chambers on bass, and Roy Haynes on drums. "Stolen Moments," Nelson's best-known composition, was first recorded by Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis a year earlier, but receives its definitive interpretation on this album, as could be expected from such a stellar lineup. Nelson’s solo is warm and inviting, and fits perfectly between the comping of Evans and Hubbard’s trumpet solo. The group also plays the lesser-known, but equally inviting Nelson song “Hoe Down" on this recording.
In 1962, Nelson arranged the music for organist Jimmy Smith’s album Bashin’: the Unpredictable Jimmy Smith, which featured the song “Walk on the Wild Side." Through the mid-1960s Nelson began to work more as a conductor and director, having worked with Dr. Billy Taylor on several live dates as well as with Jimmy Smith for his 1964 album Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He also conducted vocalist Nancy Wilson on the sessions for her Capitol album How Glad I Am. Nelson also recorded an album of his own in 1964, entitled Fantabulous. He arranged, conducted, and played tenor saxophone in a band that included Phil Woods and Jerome Richardson. Songs of note from the album include “Three Plus One," “Tennie’s Blues"and "A Bientot."
Nelson began focusing his attention around this time to education and film scoring more than recording and playing saxophone. Nelson joined Leonard Feather as a conductor and arranger for his Verve compilation Encyclopedia of Jazz series, which featured an all-star cast which included J.J. Johnson, Phil Woods, Ron Carter, and Clark Terry.
He formally moved to Los Angeles in 1967, as his stock as a film composer was on the rise. Nelson provided arrangements for the rhythm-and-blues singing group Temptations for their 1967 album Wish It Would Rain and continued to work with many groups outside of the jazz realm. He was a conductor and arranger for vocalist Carmen McRae’s album Portrait of Carmen in 1967 and in 1968 he worked in the same role for vocalist Della Reese’s album I Gotta Be Me…This Trip Out. Nelson continued to work with organist Jimmy Smith and provided several key arrangements for his 1968 album Livin’ It Up.
Nelson scored several cues and musical backdrops for the television show Ironside, which starred actor Raymond Burr and in 1969 he provided the original score for the Hollywood Western Death of a Gunfighter. Also in 1969, Nelson led his own septet that toured Africa and he also conducted various big bands at Berliner Jazztage and at the 1971 Montreux Jazz Festival. In 1970, Nelson composed and arranged the song “Killmanjaro (jazz.com/music/2008/1/14/count-basie-kilimanjaro)” for the Count Basie Orchestra. The record featured Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis on tenor saxophone, Herbert Laws on flute and Grant Green on guitar.
Nelson’s television and film score output continued to increase as he composed original music for the television shows Columbo, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, and Longstreet. In 1971, Nelson released two albums entitled Swiss Suite and Impressions of Berlin. Nelson’s biggest film arrangement contributions came in 1973 when he helped arrange Gato Barbieri’s score for French director Bernardo Bertolucci’s film Last Tango in Paris, which starred Marlon Brando.
In many ways, Nelson's wide-ranging talents to those of another jazz musician who found success in Hollywood, Quincy Jones, Unfortunately, Nelson didn't live long enough to enjoy the same level of success, as he died from a heart attack at the age of forty three on October 28th, 1975 in Los Angeles, California.
Oliver Nelson’s recorded legacy well rewards those who are willing to search beyond that famously-titled album. His work as a soloist ranks among the best on his instrument. His accomplishments as an arranger and conductor paved the way for many other jazz artists to do the same, scoring films and for television.
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Oliver Joe 'King'
Real Name: Joseph Joe Oliver
Profile: Was a jazz cornet player and bandleader. He was the mentor and teacher of Louis Armstrong. From 1920 to 1923 he led the Creole Jazz Band, which became the greatest exponent of the New Orleans, or “Dixieland,” jazz
Born: May 11, 1885 Aben, Louisiana, USA
Died : April 10, 1938 Savannah, Georgia (aged 52)
King Oliver is said to have begun music as a trombonist, and from about 1907 he played in brass bands, dance bands, and in various small groups in New Orleans bars and cabarets. In 1918 he moved to Chicago (at which time he may have acquired his nickname), and in 1920 he began to lead his own band. After taking it to California (chiefly San Francisco and Oakland) in 1921, he returned to Chicago and, with some of the same musicians, started an engagement at Lincoln Gardens as King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band (June 1922). This group was joined a month later by the 22-year-old Louis Armstrong as second cornetist. With two cornets (Oliver and Armstrong), clarinet (Johnny Dodds), trombone (Honore Dutrey), piano (Lil Hardin), drums (Baby Dodds), and double bass and banjo (Bill Johnson), Oliver began recording in April 1923. Many young white jazz musicians had the opportunity to hear him then, either on recordings or live at Lincoln Gardens.
