terraverdemusic.org

Paul Desmond studied the clarinet at San Francisco State University and played in various local bands before joining the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1951. Because his career has been almost exclusively with this group until its dissolution in 1967, he shared his success, without receiving the recognition it deserves.

Desmond continued to play occasionally with Brubeck in the 1970s, notably in 1975 when the two men have recorded an album of duets. He also appeared at festivals and toured Europe, Australia and Japan for George Wein. He later worked in New York on the half-note with his own group, which included Jim Hall (1974), and in Toronto as a soloist with a rhythm section (1974-5).

Desmond was one of the most capable of “cool” trend alto saxophone jazz, Lee Konitz, who was the main exhibitor, and Lester Young, Benny Carter, and others had announced in the late 1930s . His tone was a luminous quality, consistent throughout the instrument, which was particularly recalls Carter, but his most notable gift for improvisation is its power of melodic invention, supported in part that depends on use unusual sequence of the imagination. Desmond independent recordings, with sidemen Gerry Mulligan (1962) and Hall (1959-65), for example, did more justice to the many people who Brubeck, for whom he composed the famous Take Five 5 / 4 time.

Ella Fitzgerald was orphaned in early childhood and moved to New York to attend school in Yonkers orphanage. In 1934, she was discovered in an amateur contest sponsored by the Apollo Theater in New York City. This led to a commitment with the group of Chick Webb, and she quickly became a celebrity of the swing era with shows such as A-Tisket, A-Tasket (1938) and Undecided (1939). When Webb died in 1939, Fitzgerald assumed leadership of the band, who led for three years. She then embarked on a solo career, and issuing commercial recordings of jazz and in 1946 began a collaboration with Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic, which has finally a large international following.

She also sang in a jazz band led by her husband, Ray Brown (1948-52). In early 1956, Fitzgerald broke its longstanding relationship with Decca to join the newly founded Granz Verve label. Among the first projects was a series of 11 songs dedicated to the great American authors. The series has made use of the superiority of jazz-inflected arrangements of Nelson Riddle and others, and succeeded in attracting a wide audience of non-jazz, the establishment of the Fitzgerald supreme interpreters of popular song repertoire. Thereafter, his career was managed by Granz, and has become one of the best jazz performers of international renown. She has published numerous recordings for labels Granz and made frequent appearances at jazz festivals of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Oscar Peterson, Tommy Flanagan, and Joe Pass. Among her many awards is a Grammy Award in 1980. Her collection of scores and photos is now in the library of Boston University.

For decades, Fitzgerald was seen as the quintessential female jazz singer and drew lavish praise from admirers as diverse as Charlie Parker and the singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Her voice is small and somewhat girlish in timbre, but these disadvantages are offset by a very wide range (from D to C), which has orders with remarkable agility and a sense of swing smoothly. This allows her to give performances that rival the best jazz instrumentalists in their virtuosity, particularly in improvised scat solos, for which she is justly famous. Unlike the training of singers, it shows the strain on the breaking of his voice (d ‘and beyond), which, however, it uses the term effect in the construction of the highlights. Fitzgerald also has a gift of mimicry that enables him to imitate other well-known singers (Louis Armstrong to Aretha Franklin) and the instruments of jazz. As an interpreter of popular songs, it is limited by some innate gaiety of handling drama and pathos convincingly, but it is unmatched in its return of lightweight materials and its ease to slide in and out of the idiom jazz. It has influenced many popular American singers of the post-swing as well as international artists such as singer Miriam Makeba.

Joe “King” Oliver is said to have started music as a trombonist, and from about 1907, he played in brass bands, dance groups, and various small groups in New Orleans bars and cabarets. In 1918, he moved to Chicago (to which he may have acquired his nickname), and in 1920 he began directing his own group. After taking California (primarily Oakland and San Francisco) in 1921, he returned to Chicago and, in some of the same musicians, began a commitment to the Lincoln Gardens King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band (June 1922). This group was joined a month later by 22 years, Louis Armstrong as second cornetist. With two horns (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 it then, either on disc or live at the Lincoln Gardens.

In late 1924, after a tour of the Midwest and Pennsylvania, the group has completely revamped including two or three saxophones, and played in Chicago as the Dixie Syncopators (February 1925 to March 1927), the most distinguished saxophonists who played with the group were Barney Bigard and Albert Nicholas. Shortly after a brief but successful engagement at the Savoy Ballroom in New York (from May 1927), members began to disperse and fall the group dissolved, but Oliver remained in New York, recording ad hoc, often with orchestras. From 1930 to 1936 he toured widely, mainly in the Midwest and upper South, with dimes and 12 bands, he had rarely made during this period, and there is more ‘records from April 1931. He spent the last months of his life to retirement from the music Savannah.

Oliver is generally considered one of the most important musicians in New Orleans style. Like other early cornetists New Orleans, he played in a rhythm of four squares and cut melodic style (which contrasts with the deliberate irregularity of the young Armstrong and his imitators) and has a repertoire of forms of expression differences of pace and height, a frieze on the scene of novelty effects and other derivatives blues vocal style. He frequently used the stamp modifiers of various kinds, 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 heart by many trumpeters years 1920 and 1930 and who, like Sugar Foot Stomp, became a jazz standard. As a soloist, May it be better heard in a number of blues accompaniments, including Sippi Wallace.

In contrast to his near-contemporary, 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 a successfull largely because of the discipline that it imposed its musicians. Indeed, the former New Orleans cornetists, only Oliver was extensively recorded in the 1920s with an exceptional, and the revival of New Orleans style, which began shortly after his death owes much to the rediscovery of its small band of three dozen recordings Creole, which are known internationally by the 1940s. After 1924, the quality of its recordings have decreased, partly because of recurring sore teeth and gums, and partly because his style is at odds with that of his younger sidemen, but with a good orchestra, it was able to play consistent and energetic, even as late as 1930. Almost all of his performances have been reissued.

