Andre Rieu's tribute to Frank Sinatra

Andre Rieu, renowned Dutch violinist, conductor and composer, and his orchestra did this tribute to Frank Sinatra with My Way on his Stradivarius violin at Radio City Music Hall – New York.

Glenn Miller on Broadway

Q. In a recent article about the great big band leader Glenn Miller it mentioned that he had worked in a show orchestra on Broadway. Do you know what show? When was it? Any big named stars?

A. In 1930, the hit musical of the Broadway season was George and Ira Gershwin's “Girl Crazy,” The production starrred Ethel Merman (her debut) and Ginger Rogers.

Ethel Merman became an overnight sensation when she stopped the show with "I Got Rhythm." George Gershwin, supposedly visited her the day after the opening to congratulate her and to advise her to "never take another singing lesson...don't let anyone change you... just keep doing what you are doing!"

To fans of the big bands, the orchestra for the 1930 show is of great interest. The band in the pit for the original Broadway production was known for its richness of talents an included: Red Nichols, Jack Teagarden, Gene Krupa and Glenn Miller!  All future big band leaders!

Glenn Miller, working as a music contractor, put the group together, including his roommate from the Ben Pollack band days in California....Benny Goodman.

A petition for Mildred Bailey's selection in the Jazz Hall of Fame

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE NESHUI ERTEGUN JAZZ HALL OF FAME

March 19, 2012
 

Mr. Wynton Marsalis
c/o Selection Committee
Jazz Hall of Fame at Lincoln Center
33 West 60th Street, 11th Floor
New York, N.Y. 10023
 

Dear Mr. Marsalis and fellow Selection Committee Members:
 

My name is Julia Keefe, and I am a student at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, FL, studying vocal jazz performance. I am also a member of the Nez Perce Indian Tribe. Shortly after I first became interested in jazz over ten years ago, I began researching the life of Bing Crosby, who also attended my high school, Gonzaga Prep, in Spokane, WA. I was surprised and happy to learn that Bing Crosby gave credit for his early success to a Native American woman from the Coeur d'Alene Tribe named Mildred Rinker Bailey who had, like me, lived her formative childhood years on her Idaho tribal reservation before moving to Spokane and discovering jazz. I am writing to urge that Mildred Bailey be considered for induction into the Neshui Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame in recognition of her groundbreaking role in jazz history.
 

To say that Mildred Bailey inspired me in my chosen vocation as a jazz singer would be a great understatement. But I am not alone. Bing Crosby once said, "I was lucky in knowing the great jazz and blues singer Mildred Bailey so early in life. I learned a lot from her. She made records which are still vocal classics, and she taught me much about singing and interpreting popular songs." And a sideman from her husband Red Norvo's band, trumpeter Lyle "Rusty" Dedrick once wrote, "She had a magic. So many people down the line, so many singers, benefited from her, owe debts to her - and they don't even know it. Mildred Bailey probably never made a bad record; she made many that were excellent, and quite a few considerably better, even, than that."
 

As the very first female big band singer in America, Mildred was a role model and inspiration for contemporaries including Billie Holiday, Helen Ward and Ella Fitzgerald. She opened the door of opportunity for every female lead singer who followed the trail she blazed. Her singing style and phrasing caught the ear of aspiring young singers of that era including Tony Bennett and Rosemary Clooney, and still, much later, Linda Ronstadt. She was respected and admired by performers including Frank Sinatra, the Dorsey brothers, Coleman Hawkins and Artie Shaw. A 1944 Time Magazine review of her show at the Café Society in New York called Mildred, "just about the greatest songbird in the U.S."
 

Recognition of Mildred Bailey in the Jazz Hall of Fame would, I believe, open a door to a largely neglected and ignored chapter in the history of this All-American art form known as jazz: the involvement of First Americans. When I was living on my own reservation in Kamiah, ID, I came across old photographs of tribal members in small ensembles and quartets, playing jazz. One group, the Lollipop Six, was made up of young Nez Perce men who had learned to play their instruments while attending Indian boarding schools in the early 20th century. I can still recall how proud Lionel Hampton was when he visited our reservation to be honored while attending the international jazz festival at the University of Idaho that still bears his name.
 

