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Doc: Art Pepper - Notes From a Jazz Survivor
Loneliness on the road and the dread of performing live in the early 1950s drove Art Pepper to snort heroin. What followed was a lifelong addiction. As he said regarding his stage anxiety, “I'd get sick to my stomach, and the only way I could handle it was getting loaded." It's hard to believe when you ...
Joe Harriott Quintet: At the BBC
Given up for adoption in Kingston, Jamaica, soon after he was born in 1928, Joe Harriott learned to play the clarinet, starting at age 10, while attending the city's Alpha Boys School. In 1951, when Harriott turned 23, he toured in the U.K. as a member of Ossie DaCosta's band. After the tour, Harriott decided to ...
Backgrounder: Dave Pell Octet 'Plays Rodgers & Hart'
I received so much email yesterday about the octet format that I figured I'd end the week with a Backgrounder by the Dave Pell Octet. The octet's arrangements in the 1950s were designed to give the eight musicians a West Coast big band sound—a miniaturized Les Brown Orchestra if you will. Prior to Dave Pell, there ...
Florian Ross Octet: Tunes & Explorations
I love jazz octets. More than any other ensemble configuration, an octet shows off an arranger's stuff. Unlike a big band, an octet is fully exposed, with individual instruments coming and going rather than full sections broken into chords. In many ways, octets are little big bands—the skeletal version. As a listener, you get to hear ...
Doc: Shirley Horn Sings & Plays 'Here's to Life'
Vocalist Shirley Horn's 1992 album Here's to Life (Verve) is a jazz masterpiece. The album has long been considered Horn's most emotionally penetrating album and Johnny Mandel's greatest triumph as a string arranger and orchestra conductor. He won the Grammy for Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocal(s) for the album. Unfortunately, Horn lost in the Best Jazz ...
Mouse Bonati: Portrait of a Jazz Hero
Joe “The Mouse" Bonati isn't widely known among most jazz fans. The saxophonist died in 1983 at age 53 after spending his latter years playing in Las Vegas. Born in 1930 in Buffalo, N.Y., Bonati had a less-than-desirable childhood and found solace in the alto saxophone at age 14. Two years later he was playing locally ...
Backgrounder: Ernest Ranglin's Wranglin'
Ernest Ranglin is one of Jamaica's finest jazz, ska, mento and rock-steady guitarists. Best of all, he has always mixed them up while playing—a technique that is astonishing and has always left me speechless. In 1962, when the James Bond film Dr. No was being shot in Jamaica, Ranglin was hired to compose music for some ...
Anita Kerr (1927-2022)
Anita Kerr, a recording studio soprano and vocal arranger whose Anita Kerr Singers released a staggering number of mellifluous albums under the group's own name as FM radio embraced the “beautiful music" stereo format starting in the late 1960s, died on October 10. She was 94. In addition to recording as a lead group, the Anita ...
Take Five with Eugenie Jones
by AAJ Staff
Meet Eugenie Jones Born and raised in Morgantown, West Virginia, Eugenie Jones's father, Eugene, was the director of the local Friendship Baptist Church Choir, and her mother was the choir's lead soprano. However, Jones possessed no latent desire to one day become a singer herself. She earned her MBA, married, and moved to Seattle, raising two ...
One-Album Female Vocalists
In the mid-1950s and early 1960s, female vocalists were in high demand at America's record labels. Never before had so many new pop and jazz singers found their way into recording studios. The reason was the arrival of the 12-inch album. Sales of new phonograph consoles that could handle the 331/3 speed were surging as the ...
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