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Rob Madna: A Dutch Discovery
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JazzWax by Marc Myers
For many JazzWax readers, this blog is a resource that happily turns them onto jazz musicians and recordings they didn't know previously. But every so often, that wow sensation happens to me. My own discovery happened a few weeks ago while posting about Joy Marshall (here and here). In the latter post, I featured a video of pianist Rob Madna playing solo on Yesterdays and then Marshall joining with the orchestra on It's Alright With Me. Madna was completely new ...
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Nara Leão: Muse of the Bossa Nova
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JazzWax by Marc Myers
Nara Leão (pronounced LEE-yay-yo) was a celebrated Brazilian bossa nova and Tropicália pop singer in the 1960s. Her father had given her a guitar at age 12, and as a teenager in the late 1950s, she became friends with many of the singer-songwriters who were pioneering the bossa nova. The list included including Roberto Menescal, Carlos Lyra, Ronaldo Bôscoli, João Gilberto, Vinicius de Moraes and Antônio Carlos Jobim. Many of them rehearsed in her parents' home in Rio de Janeiro's ...
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Herbie Steward: Three Horns
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JazzWax by Marc Myers
Herbie Steward was a crackerjack reed player. He toured and recorded with many of the toughest big bands of the 1940s, including Artie Shaw, Alvino Rey, George Handy, Jack Teagarden, Ralph Burns and Woody Herman. Steward is probably best know for being one of the saxophones on Herman's original recording of Jimmy Giurffre's composition and arrangement of Four Brothers. He also was on Ralph Burns's Summer Sequence Part IV, which was immortalized by Getz's solo that itself became a song ...
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Wayne Shorter: Timeless Sound
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JazzWax by Marc Myers
Wayne Shorter remains one of America's most fascinating living jazz legends. His sound on the tenor saxophone is muscular, hypnotic and so evocative of the 1960s. His original compositions remain relevant, with their yearning, political undertow and modal scales. So it's puzzling that there are so few YouTube clips of him live in the 1960s leading his own groups and playing his own songs. Part of this is a result of him spending most of his time in the Miles ...
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Joy Marshall in Holland, 1965
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JazzWax by Marc Myers
Earlier this week, I posted on jazz-pop vocalist Joy Marshall, who moved to London in 1962, married, divorced and remained there until her untimely death in 1968. David Chilver in London sent along a link to the following clip of Marshall in the Netherlands in 1965 on Dutch television. First we hear Yesterdays, a solo by Rob Madna on piano backed by the Frans de Kok Orchestra. Then Marshall sings It's All Right With Me. She's backed by the orchestra ...
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The Sad Story of Joy Marshall
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JazzWax by Marc Myers
Throughout the 1960s, American singer Joy Marshall was an accomplished jazz-pop vocalist who was and still is virtually unknown in the U.S. Her anonymity here has much to do with her relocating to the London in June 1962, at age 25. Marshall said she never considered herself a jazz singer in interviews, though her pop recordings clearly have a jazz feel. Sort of a combination of Mary Wells and Carmen McRae. Everything she took on cooked. Smitten by the States, ...
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Billy Eckstine's Ballads 1947-1951
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JazzWax by Marc Myers
In 1947, vocalist Billy Eckstine became a solo performer, much the way Frank Sinatra had in 1942. Signing with MGM, Eckstine played to the young female market that dreamed of love. At first marketed to the Black urban market, Eckstine on MGM crossed over to the pop charts, racking up 18 hits between 1947 and '51. Lanky with movie-star looks and a bass-baritone voice, Eckstine specialized humid, romantic ballads that took Sinatra's sensitive male to a different level. Instead of ...
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What Ever Happened to Hazel Scott?
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JazzWax by Marc Myers
Hazel Scott was an enormously talented jazz and classical pianist whose popularity soared in the early 1940s. She appeared regularly at New York's Cafe Society in 1941, performed at Carnegie Hall in 1943, went to Hollywood, married Congressman Adam Clayton Powell in 1945 and was the first woman to have her own TV show in 1950. But later that year, she was accused by the House Un-American Activities Committee of being a Communist, which tanked her career. She had a ...
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