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Jazz Articles about Eddie Durham
Eddie Durham: The Jazz Innovator a City Refuses to Forget
by Hank Hehmsoth
Eddie Durham's LegacyFew names in jazz carry the quiet weight of Eddie Durham. Born in San Marcos, Texas, in 1906, Durham was a trombonist, guitarist, composer, and arranger whose fingerprints are all over the sound of swing. He was a pioneering electric guitarist--the first to record with the instrument--and a key arranger for Bennie Moten, Jimmie Lunceford, Count Basie, and Glenn Miller. Durham helped shape the Count Basie Orchestra's small-group feel, expanded orchestral voicings in ways that gave the band ...
Continue ReadingEddie Durham: Genius in the Shadows
by Jim Gerard
On December 13, 1932, in the eye of the Great Depression that was devastating the record industry, the Bennie Moten Orchestra shuffled “on their uppers" into a converted church in Camden, N.J., and silently launched the Swing Era, three years before clarinetist Benny Goodman's formal inauguration as the “King of Swing" at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles. While composer/bandleader Moten has vanished into the mists of history, his band boasted an assemblage of jazz legends: trumpeter Oran “Hot Lips" ...
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