On too many reservations in modern America there are not enough inspirational stories of successful native women who rose above the challenges they faced and helped to change history. But Mildred Rinker Bailey, did just that. Though widely thought to have been a white singer, Mildred was, in fact, a member of the Coeur d'Alene Tribe. Mildred once called traditional Indian singing, "a remarkable training and background" for a singer. "It takes a squeaky soprano and straightens out the clinkers that make it squeak; it removes the bass boom from the contralto's voice," she said. "This Indian singing does this because you have to sing a lot of notes to get by, and you've got to cover a lot of range." Every Native American who has ever attended a tribal ceremony, whether a feast, a memorial, or a modern pow-wow, knows exactly what Mildred Bailey was talking about here. I believe that Mildred Bailey's success as a jazz vocalist is grounded in her early vocal training and development from singing traditional tribal songs as a young girl on the Coeur d'Alene Indian Reservation.
 

I would deeply appreciate the chance to provide you and the other selection committee members, and your entire international voting panel, with a complete packet of information that I have collected while researching the remarkable career of the first female vocalist in America to sing with a big band. Recognizing Mildred Bailey's pioneering, ground breaking accomplishment, would do honor to the Neshui Ertegun Hall of Fame, and provide Indian tribes from across this country a symbol of their own contribution to the rich cultural heritage of a uniquely American art form that I have come to love, thanks in large part to Mildred Bailey.

Respectfully,

Julia Keefe
Nez Perce Tribal member #4152
Frost School of Music, Class of 2012
www.whereismildred.com
www.juliakeefe.com

Artie Shaw's many wives!

Band leader Artie Shaw was married eight times!

They included actresses Lana Turner (wife No. 3, 1940), Ava Gardner (No. 5, 1945), Evelyn Keyes (No. 8, 1957) and novelist Kathleen Winsor, author of the 1944 best-seller “Forever Amber” (No. 6, 1946).

ARTIE SHAW (getty)

Here's the complete list (from Wiki); A self-proclaimed "very difficult man," Shaw was married eight times: Jane Cairns (1932–33; annulled); Margaret Allen (1934–37; divorced); actress Lana Turner (1940; annulled); Betty Kern (1942–43; divorced), the daughter of songwriter Jerome Kern; actress Ava Gardner (1945–46; divorced); Forever Amber author Kathleen Winsor (1946–48; annulled); actress Doris Dowling (1952–56; divorced); and actress Evelyn Keyes(1957–85; divorced).

The marriage to Keyes, best known for playing the middle of the three O’Hara sisters in “Gone With the Wind,” lasted the longest, until 1985, but they led separate lives for much of that time. “I like her very much and she likes me, but we’ve found it about impossible to live together,” he said in a 1973 interview.

 Note: With that many ex-wives, collecting alimony in most cases, it is not surprising that his theme song was "Nightmare!"  When asked why he married so many times....his answer..."Because they asked me!"He had one son, Steven Kern, with Betty Kern, and another son, Jonathan Shaw (a well-known tattoo artist who founded Fun City Tattoo), with Doris Dowling. Both Lana Turner and Ava Gardner later described Shaw as being extremely emotionally abusive. His controlling nature and incessant verbal abuse in fact drove Turner to have a nervous breakdown, soon after which she divorced him.

Frank Sinatra's appeal for religious and racial tolerance honored in Washington

To many Frank Sinatra's contribution to our culture and society goes far beyond his music....he was a fighter against racial, religious and ethnic discrimination throughout his lifetime...a position that could have cost him his career.  Crosby, Wayne, Hope and others had the same opportunity but chose to remain silent....not the kid from Hoboken. 