By late 1924, after a tour of the Midwest and Pennsylvania, the completely reorganized band included two or three saxophones, and played in Chicago as the Dixie Syncopators (February 1925 to March 1927); the most distinguished of the saxophonists who played with this band were Barney Bigard and Albert Nicholas. Soon after a brief but successful engagement at the Savoy Ballroom in New York (from May 1927) the members began to disperse and by autumn the group had disbanded, but Oliver stayed in New York, recording frequently with ad hoc orchestras. From 1930 to 1936 he toured widely, chiefly in the Midwest and upper South, with various ten to 12 piece bands; he himself seldom performed during this period, and he made no further recordings after April 1931. He spent the final months of his life in Savannah retired from music.
Oliver is generally considered one of the most important musicians in the New Orleans style. Like other early New Orleans cornetists, he played in a relatively four square rhythm and clipped melodic style (contrasting with the deliberate irregularity of the younger Armstrong and his imitators) and had a repertory of expressive deviations of rhythm and pitch, some verging on theatrical novelty effects and others derived from blues vocal style. He frequently used timbre modifiers of various sorts, and was especially renowned for his wa-wa effects, as in his famous three-chorus solo on Dipper Mouth Blues (1923), which was learned by rote by many trumpeters of the 1920s and 1930s and which, as Sugar Foot Stomp, became a jazz standard. As a soloist he may best be heard in a number of blues accompaniments, notably with Sippie Wallace.
In contrast to his near-contemporaries Freddie Keppard and Bunk Johnson, Oliver integrated his playing superbly with his ensemble, and was an excellent leader; the Creole Jazz Band may have been successful largely because of the discipline he imposed on his musicians. Indeed, of the earlier New Orleans cornetists, only Oliver was extensively recorded in the 1920s with an outstanding ensemble, and the revival of New Orleans style, which began shortly after his death, owed much to the rediscovery of his early three dozen Creole Band recordings, which were internationally known by the 1940s. After 1924 the quality of his recordings declined, partly because of recurrent tooth and gum ailments and partly because his style was at odds with that of his younger sidemen; but with a good orchestra he was capable of coherent and energetic playing even as late as 1930. Almost all of his recorded performances have been reissued.
Oliver's influence is difficult to assess: his playing during his New Orleans period (his best years, according to Souchon) was not recorded, and by 1925 his style had largely been superseded by Armstrong's. He had an obvious formative impact on Ellington's sideman Bubber Miley, and perhaps on such white musicians as Muggsy Spanier; his mute tricks were copied by Johnny Dunn; and trumpeters such as Natty Dominique and Tommy Ladnier, who remained apart from Armstrong's influence, may have derived their styles in part from Oliver. The extent of Oliver's influence on Armstrong himself, though clearly audible and significant, has yet to be examined properly. Oliver is credited with many melodies on record labels and in copyright registrations; it is not known how many of these he actually composed.
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Parker Charlie
Real Name: Charles Christopher Parker Jr.
Profile: Jazz saxophonist and composer. Best known as simply 'Bird' (a shortening of 'Yardbird', Parker acquired the nickname early in his career with many contradictory stories regarding the name's origin). Widely considered to be one of the most influential of jazz saxophonists, jazz musicians, and indeed musicians in general.
Born: 29 Aug 1920 in in Kansas City, USA.
Died: 12 March 1955 in NYC, USA (aged 34).
Charlie Parker was one of the most influential improvising soloists in jazz, and a central figure in the development of bop in the 1940s. A legendary figure in his own lifetime, he was idolized by those who worked with him, and he inspired a generation of jazz performers and composers.
