FAMOUS RESIDENTS OF DAYS GONE BY
PETER ARNO - CARTOONIST
January 8, 1904 – February 22, 1968)
Photo credit: Flickr API
Born in New York City to a New York City Supreme Court justice, Curtis Arnoux Peters, Jr. known professionally as Peter Arno, was an American cartoonist. While attending Yale University he contributed illustrations, covers and cartoons to The Yale Record. He played piano, banjo and accordion in the Yale Collegians, a jazz band he formed. Infatuated by show business Arno designed, wrote and/or produced for four Boardway shows. He also appeared in a film “Artists and Models”. He left Yale after one year and moved back to New York City where he joined the staff of the fledgling magazine The New Yorker. His iconic cartoons and magazine covers helped build the magazine’s reputation for sophisticated humor and illustration. In 1927, Arno married Lois Long, a columnist and fashion editor for The New Yorker who wrote under the pen name “Lipstick”. Their daughter Patricia was born in 1928; the couple divorced two years later. Arno married debutante Mary Livington Lansing in August of 1935. When the couple divorced four years later, Arno secluded himself on a farm in Harrison, New York. He died of emphysema at the age of 64.
ART BLAKEY - DRUMMER
October 11, 1919 - October 16,1990
Copyright: artblakey.com
American jazz drummer and bandleader Arthur Blakey was born on October 11, 1919 in Pittsburgh, PA, and like many jazz musicians, learned the bible and piano in unison. After three years touring with Fletcher Henderson, Blakey joined the great Billy Eckstine band and was introduced to the bebop style and such musicians as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk. From 1939 to 1944, Blakey played with fellow Pittsburgh native Mary Lou Williams and he toured with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. In 1947 Blakey took a trip to Africa, and chose to live there for 2 years, where he studied polyrhythmic drumming and Islam, taking the name Abdullah Ibn Buhaina.
Arthur Blakey and Horace Silver joined together and formed the Jazz Messengers in the mid-1950s, a band drummer Blakey was associated with for the next 35 years. Though the band was formed as a collective of contemporaries, it became an incubator for young musical talent. The band’s first record, titled Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, produced their biggest hit “Moanin’” along with jazz classics “Blue’s March” and “Along Came Betty”.
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In 1981, Blakey was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame followed by the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1991 and the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998. In 2005, he was the recipient of the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Blakey died at the age of 71 after an illustrious career in jazz music that spanned six decades.
BRADFORD BOOBIS - PAINTER / COMPOSER
November 9, 1927 – January, 1972
Joseph Abeles/Zodiac Photographs
Bradford Boobis was a colorful eccentric and minor celebrity. He was a composer who, later in life, turned to painting to cope with the death of his 3-year-old son to spinal meningitis. Boobis used painting as an outlet to explore his personal loss, as well as larger societal woes such as vanity, pollution, and racial inequity. His paintings are dynamic and full of tension and movement. With a nod to sci-fi paperbacks, Bobbis’ works are full of dystopian realist imagery set in dream-like scenes. The paintings resonated with the American political climate of the late 1960s.
In his later life, he began a cultlike philosophical movement which he called Life, Infinity, Man (LIM). The self-taught painter received high praise in a 1969 edition of American Artist magazine: “His work indicates that he has thoroughly mastered oil technique, draughtsmanship and craftsmanship.” According to family lore, on the evening of Boobis’ death, four of his most dedicated devotees let themselves into Boobis’ 415 Central Park West studio. Three of them removed roughly a dozen of his paintings, all of which depicted naked figures in distorted surroundings. The whereabouts remained unknown until the paintings ultimately came into the possession of one of Boobis’ long-time London patrons who established a trust to maintain the works for posterity.
MARY “MOLLIE” COLUM - WRITER
June, 1884 - October 22, 1957
Portrait Of Mary Colum (George William Russell)
After the death of her parents, Margaret Catherine “Mollie” Gunning Maguire was sent to the St. Louis convent boarding school in Monaghan and later abroad to a German convent school. She described her convent education as one that ‘was regarded as a means of fitting our souls for God rather than as a preparation for life’. Her university years coincided with the early years of the Irish literary revival in Dublin. She married poet and playwright Padraic Colum in 1912. They accepted the offer of passage to America from Padraic's aunt in 1914, planning to stay only a few months while Padraic gave some lectures. Except for three years in France, the Colums spent the rest of their lives in the United States.
A respected literary critic, Mollie wrote reviews and essays and co-authored Our Friend James Joyce with her husband Padraic, a memoir and personal account of their friendship and time in Trieste. She and her husband were an influential Irish literary couple and patrons of the Irish Literacy Revival. They co-founded the Irish Review and were known for their joint and individual contributions as writers, critics, and educators.
In 1933, the Saturday Review wrote that “Everyone of sapience knows that Mary M. Colum, Padraic Colum’s wife, is the best woman critic in America. There is no one in her class.” Charles Poore’s review of her in the New York Times stated, “Mrs. Colum, as everyone knows, is a distinguished and penetrating critic of literature, life and manners.” Mollie Colum is remembered as the feisty wife of Padraic Colum, poet and playwright of the Irish Renaissance. She wrote over 160 articles and reviews for such magazines as Scribners, Dial, The Nation, New Republic, Saturday Review, Yale Review, New York Times Book Review and Forum where she served as literary editor from 1933 to 1940.