Today we note that the 2012 edition of The Smithsonian’s Jazz Appreciation Month in honoring the  role of jazz artists with the theme of “Jazz Crossing Borders and Cultures”  illustrates how musicians often took a stand on civil rights issues by featuring Frank Sinatra's film and recording from 1945 “The House I Live in.”


The song, along with a 10-minute short, was an appeal for religious tolerance, unity and freedom after World War II, a time when many African-American veterans were angry that they were returning home to Jim Crow conditions and second-class treatment after their war service. The film received an Honorary Academy Award in 1946 and was selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2007.

Frank put his feelings to paper in 1991 when he wrote this op-ed piece for the L.A. Times on July 4th; 
  
We are created equal! No one of us is better than any of us! That's the headline proclaimed in 1776 and inscribed across centuries in the truth of the ages. Those inspired words from the Declaration of Independence mock bigotry and anti-Semitism. Then why do I still hear race and color-haters spewing their poisons? Why do I still flinch at innuendoes of venom and inequality? Why do innocent children still grow up to be despised? Why do haters' jokes still get big laughs when passed in whispers from scum to scum? You know the ones I mean—the "Some of my best friends are Jewish..." crowd.

As for the others, those cross-burning bigots to whom mental slavery is alive and well, I don't envy their trials in the next world, where their thoughts and words and actions will be judged by a jury of One. Why do so many among us continue in words and deeds to ignore, insult and challenge the unforgettable words of Thomas Jefferson, who drafted the Declaration of Independence's promise to every man, woman and child—the self-evident truth that all men are created equal?

That's what the Fourth of July is all about. Not firecrackers. Not getting smashed on the patio sipping toasts to our forefathers. Not picnics and parades or freeways empty because America has the day off. Equality is what our Independence Day is about. Not the flag-wavers who wave it one day a year, but all who carry its message with them wherever they go, who believe in it, who live it enough to die for it—as so many have.

OK, I'm a saloon singer, by self-definition. Even my mirror would never accuse me of inventing wisdom. But I do claim enough street smarts to know that hatred is a disease—a disease of the body of freedom, eating its way from the inside out, infecting all who come in contact with it, killing dreams and hopes millions of innocents with words, as surely as if they were bullets.

Who in the name of God are these people anyway, the ones who elevate themselves above others? America is an immigrant country. Maybe not you or me, but those whose love made our lives possible, or their parents or grandparents. America was founded by these people, who were fed up with other countries. Those weren't tourists on the Mayflower—they were your families and mine, following dreams that turned out to be possible dreams. Leaving all they owned, they sailed to America to start over and to forge a new nation of freedom and liberty—a new nation where they would no longer be second-class citizens but first-class Americans.

Even now, with all our problems, America is still a dream of oppressed people the world over. Take a minute. Consider what we are doing to each other as we rob friends and strangers of dignity as well as equality. Give a few minutes of fairness to the house we live in, and to all who share it with us from sea to shining sea. For if we don't come to grips with this killer disease of hatred, of bigotry and racism and anti-Semitism, pretty soon we will destroy from within this blessed country.

And what better time than today to examine the conscience of America? As we celebrate our own beginnings, let us offer our thanksgiving to the God who arranged for each of us to live here among His purple mountain majesties, His amber waves of grain. Don't just lip-sync the words to the song. Think them, live them. "My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty." And when the music fades, think of the guts of Rosa Parks, who by a single act in a single moment changed America as much as anyone who ever lived.

I'm no angel. I've had my moments. I've done a few things in my life of which I'm not too proud, but I have never unloved a human being because of race, creed, or color. And if you think this is a case of he who doth protest too much, you're wrong. I would not live any other way; the Man Upstairs has been much too good to me.

Happy Fourth of July. May today be a day of love for all Americans. May this year's celebration be the day that changes the world forever. May Independence Day, 1991, truly be a glorious holiday as every American lives the self-evident truth that all people are created equal. God shed His grace on thee—on each of thee—in His self-evident love for all of us.