Parker was the only child of Charles and Addle Parker. In 1927, the family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, an important center of African-American music in the 1920s and 1930s. Parker had his first music lessons in the local public schools; he began playing alto saxophone in 1933 and worked occasionally in semi-professional groups before leaving school in 1935 to become a full-time musician. From 1935 to 1939, he worked mainly in Kansas City with a wide variety of local blues and jazz groups. Like most jazz musicians of his time, he developed his craft largely through practical experience: listening to older local jazz masters, acquiring a traditional repertory, and learning through the process of trial and error in the competitive Kansas City bands and jam sessions.
In 1939 Parker first visited New York (then the principal center of jazz musical and business activity), staying for nearly a year. Although he worked only sporadically as a professional musician, he often participated in jam sessions. By his own later account, he was bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used then. He said, "I kept thinking there's bound to be something else…. I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn't play it." While working over at the Cherokee in a jam session with the guitarist Biddy Fleet, Parker suddenly found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes he could play what he had been "hearing." Yet, it was not until 1944-5 that his conceptions of rhythm and phrasing had evolved sufficiently to form his mature style.
Parker's name first appeared in the music press in 1940, and from this date his career is more fully documented. From 1940 to 1942 he played in Jay McShann's band, with which he toured the Southwest, Chicago, and New York, and took part in his first recording sessions in Dallas (1941). These recordings, and several made for broadcasting from the same period, document his early, swing-based style, and at the same time reveal his extraordinary gift for improvisation. In December 1942, he joined Earl Hines' big band, which then included several other young modernists such as Dizzy Gillespie. By May 1944 they, with Parker, formed the nucleus of Billy Eckstine's band.
During these years, Parker regularly participated in after-hours jam sessions at Minton's Playhouse and Monroe's Uptown House in New York, where the informal atmosphere and small groups favored the development of his personal style and of the new bop music generally. Unfortunately, a strike by the American Federation of Musicians silenced most of the recording industry from August 1942, causing this crucial stage in Parker's musical evolution to remain virtually undocumented. Though there are some obscure acetate recordings of him playing tenor saxophone dating from early 1943. When the recording ban ended, Parker recorded as a sideman (from September 15, 1944) and as a leader (from November 26, 1945), which introduced his music to a wider public and to other musicians.
The year 1945 marked a turning point in Parker's career: in New York he led his own group for the first time and worked extensively with Gillespie in small ensembles. In December 1945, he and Gillespie took the new jazz style to Hollywood, where they fulfilled a six-week nightclub engagement. Parker continued to work in Los Angeles, recording and performing in concerts and nightclubs, until June 29, 1946, when a nervous breakdown and addiction to heroin and alcohol caused his confinement at the Camarillo State Hospital. He was released in January 1947 and resumed work in Los Angeles.
Parker returned to New York in April 1947. He formed a quintet (withMiles Davis, Duke Jordan, Tommy Potter, and Max Roach) that recorded many of his most famous pieces. The years from 1941 to 1951 were Parker's most fertile period. He worked in a wide variety of settings (nightclubs, concerts, radio, and recording studios) with his own small ensembles, a string group, and Afro-Cuban bands, and as a guest soloist with local musicians when traveling without his own group. He visited Europe (1949 and 1950) and recorded slightly over half his surviving work. Though still beset by problems associated with drugs and alcohol, he attracted a very large following in the jazz world and enjoyed a measure of financial success.
In July 1951, Parker's New York cabaret license was revoked at the request of the narcotics squad. This banned him from nightclub employment in the city and forced him to adopt a more peripatetic life until the license was reinstated (probably in autumn 1953). Sporadically employed, badly in debt, and in failing physical and mental health, he twice attempted suicide in 1954 and voluntarily committed himself to Bellevue Hospital in New York. His last public engagement was on March 5, 1955 at Birdland, a New York nightclub named in his honor. He died seven days later in the Manhattan apartment of his friend the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, sister of Lord Rothschild.
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Reinhardt Django
Real Name: Jean-Baptiste Reinhardt
Profile: Was a Gypsy jazz guitarist. One of the first prominent European jazz musicians, Reinhardt remains one of the most renowned jazz guitarists.
Born: 23 January 1910, Liberchies, Belgium
Died: 16 May 1953, Fontainebleau, Seine-et-Marne, France (aged 43)
Django Reinhardt was the son of a traveling entertainer and the brother of Joseph Reinhardt. He grew up in a gypsy settlement outside Paris. Reinhardt first played violin and later took up guitar, and began working professionally in 1922 with the accordionist Guerino. In 1928, he was badly burned in a caravan fire, which resulted in the mutilation of his left hand. This deprived him of the use of two fingers and led him to devise a unique fingering method to overcome his handicap.
