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Eight Men, a Young Woman and a Studio

20th October 2022

Peter Gardner

According to one source the group was called ‘Dave Dexter’s International Jazzmen’, whereas, more accurately, the group’s name was ‘Capitol’s International Jazzmen’. Dave Dexter was involved; he was Capitol Records’ producer and he had assembled the musicians, but the group didn’t bear his name.  ‘Capitol’ was the label they were recording for and as for ‘International’, this apparently came from the fact that three of the musicians had enjoyed longish spells in Europe. And the seeming grandeur of the title was certainly deserved: the group consisted of Coleman Hawkins, tenor sax, Benny Carter, alto sax and arranger, Buster Bailey, clarinet, Bill Coleman, trumpet, Nat King Cole, piano, Oscar Moore, guitar, John Kirby, bass, and Max Roach, drums.

Even bearing in mind that only Roach would count as a modernist, this must still stand as one of the very best octets one could get together in March 1945. ”Capitol”, according to Benny Carter’s biographers, had taken “advantage of the presence in Los Angeles of this dream personnel”, musicians from several backgrounds all on the West Coast. They would record only once together.

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Happy Birthday to Wally Fawkes

20th June 2022

Towards the end of June this year will be Wally Fawkes’ ninety-eighth birthday. Those who wish to celebrate the birthday of Trog or the Daily Mails’ Flook have my blessing and my encouragement. I am not going to interfere with anyone’s celebration of one of our greatest artists and cartoonists. Instead, I wish to focus on Wally Fawkes, clarinet and soprano saxophone player, and one of our finest musicians.

Wally in 2013. Photograph by the fine jazz historian Peter Vacher.
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Sam’s Liberation Band

20th January 2022

“…he took over Artie Shaw’s band after the latter’s discharge and developed it into one of the most magnificent bands of all time.”

George T.Simon

Late in 1943 a twenty-five year-old musician went to Washington with a mission.  The future of his band was uncertain.  Maybe he could persuade the admirals his band should keep on playing. He was Sam Donahue and, fortunately, he was successful.

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Fletcher Henderson

15th February 2020

If Benny was the “King”, what then was Fletcher?”

 – Gunther Schuller

“Goodman…opened the whole wide world of jazz to hundreds of thousands

who had never heard of Benny Carter or Fletcher Henderson.”

Tom Scanlan

Henderson “made great recordings of his own compositions, which sold a

 minimal number, only to have the same tunes and arrangements cut by Benny

Goodman with astronomical sales. No question about it; he was frustrated.”  

John Hammond

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…and then came Phil and Lew

6th December 2019

The musical revue, ‘A to Z’, opened on 11th October, 1921, at the Prince of Wales’ Theatre in London’s West End. It would run for 428 performances. Ivor Novello is credited as being the composer of ‘A to Z’, though other songwriters contributed pieces of their own, including the revue’s most durable song. Composed by Philip Braham with words by Douglas Furber, ‘Limehouse Blues’ would become something of a jazz standard or, if you have grown tired of musicians battling over its accommodating changes at breakneck speeds, maybe you would prefer the description ‘jazz warhorse’. Recorded by Paul Whiteman in the early 1920s and, several decades later, by the Sun Ra Arkestra, ‘Limehouse Blues’ certainly has staying power. It has also proved quite enticing to post-bop saxophonists wanting to give their awesome techniques a workout while providing their rhythm sections with a wake-up call. But more of them later.

Phil Woods (Alto Sax)
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‘Chu’

1st October 2019

“…had he lived there is no doubt that he would be ensconced in the jazz pantheon alongside Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young.  He was that good.”                                                                                                    

– Dan Morgenstern

“(Charlie)Parker even gave his first son, born in January 1938, the middle name of Leon, after his idol.”

– Jeffrey Magee

Leon ‘Chu’ Berry

In late October, 1941, one the most extrovert bandleaders of the Swing Era and his band  were playing a dance in Youngstown, Ohio.  The next engagement for Cab Calloway and His Orchestra was scheduled to be in Buffalo, New York. When the Youngstown engagement finished, saxophonists Andy Brown and Leon ‘Chu’ Berry decided to travel ahead of the band bus in trumpeter Lammar Wright’s new car. Calloway’s bass player, Milt Hinton, recalled that the bus followed on about half an hour later and about fifteen minutes into its journey the bus stopped at the scene of an accident. There was no street lighting, but what could be seen in the band bus’s headlights was that Lamar Wright’s car was badly damaged and on the wrong side of the road. 

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‘Summits and Beyond’

13th August 2019

Peter Gardner

Accounts of when Soprano Summit’s musicians first got together all mention that it was at the end of one of the Dick and Maddie Gibsons’ annual jazz parties. It was early September 1972 and the party, which was held at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, had nearly run its course. For the last few days the Broadmoor’s guests had heard some wonderful musicians. Amongst the trumpeters who had taken to the stage were Ruby Braff, Clark Terry and Joe Wilder.  Buster Cooper, Urbie Green and Frank Rosolino were some of the trombonists who had entertained the party crowd and saxophone masters Budd Johnson, James Moody and Flip Phillips along with legendary pianists Hank Jones and Teddy Wilson had all played their parts.  