Frank Sinatra
July 4, 1991 

We remember the King of the Clarinet... Artie Shaw

Artie Shaw CD

On the eve of America's entry into World War II, TIME magazine reported that to the German masses the United States meant "sky-scrapers, Clark Gable, and Artie Shaw."

Artie's story starts in New Haven, Connecticut, where he spent his formative years and at an early age became a compulsive reader, and where at 14 he began to play the saxophone (and several months later the clarinet), and at 15 left home to play all over America, and meanwhile study the work of his early jazz idols, such as Bix Beiderbecke, Frank Trumbauer, and Louis Armstrong.

At the age of 16 Artie went to Cleveland, where he remained for three years, the last two working with Austin Wylie, then Cleveland's top band leader, for whom Shaw took over all the arranging and rehearsing chores. In 1927 Artie heard several "race" records, the kind then being made solely for distribution in black (or "colored," as they were then known) districts. After listening entranced to Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five playing Savoy Blues, West End Blues, and other now-classic Louis Armstrong records from the late 1920's, Artie made a pilgrimage to Chicago's Savoy Ballroom to hear the great trumpet player in person. Back in Cleveland, Artie, now 17, won an essay-writing contest which took him out to Hollywood in 1928, where he ran into a couple of musicians he had known back in New Haven who were now working in Irving Aaronson's band. A year later, at the age of 19, Artie moved to Hollywood to join the Aaronson band.

Shortly afterwards, the Aaronson band spent the summer of 1930 in Chicago, where Artie "discovered a whole new world" (as he would much later write, in a semi-autobiographical book The Trouble With Cinderella first published in 1952) when he heard several recordings of some of the then avant-garde symphonic composers' work: Stravinsky, Debussy, Bartok, Ravel, et al, whose work would eventually influence most of our contemporary jazz performers. This influence would soon surface in Shaw's own work when he began to use strings, woodwinds, etc.-notably in a highly unusual album entitled Modern Music for Clarinet, selections of which were also featured in several of Shaw's Carnegie Hall concerts.

When the Aaronson band came to New York in 1930, Artie decided to stay there, and within the year, at age 21, he became the top lead-alto sax and clarinet player in the New York radio and recording studios. After a couple of years of commercial work, he became disillusioned with the music business and bought some acreage with an old farmhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He moved out there to spend the next year chopping wood for a living and trying to train himself as a writer-of books rather than music-since there seemed to be no way at that time to make a decent living playing the kind of music that interested him.

In 1934 he returned to New York to pick up his formal education where it had been abruptly terminated when he left high school at 15, and resumed studio work to support himself. He made his first public appearance as a leader in 1936, in a Swing Concert (history's first) held at Broadway's Imperial Theatre. This proved to be a major turning point in his career, and would in fact ultimately have a significant impact on the future of American Big Band jazz. Shaw (who was then completely unknown to the general public) did something totally unorthodox to fill one of the three minute interludes in front of the stage curtain while such then established headliners as Tommy Dorsey, the Bob Crosby Band, the Casa Loma Band, etc. were being set up. Instead of the usual jazz group (a rhythm section fronted by a soloist), Shaw composed a piece of music for an octet consisting of a legitimate string quartet, a rhythm section (without piano), and himself on clarinet-an extremely innovative combination of instruments at that time. Fronting this unusual group, he played a piece he had written expressly for the occasion, Interlude in B-flat, which the group presented to a totally unprepared and, as it turned out, wildly enthusiastic audience. (This, by the way, is the first example of what has now come to be labeled "Third Stream Music.")

Shaw could scarcely have known that within a short time he would make a hit record of a song called Begin the Beguine, which he now jokingly refers to as "a nice little tune from one of Cole Porter's very few flop shows." Shortly before that he had hired Billie Holiday as his band vocalist (the first white band leader to employ a black female singer as a full-time member of his band), and within a year after the release of Beguine, the Artie Shaw Orchestra was earning as much as $60,000 weekly-a figure that would nowadays amount to more than $600,000 a week!