After a period of convalescence, he worked in cafés in Paris and in a duo with the singer Jean Sablon. In 1934, he was a founding member, with Stephane Grappelli, of the ensemble that became known as the Quintette du Hot Club de France. In the years before World War II the group gained considerable renown through its numerous recordings, and Reinhardt became an international celebrity. He appeared throughout Europe and recorded with many important American musicians who visited the Continent. During the war, while Grappelli lived in Britain, Reinhardt remained in France. He led a big band, then achieved considerable success as the leader of a new quintet in which the clarinetist Hubert Rostaing took Grappelli's place. He also became interested in composition and, with Andre Hodeir, arranged the music for the film Le Village de la Colere (1946). In 1946, he visited England and Switzerland, toured the USA as a soloist with Duke Ellington's band (playing an amplified guitar for the first time), and worked in New York.
After his return to France, he lived in Samois and toured and recorded with his quintet, which sometimes included Grappelli again. Reinhardt's grasp of harmony, remarkable technique, and trenchant rhythmic sense made him an excellent accompanist. His incisive support is heard to advantage on Stardust (1935), recorded with Coleman Hawkins. He later developed into a soloist of unique character, creating a deeply personal style out of his own cultural patrimony. By 1937, when he recordedChicago with the Quintette, he was established as the first outstanding European jazz musician, a stylist with great melodic resourcefulness and a mastery of inflection. He was a gifted composer of short evocative pieces and had a flair for pacing a performance so the maximum variety could be wrung from it without compromising its homogeneity; an excellent example of this is St. Louis Blues (1937).
Endowed with remarkable sensitivity, he could work with visiting American performers without forsaking his own essentially romantic style. In the 1940s, he switched to the electric guitar. However, this did not coarsen his playing since he used its power with discretion. The rhythmic content of his work became more varied, as in Minor Swing(1947), and his improvised lines more flexible. The asymmetrical, occasionally violent playing heard in some later performances shows the continual widening of his expressive scope. A documentary film, Django Reinhardt (1958), was made after his death by the director Paul Paviot. It includes an introduction by Jean Cocteau and features music performed by Grappelli, Rostaing, and Joseph Reinhardt.
Django's two sons, Lousson and Babik, were both fine guitarists, and after their father's death, Babik established a reputation in his own right.
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Bessie Smith
Real Name: Bessie Smith
Profile: Was an American blues singer. referred to as "The Empress of the Blues", Smith was the most popular female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s. Inducted into Rock And Roll Hall of Fame in 1989
Born: Apr. 15, 1894 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA
Died: Sept. 26, 1937 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, USA (aged 43)
Bessie Smith began her professional career in 1912 by singing in the same show as Ma Rainey, and subsequently performed in various touring minstrel shows and cabarets. By the 1920s, she was a leading artist in black shows on the TOBA circuit and at the 81 Theatre in Atlanta. After further tours she was sought out by Clarence Williams to record in New York. Her first recording,Down-Hearted Blues, established her as the most successful black performing artist of her time. She recorded regularly until 1928 with important early jazz instrumentalists such as Williams, James P. Johnson, and various members of Fletcher Henderson's band, including Louis Armstrong, Charlie Green, Joe Smith, and Tommy Ladnier. During this period she also toured throughout the South and North, performing to large audiences. In 1929, she appeared in the film St. Louis Blues. By then, however, alcoholism had severely damaged her career, as did the Depression, which affected the recording and entertainment industries. A recording session, her last, was arranged in 1933 by John Hammond for the increasing European jazz audience; it featured among others Jack Teagarden andBenny Goodman. By 1936, Smith was again performing in shows and clubs, but she died, following an automobile accident, before her next recording session had been arranged.