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Russell Procope

15th June 2019

On 6th December, 1928, and not yet twenty-one, he entered a New York recording studio as part of Jelly Roll Morton’s Orchestra. He would play clarinet on two sides. The first, ‘Red Hot Pepper’, a lively piece full of unexpected breaks. The second, ‘Deep Creek’, a slow blues. On 3rd June, 1976, at the St. Ivo Centre, St. Ives, Huntington, he would be guest star with Chris Barber’s Jazz and Blues Band. With Barber his clarinet would be heard on ‘Mood Indigo’ and ‘The Mooche’, his alto on ‘Take the ‘A’ Train’ and ‘Just Squeeze Me’ amongst other Ellington favourites. In the nearly forty-eight years between playing with Morton and playing with Barber, Russell Procope would be a member of some of the greatest groups in jazz history.

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‘Ike’s Last Hurrahs’

23rd April 2019

Accounts of his short life usually stress he made a promising start to his career as a saxophonist, for in his early years he recorded on numerous occasions and became a principal soloist with the Cab Calloway Orchestra.  The second period of his career, which covers most of the 1950s, is seen as a bleak battle with a heroin addiction, few well paid jobs and few recording opportunities. Third, and finally, there is a golden sunset, where our saxophonist was able to make recordings and gave performances that showed him at his best.  Of course, real lives are never this simple or so neatly compartmentalised, and Ike Quebec’s was no doubt more complicated than this brief summary suggests, but I also suspect that most who knew Ike would recognise him from the picture we have painted.

Ike Quebec

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About Sonny Criss – Jazz Saxophonist

17th November 2018

‘Hootie Blues’ was recorded by Jay McShann and His Orchestra in April, 1941. After the opening chorus there is a brief saxophone solo. Ross Russell would later write that the saxophonist’s twelve bar solo was “heard as a sermon from the mount.”  The saxophonist was Charlie Parker. A young alto player is said to have first heard a recording of ‘Hootie Blues’ in Los Angeles and become a convert. He was reported as saying, “That solo on ‘Hootie Blues’ started me in a completely new direction.”  The young musician was Sonny Criss.

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…and finally ‘Lotus Blossom’

19th April 2018

I travelled with a young saxophonist who had never seen the great man before. The journey was uneventful and we arrived on time at Preston railway station. Then we made our way to Preston’s Guild Hall for the second concert of the evening. In a foyer we came across a large crowd of people facing closed doors that led into the auditorium. The doors were manned by a number of ushers and security staff. Word quickly spread that the start of the first of the evening’s concerts had been delayed and that the first concert would end in about thirty or forty minutes. As a result, the second house would be starting late. The ushers and security staff, more than willing to try to explain what had caused the delay, went through the foyer chatting to groups and answering our questions.

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The Duke, Hawk and maybe Lorenzo

23rd March 2018

According to John Chilton, despite all the musicians who met up at the recording studio on that August afternoon being “hard bitten veterans who had made thousands of records between them”, nevertheless the occasion “seemed special”.  This was going to be no ordinary recording session; it would involve two musical legends who, or so they insisted, had been intending to get together for decades. But record producer Bob Thiele had finally made it happen.  The date was 18th August, 1962.

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‘Big Ben’ by Peter Gardner

3rd November 2016

In January 1967 Ben Webster was playing a short season at Ronnie Scott’s Cub in London.  As often happened back then, star soloists who were playing at Ronnie Scott’s would play some out of town gigs.  That was how, a few months earlier, I had heard Johnny Griffin in Coventry’s Leofric Hotel. Griffin, ‘The Little Giant’, ‘The Fastest Tenor in the West’, had left his audience enthralled and somewhat drained by his astonishing speed, unquenchable imagination and stamina.

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Benny Carter: ‘The King’

11th October 2016

           …he is a king, man!  You got Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and my man the Earl

            of Hines, right?  Well, Benny’s right up there with all them cats.  Everybody

            that knows who he is call him King!  He is a King!

                                                                                               Louis Armstrong

Generations of jazz fans grew up in the firm belief that the three greatest alto saxophone players were Johnny Hodges, Benny Carter and Charlie Parker.  Of this wondrous trio, only one could claim to be multi-talented; he was Benny Carter. His principal instruments were the alto sax and trumpet, which prompted someone with the pen-name of Snooty McSiegle to wax poetic:

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The Shy Revolutionary

22nd September 2016

Join Jazz aficionado Peter Gardner as he takes a look at the glorious Lester Young…

By the autumn of 1936 someone who would become one the most influential and imitated of all jazz musicians had been ‘on the road’ for most of his twenty seven years, but hadn’t yet been heard on record. Lester Willis Young had started out as a boy drummer in his father’s band, though in early adolescence he discovered that by the time he had packed up his drums at the end of an evening, the girls had gone.  So, he switched to saxophone.

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The Making of a Masterpiece…

16th August 2016

Join Jazz aficionado Peter Gardner as this time he takes a look at the origins of ‘Body and Soul’…

It would become one of the world’s most recorded songs. One recorded performance would reach artistic heights rarely exceeded in the history of jazz. As the result of that performance, the tune would become something of a test piece for jazz musicians, particularly tenor saxophonists. Yet, some accounts of the song’s origins give little hint of the memorable things that were to follow.

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