Oliver’s influence is difficult to assess: his playing during New Orleans period (his best year, according to Souchon) has not been registered, and in 1925 his style was largely replaced by Armstrong. He had a clear impact on the training Ellington sideman Bubber Miley, and perhaps these white musicians as Muggsy Spanier and his dumb tricks have been copied by Johnny Dunn and trumpeters such as Natty Dominique Ladnyi and Tommy, who remained outside the influence of Armstrong, may have derived in part from their styles Oliver. The extent of the influence of Oliver Armstrong himself, although clearly audible and significant, has yet to be examined properly. Oliver is credited with songs on many albums and recordings of copyright, it is not known how many of them, he actually composed.

Thanks to Bottle Openers

The work of trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong once summarized the achievements of New Orleans jazz style and pointed the way to the latest development of music as a solo-oriented art. Its historical importance is offset by its popular appeal – a rare combination in the jazz art form, which is often suspicious of commercial success – and his career, is the favorite of “West End Blues” in 1928, at one end this has changed the course of jazz with his flamboyance and virtuosity, and (at the other end), in his hit records “Hello Dolly” and “What a Wonderful World”, which attracted a mass audience with their charisma and emotionally direct. Leslie Critic Gourse entitled his book on jazz singers Louis “The children, but may equally well be applied to all jazz musicians later, which swim in the inheritance and often work in ’shadow of this huge figure of the art of the first time.

Armstrong often stated that his birthday was the fourth of July, 1900 – a symbolic milestone to celebrate the arrival of this important figure at the dawn of the American Century. However, he used 1901 on the application of social security and other official documents. Search by Tad Jones and Gary Giddins led to the discovery of records of baptism Armstrong has created the most prosaic birthday of August 4 1901.

Armstrong suffered the stigma of an illegitimate child of a prostitute, raised in abject poverty of the tower-of-the-century New Orleans. His father, William Armstrong has left the family when Louis was still an infant, and his mother Mary Armstrong was often absent, and with the child to fall into the care of his grandmother and uncle. He briefly attended the Fisk School for boys, but left when he was eleven years. He earned money by singing in the streets with a quartet, young and working odd jobs. Arrested for firing a gun as part of a celebration of New Year’s Eve, Armstrong was placed in the House of New Orleans Waifs. Armstrong has benefited from the structured and disciplined environment in this context, but perhaps even more so by the musical training he received from the hands of Professor Peter Davis. Armstrong was soon attracting the attention of his cornet playing, and absorb the sounds of jazz from New Orleans.

Armstrong was excited by playing of cornetist Buddy Bolden, a quasi-legend who has never registered, but is often credited as the first musician to perform New Orleans jazz style. The youth was also admired and learned from Bunk Johnson, Kid Ory, Buddy Petit and especially the great Joe ‘King’ Oliver. When Oliver left New Orleans in 1919 to try his luck in the North, Armstrong took his place in the Kid Ory. Armstrong also played on the river boats, and served as second trumpet for the Tuxedo Brass Band. Around this time Armstrong married Daisy Parker, and the couple adopted Clarence Armstrong, the son of Louis the cousin of Flora who died shortly after childbirth. But marriage did not last long, and Parker is dying soon after the divorce.

In 1922, Armstrong was invited to travel to Chicago to join King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. This was the most famous jazz band in Chicago at the time, Armstrong and the association has given a platform to continue his fame and success. Armstrong and Oliver gained attention for the counterpoint of two cones, but in time the youngest player of the more assertive tend to surpass the work of his employer. King Oliver’s classic recording of “Dippermouth Blues”, we see the contrast between the two designers. Former Oliver remains faithful to the tradition of New Orleans mixed with other instruments, and concentrating on the timbre and texture rather than the variety of notes, but the young Armstrong was chomping at the bit, anxious to demonstrate his virtuosity on the horn. His second wife, Lil Hardin Armstrong, who was also with pianist Oliver band, encouraged him to go as a leader and to develop his own style and sound like a jazz musician.

“Make no mistake, [this] jazz music is for everyone. Jazz is not an exclusive, elite club. Go ahead, listen…” Christian McBride

True indeed that jazz music is appreciated not only by a few but surprisingly by many people. They enjoy the unique creativitity of this musical genre of syncopated rhythm of the famous blues.

Jazz fans in Chicago include even the highest official of the USA. Yes, Barack Obama himself!

An article posted in msnbc.com last Feb. 26,2009 had a glaring headline: “Obamas honor Stevie Wonder at White House” and is herein cited:

” WASHINGTON [AP]- President Barack Obama on Wednesday thanked musician Stevie Wonder  for creating “a style that’s uniquely American” as he presented the singer-songwriter the nation’s  highest award for pop music.
Obama, who called Wonder the soundtrack of his youth, gave the star the Library of  Congress’ Gershwin Prize for Popular Song during an East Room tribute that featured Tony Bennett, Martina McBride and Wonder himself. The president joked that the group was “the most accomplished Stevie Wonder cover band in history.”

Not only the President but also the First lady Michelle Obama called Wonder as “one of the world’s greatest artists.” She related how her grandfather would play Stevie’s  music all throughout the house, and would together they listened to his song over and over.

And Stevie may have played a big role in Michelle and Barack’s love story!The couple’s wedding song was “You and I”, and the President was quoted saying “… had I not been a Stevie Wonder fan, Michelle might not have dated me, we might not have married”.

This post was brought to you by Business News