Smith was unquestionably the greatest of the vaudeville blues singers and brought the emotional intensity, personal involvement, and expression of blues singing into the jazz repertory with unexcelled artistry. Baby Doll and After You've Gone, both made with Joe Smith, andNobody Knows You When You're Down And Out, with Ed Allen on cornet, illustrate her capacity for sensitive interpretation of popular songs. Her broad phrasing, fine intonation, blue-note inflections, and wide, expressive range made hers the measure of jazz-blues singing in the 1920s. She made almost 200 recordings, of which her remarkable duets with Armstrong are among her best. Although she excelled in the performance of slow blues, she also recorded vigorous versions of jazz standards. Joe Smith was her preferred accompanist, but possibly her finest recording (and certainly the best known in her day) was Back Water Blues, with James P. Johnson. Her voice had coarsened by the time of her last session, but few jazz artists have been as consistently outstanding as she.
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Tatum Art
Real Name: Arthur Tatum
Profile: Was an American jazz pianist and virtuoso. He was nearly blind.
Born: October 13, 1910 in Toledo, Ohio U.S.A
Died: November 5, 1956 in Los Angeles, California. U.S.A (aged 47)
Despite seriously impaired vision (he was blind in one eye and had only partial sight in the other), Art Tatum received some formal piano training as a teenager at the Toledo School of Music and learned to read sheet music with the aid of glasses and by the Braille method. Other than that, he was self-taught, learning from piano rolls, phonograph recordings, radio broadcasts, and various musicians whom he encountered as a young man in the area around Toledo and Cleveland. Tatum acknowledged Fats Waller as his primary inspiration, with the popular radio pianist Lee Sims, whose interpretations contained many interesting harmonies, as an important secondary influence.
Tatum was playing professionally in Toledo by 1926 and performed on radio in 1929-30. In 1932, he traveled to New York as the accompanist for Adelaide Hall. There, in March 1933, he made his first solo recordings, for Brunswick. After leaving Hall, he worked in Cleveland from 1934-5 and led a group in Chicago from 1935-6. His reputation as an outstanding jazz pianist was consolidated in 1937 with his performances in various New York clubs and on radio shows. He toured England the following year and appeared regularly in New York and Los Angeles in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Taking Nat "King" Cole's successful jazz trio as a model, Tatum founded his own influential trio with Slam Stewart (double bass) and Tiny Grimes (electric guitar) in 1943. Grimes left the following year, but Tatum continually returned to this format, playing with Everett Barksdale in particular.
In 1944, Tatum played in a jazz concert at the Metropolitan Opera House, and in 1947 he made a cameo appearance in the film The Fabulous Dorseys. Although he was regularly active in nightclubs, radio shows, recording studios, and was lionized by jazz musicians and critics, he did not acquire a large popular following during this period and was bypassed in jazz popularity polls. In 1953, he began an association with the record producer Norman Granz that led to a number of outstanding small-group recordings with such mainstream musicians as Benny Carter,Roy Eldridge, and Ben Webster. More importantly, he was recorded in a long series of solo performances, which indicated both the extent of his repertory and his extraordinary imagination. Tatum remained active and constantly improving his art until shortly before his death.
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Vaughan Sarah
Real Name: Sarah Lois Vaughan
Profile: One of the most respected of all jazz singers, known among her close-knit circle of musician friends as 'Sassy' and among her worldwide fan base as 'The Divine One'.
Born: March 27 1924, Newark, New Jersey. U.S.A
Died: April 03 1990, Hidden Hills, California. U.S.A (aged 66)
Sarah Vaughan sang in the choir of Mount Zion Baptist Church, Newark, as a child, where at the age of 12 she became organist. In October 1942, she won an amateur contest at the Apollo Theatre; shortly afterwards, in April 1943, she joined Earl Hines' big band as second pianist and singer to Hines and Billy Eckstine. Eckstine formed his own bop-oriented big band early in 1944, and Vaughan joined him a few months later, making her first recording with his orchestra on December 31. She left Eckstine after about a year, and thereafter, except for a brief stay in John Kirby's group in winter 1945-6, she worked only as a solois
After George Treadwell (her manager and first husband) refashioned her stage appearance and repertory she achieved considerable success on television, in recordings from the late 1940s, and in international performances from the early 1950s. Although she began to perform predominantly slow, popular ballads with heavy vibrato to the accompaniment of "easy listening" orchestras, her early associations with bop musicians (especially Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, with whom she recorded Lover Man in 1945) established her lasting reputation as a jazz singer. This reputation endured in part because of her tendency to treat her voice more as a jazz instrument than as a vehicle for lyrics: she negotiated wide leaps within her full-bodied contralto range, improvised subtle melodic and rhythmic embellishments, and made fluid alterations of timbre from a bell-like clarity to a bluesy growl.