The breakthrough hit record catapulted him into the ranks of top band leaders and he was immediately dubbed the new "King of Swing". Today, Shaw's recording of Begin the Beguine sells thousands and has become one of the best-selling records in history.

Superstardom turned out to be a status that Shaw (as a compulsive perfectionist) found totally uncongenial. Within a year he abruptly took off for another respite from the music business, this time in Mexico. In March of 1940 he re-emerged with a recording of Frenesi, which became another smash hit. For this recording session, he used a large studio band with woodwinds, French horns, and a full string section along with the normal dance band instrumentation-another first in big band jazz history. Later that year he formed a touring band with a good-sized string section, with which he recorded several more smash hits, among them his by now classic version of Star Dust, plus a number of other fine musical recordings such as Moonglow, Dancing in the Dark, Concerto for Clarinet, and many others.

Shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the unpredictable Shaw quit the music business once again, this time to enlist in the U.S. Navy. After finishing boot training, he was asked to form a service band which eventually won the national Esquire poll. He spent the next year and a half taking his music into the forward Pacific war zones, playing as many as four concerts a day throughout the entire Southwest Pacific, on battleships, aircraft carriers, and repair ships, ending with tours of Army, Navy, and Marine bases (and even a number of ANZAC ones when his band arrived in New Zealand and Australia). On returning to the U.S.-after having undergone several near-miss bombing raids in Guadalcanal-physically exhausted and emotionally depleted, he was given a medical discharge from the Navy. His troubled marriage to Betty Kern (the daughter of composer Jerome Kern) ended in divorce, and in 1944 Shaw formed another civilian band-featuring such great performers as pianist Dodo Marmarosa, guitarist Barney Kessel, and the phenomenal trumpeter Roy Eldridge-with which he toured the country and made many excellent recordings.

In 1947, during another hiatus, Shaw spent about a year in New York City in an intensive study of the relation of the clarinet to non-jazz (or, as he prefers to call it, "long-form") music. This culminated in a tour in 1949 of some of the finest musical organizations in America, such as the Rochester Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Eric Leinsdorf, the National Symphony in Washington, D.C., the Dayton Symphony, three appearances with New York's "Little Orchestra" (one in Newark, a second in Brooklyn's Academy of Music, and the last in Town Hall). After that Shaw recorded the aforementioned Modern Music for Clarinet album, containing a collection of remarkably well crafted symphonic orchestrations of short works by Shostakovich, Debussy, Ravel, Milhaud, Poulenc, Kabalevsky, Granados, Gould, along with Cole Porter and George Gershwin. About that time Shaw again appeared in Carnegie Hall, as guest soloist with the National Youth Orchestra conducted by Leon Barzin, where he received critical acclaim for his rendition of Nicolai Berezowski's formidable Concerto for Clarinet, which he had previously presented in its world premiere a few weeks earlier with the Denver Symphony. Around that time he performed the Mozart Clarinet Concerto with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein at a benefit performance, held at Ebbetts Field, for Israel's Philharmonic Orchestra. During that year, Shaw also played numerous chamber music recitals with string quartets, at various colleges and universities around the country.

Another of Shaw's ventures during that period was his great 1949 band, which was virtually ignored by the general public until 1989, when an album of some of its work was released on compact discs by MusicMasters, and has since received remarkable worldwide reviews.

In 1951 Shaw again quit the music business, this time moving to Duchess County, New York, where he bought a 240 acre dairy farm and wrote his first book, a semi-autobiographical work entitled The Trouble With Cinderella: An Outline of Identity, sections of which have appeared in many anthologies, and which is still in print.

Throughout the early fifties, Artie Shaw assembled several big bands and small combos-as well as his own symphony orchestra, (to play a one-week engagement at the opening of a large New York jazz club called Bop City). One such combo which was formed in late 1953 and recorded in 1954, a group known as the Gramercy 5 (a name he took from the New York telephone exchange of the time), maintain an amazingly high degree of popularity to this day despite the onslaught of Rock, MTV, and other such commercial phenomena.

In 1954 Artie Shaw made his last public appearance as an instrumentalist when he put together a new Gramercy 5 made up of such superb modern musicians as pianist Hank Jones, guitarist Tal Farlow, bassist Tommy Potter, et al. The most comprehensive sampling of that group (as well as a number of others, going all the way back to 1936 and on up through this final set of records) can be heard on a four record album, now a rare item, released in 1984 by Book of the Month Records, entitled: Artie Shaw: A Legacy, which has also received rave reviews. Some of this music was re-issued on two double CD's by MusicMasters as Artie Shaw: The Last Recordings, Rare and Unreleased, and Artie Shaw: More Last Recordings, The Final Sessions.

Artie Shaw packed his clarinet away once and for all in 1954. In 1955 he left the United States and built a spectacular house on the brow of a mountain on the coast of Northeast Spain, where he lived for five years. On his return to America in 1960 he settled in a small town named Lakeville, in northwestern Connecticut, where he continued his writing, and in 1964 finished a second book (consisting of three novellas) entitled I Love You, I Hate You, Drop Dead! In 1973, he moved back to California again, finally ending up in 1978 in Newbury Park, a small town about 40 miles west of Los Angeles, situated in what he refers to as "Southern California pickup-truck country."

On first meeting Artie Shaw, young Wynton Marsalis remarked, "This man's got some history." Shaw is regarded by many as the finest and most innovative of all jazz clarinetists, a leader of several of the greatest musical aggregations ever assembled, and one of the most adventurous and accomplished figures in American music.

As Artie Shaw went on into his nineties, he developed a crusty humor, as evidenced by an epitaph for himself he wrote for Who's Who in America a few years ago at the request of the editors: "He did the best he could with the material at hand."

Artie died on December 30, 2004 (aged 94) in Thousand Oaks, California.

(Edited from the Artie Shaw Orchestra website)

The Big Band music of Vince Giordano and His Nighthawks set for NJ concert

Vince Giordano (Mayo)

New Jersey Jazz Society will present Vince Giordano and His Nighthawks on Sunday, May 6, 2012 at 3 p.m. at the Mayo Center's Community Theatre in historic Morristown, New Jersey.  All seats are only $20.
This promises to be a blast to the big band past with Vince Giordano and his band The Nighthawks, renowned on the New York scene for their commitment to preserving and authentically presenting 1920s and ’30s jazz and popular music.

In 30 years as a bandleader, Vince Giordano has focused on recreating the sounds of 1920s and '30s jazz and popular music. "I just love the energy of the early jazz," says Giordano, 54. "I wanted to recapture some of that." Giordano has developed his expertise on the saxophone, bass, and tuba, but he is best known as leader of the vintage band the Nighthawks, and his authentic realizations of earlier jazz performance styles.

In 1976 Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks (originally known as the New Orleans Nighthawks) was formed. His band has been booked for black tie galas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, the Waldorf Astoria, the Rainbow Room and many private parties. Vince has also been invited to perform at the Smithsonian, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and Jazz Festivals around the world.

"Early appearances with Leon Redbone and on the Prairie Home Companion and lending his talents to Francis Ford Coppola's film The Cotton Club, led to working with Dick Hyman's Orchestra in half a dozen Woody Allen soundtracks then as a bass player in Sean Penn's band in Woody's Sweet and Lowdown. He and band were featured in Gus Van Sant's film Finding Forrester, in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, Robert DeNiro's The Good Shepherd and most recently in Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road."

Other recording projects include soundtracks for HBO’s—Grey Gardens and Martin Scorsese’s Boardwalk Empire. Also a big-band historian and collector, Giordano has more than 60,000 scores in his collection.
Mayo Performing Arts Center is located at 100 South Street in Morristown, NJ 07960. The Box Office: 973-539-8008.