During the five-year contract with Columbia that marked her rise to stardom (1949-54), she recorded often with studio orchestras and only once in a jazz context (with Miles Davis in 1950). A new contract with Mercury (1954-9) allowed her to pursue a dual career: for Mercury she made commercial discs, including her hit Broken-Hearted Melody (1958), while for EmArcy, Mercury's jazz subsidiary, she recorded with Clifford Brown, Cannonball Adderley, the sidemen of Count Basie's orchestra, and other jazz musicians. She combined these activities under later contracts with Roulette, Mercury, and Columbia (1960-67). In 1971, after a five-year absence from recording, she began once again to make popular albums, occasionally employing a jazz-flavored accompaniment, as on her album with Oscar Peterson, Joe Pass, Ray Brown, and Louie Bellson in 1978. In public performances Vaughan is accompanied by a trio of piano, double bass, and drums, either alone or as the nucleus of a big band or symphony orchestra. Among the distinguished members of her group have been Jimmy Jones (1947-52; 1954-8), Roy Haynes (1953-4), Richard Davis (late 1950s-early 1960s), Roland Hanna (early 1960s), Bob James (1965-8), Jan Hammer(1970-71), Jimmy Cobb(1970-78), Andy Simpkins (from 1979), and Harold Jones (from 1980). From 1978 to 1980 the trio became a quartet under the leadership of Vaughan's then manager, conductor, and husband, Waymon Reed. In 1987, Vaughan recorded an album of Latin-jazz songs.
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Webster Ben
Real Name: Benjamin Francis Webster
Profile: Also known as "The Brute" or "Frog,". He was an influential American jazz tenor saxophonist
Born: March 27, 1909 in Kansas City, Missouri.U.S.A
Died: September 20, 1973in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. (aged 64)
Ben Webster was considered one of the “big three” of swing tenors along with Coleman Hawkins (his main influence) and Lester Young. He had a tough, raspy, and brutal tone on stomps (with his own distinctive growls) yet on ballads he would turn into a pussy cat and play with warmth and sentiment.
After violin lessons as a child, Webster learned how to play rudimentary piano (his neighbor Pete Johnson taught him to play blues). But after Budd Johnson showed him some basics on the saxophone, Webster played sax in the Young Family Band (which at the time included Lester Young). He had stints with Jap Allen and Blanche Calloway (making his recording debut with the latter) before joining Bennie Moten's Orchestra in time to be one of the stars on a classic session in 1932. Webster spent time with quite a few orchestras in the 1930s (including Andy Kirk, Fletcher Henderson in 1934, Benny Carter, Willie Bryant, Cab Calloway, and the short-lived Teddy Wilson big band).
In 1940 (after short stints in 1935 and 1936), Ben Webster became Duke Ellington's first major tenor soloist. During the next three years he was on many famous recordings, including “Cotton Tail” (which in addition to his memorable solo had a saxophone ensemble arranged by Webster) and “All Too Soon.” After leaving Ellington in 1943 (he would return for a time in 1948-1949), Webster worked on 52nd Street; recorded frequently as both a leader and a sideman; had short periods with Raymond Scott, John Kirby, and Sid Catlett; and toured with Jazz at the Philharmonic during several seasons in the 1950s. Although his sound was considered out-of-style by that decade, Webster's work on ballads became quite popular and Norman Granz recorded him on many memorable sessions.
Webster recorded a classic set with Art Tatum and generally worked steadily, but in 1964 he moved permanently to Copenhagen where he played when he pleased during his last decade. Although not all that flexible, Webster could swing with the best and his tone was a later influence on such diverse players as Archie Shepp, Lew Tabackin, Scott Hamilton, and Bennie Wallace.
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Currently, there are no musicians with last names beginning with the letter 'X'.
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Young Lester
Real Name: Lester Willis Young
Profile: Nicknamed "Prez", was an American jazz tenor saxophonist and clarinetist. He also played trumpet, violin, and drums.
Born : August 27, 1909 Woodville, Mississippi, U.S.A
Died : March 15, 1959 New York City, New York, U.S.A (aged 49)
Lester Young was the oldest of three children and grew up in the vicinity of New Orleans. By 1920 he had moved to Minneapolis with his father, Willis Handy Young, a versatile musician who taught all his children instruments and eventually formed a family band that toured with carnivals and other shows. Young studied violin, trumpet, and drums, settling on alto saxophone by about the age of 13. After one of many disputes with his father, he left the family band at the end of 1927. He spent the following year touring with Art Bronson's Bostonians, where he took up tenor saxophone. He returned to his family in New Mexico during 1929, but stayed behind when they moved to California.
In 1930, he played briefly with Walter Page's Blue Devils and again with Bronson, then settled in Minneapolis, where he played during 1931 with Eddie Barefield and various leaders at the Nest Club. Early in 1932 Young joined the Thirteen Original Blue Devils, and while on tour in Oklahoma City met Charlie Christian. When the Blue Devils disbanded in the middle of 1933, Young made Kansas City his base and played with the Bennie Moten-George E. Lee Band, Clarence Love, King Oliver, and, on one night in December, Fletcher Henderson, then on tour with his star saxophonist, Coleman Hawkins.
Early in 1934, Young joined Count Basie, beginning an association that eventually led to national recognition. He left Basie at the end of March as a provisional replacement for Hawkins in Henderson's band. Henderson's musicians rejected Young's very different approach to the saxophone, however, and he left after a few months. He joined Andy Kirk en route back to Kansas City, then Boyd Atkins and Rook Ganz in Minnesota and for the next year performed mostly in these two areas on a freelance basis.
By 1936 Young had resumed his association with Basie. In November of that year, with a unit from Basie's band, he made his first recordings. His solos on Lady be Good and Shoe Shine Boy were immediately regarded by musicians, many of whom learned them note for note. During the next few years, as Basie's band became more famous, Young was prominently featured on its recordings and broadcasts. Although he received mixed reviews from the critical establishment, the younger generation of musicians, including Dexter Gordon, Illinois Jacquet, and others, were enthusiastic about his music. His small-group performances, particularly Lester Leaps In (1939) and his many recordings with Billie Holiday, were especially influential.
By 1936 Young had resumed his association with Basie. In November of that year, with a unit from Basie's band, he made his first recordings. His solos on Lady be Good and Shoe Shine Boy were immediately regarded by musicians, many of whom learned them note for note. During the next few years, as Basie's band became more famous, Young was prominently featured on its recordings and broadcasts. Although he received mixed reviews from the critical establishment, the younger generation of musicians, including Dexter Gordon, Illinois Jacquet, and others, were enthusiastic about his music. His small-group performances, particularly Lester Leaps In (1939) and his many recordings with Billie Holiday, were especially influential.
Young left Basie in December 1940 to form his own small band, which performed at Kelly's Stable in New York early in 1941. In May, he moved to Los Angeles to lead a band with his brother Lee, which went to New York's Café Society in September 1942. This group disbanded early the following year, and Young played as a freelancer in New York and on tour with a USO band before rejoining Basie in December 1943. It was during this second tenure with Basie that Young came to the notice of the general public. In 1944, he won first place in the Down Beat poll for tenor saxophonists, the first of many such honors. He also became the favorite of a new generation of jazz musicians, among them John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, and Stan Getz. He was prominently featured in the film Jammin' the Blues.
On September 30, 1944 Young was drafted into the army, which he found a nightmarish experience. Cut off from his musical outlets, he was discovered using drugs and was court-martialed the following February. After serving several months in detention barracks in Georgia, he was released at the end of 1945 and resumed recording and performing in Los Angeles. At his first recording session he produced a masterpiece,These Foolish Things.
Beginning in 1946 Young spent part of almost every year playing with Jazz at the Philharmonic, touring the rest of the time with his own small groups. From 1947 to 1949 his style showed the influence of some of the young bop musicians in his groups in the occasional use of double-time and in the selection of repertory. He continued to develop and modify his approach successfully except when he was drinking; by this time his reliance on alcohol was becoming a problem. From about 1953 until his death his recordings were noticeably less consistent, yet he was still able to produce some of his best work on concert recordings such asPrez in Europe (1956). He made guest appearances with Basie's band in 1952-4 and again at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1957, but he never rejoined as a regular member. He became increasingly dependent on alcohol and on several occasions was hospitalized. In January 1959, he began an engagement at the Blue Note Club in Paris. He made his last recordings there in March, then became severely ill and returned to New York, where he died shortly afterwards.
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