PADRAIC COLUM - WRITER
December 8, 1881 - January 11, 1972
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Born Patrick Collumb on December 8, 1881 Colum is from Longford, Ireland. The oldest of eight children, Colum was awarded a fellowship in the Irish Railway Clearing House at the age of 17 and worked there until 1903. During this time, he began writing and met famous Irish writers such as Lady Gregory and WB Yeats. It was at the National Library of Ireland where Colum’s lifelong friendship with James Joyce began. A wealthy American, Thomas Kelly, awarded Colum a five-year scholarship to University College Dublin.
Colum wrote several plays including Fiddler’s House (formerly titled Broken Sail), The Land and Thomas Muskerry. He married Mary Gunning Maquire in 1912, another student at University College Dublin. In 1914, the couple made a trip to the United States. What was supposed to be a visit turned into eight years. It was in America that Colum started to write children’s stories, the first of which titled The King of Ireland’s Son (1916) was published in the New York Tribune. Three of his books were awarded citations for the Newberry Honor. His financial stability came from a contract for children’s literature with Macmillan Publishers.
The couple spent 3 years in France, where Padraic renewed his friendship with James Joyce, then moved to New York City where he and his wife taught at Columbia University and at CCNY. Mary died in 1957, and one year later Our Friend James Joyce, a book on which Padraic and Mary collaborated, was published. In 1961 the Catholic Library Association awarded him the Regina Medal. A prolific author with 61 published books (not even counting his plays), Padraic Colum died in Connecticut at the age of 90.
MARION CUMBO - CELLIST
March 1, 1899 - September 17, 1990
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Marion Cumbo, a cellist with the Negro String Quartet, was a leading figure in New York City’s musical life since the Harlem Renaissance. The Negro String Quartet performed in the early 20th century, mainly in churches, community organizations and college venues in New York City. The high point of the group's existence came on November 27, 1925 when the Negro String Quartet appeared in concert at New York's Carnegie Hall with renowned singer Roland Hayes. New York Times music critic Olin Downes described the program of classical works and traditional Negro spirituals as coming together "in the presence of a common ideal of beauty," to which the audience "listened with unusual intentness and applauded with discriminating enthusiasm”. Cumbo played with the New York Chamber Orchestra, the Cosmopolitan Little Symphony, the Radio City Music Hall Orchestra, and the Harlem Philharmonic Orchestra. Marion was a member of the cello section of the Symphony of the New World, the first totally integrated professional symphony in the United States created 1965.
Born on March 1, 1899 and raised in New York City, he studied cello with Willem Willeke at the Institute of Musical Art. Marion married Clarissa Burton, who was born in Roseau, Dominica (British West Indies). Clarissa and Marion founded Triad Presentations in 1970, a nonprofit organization that promotes and encourages black artists by presenting them in community concerts. Clarissa died in 1988; two years later, on September 17, 1990 Marion Cumbo died at the age of 91.
The following link from 1978 features a story about the Cumbos from the Black Music Research Newsletter. The interview took place in their apartment at 415CPW:
http://collections.carli.illinois.edu/utils/getfile/collection/col_bmrnews/id/73/filename/65.pdf
CLARISSA BURTON CUMBO - MUSICIAN
June 5, 1915 – June 5, 1998
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Born in the Roseau, Domenica (British West Indies), Clarissa’s family moved to New York City in 1917 so she could pursue her music career. Trained as an opera singer and pianist, Clarissa toured throughout the 1920s, notably with Josephine Baker in The Chocolate Dandies Revue.
In 1924, Clarissa Burton married cellist Marion Wilson Cumbo. Their son, William Burton Cumbo, was born in 1926. Clarissa became an American citizen in1943. Clarissa joined her husband Marion in 1946 as a member of the short-lived group called the State Orchestra, an interracial group of both men and women musicians. Later in her career, Clarissa focused on organizing funds and support for Black musicians. Throughout the 1950s, she participated in and organized several ensembles of Black performers, including the Community Friends of Music.
In 1970 she and her husband Marion founded a nonprofit organization, Triad Presentations, to nurture and support the work of Black composers and musicians. In 1979, in recognition for her many years of service to composers and musicians, Clarissa Cumbo received the Howard Jackman Memorial Award from the National Association of Negro Musicians. Six years later the Cumbo’s were honored by the Harlem School of the Arts for their contributions to classical arts education.
At the age of 85, Clarissa Burton Cumbo died in New York.
YIP HARBURG - LYRICIST
April 8, 1898 - March 5, 1981
Photo credit: exchange.brx.org
​American composer Edgar Yipsel “Yip” Harburg, was born on April 8, 1898 on the Lower Eastside of Manhattan to Yiddish speaking, Russian Orthodox Jews. After World War I, Harburg attended City College of New York with his good friend Ira Gershwin. In 1929, his electrical contracting business went bankrupt, a casualty of the Wall Street crash and the Depression. Harburg turned all of his energy to songwriting. Thanks to an introduction by his friend Gershwin, Harburg and musician Jay Gorney wrote “Brother Can You Spare A Dime” (for the 1932 revue Americana) which quickly became the anthem for the Great Depression. Harburg and Gorney were offered a contract with Paramount and moved to Hollywood where he wrote the lyrics for a series of musicals including The Wizard of Oz for which he won an Academy Award. A master lyricist, poet and book writer, Harburg was known for the social commentary of his lyrics as well as his liberal sensibilities. A member of several radical organizations and the Socialist party, Harburg’s name was listed in Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. Blacklisted in Hollywood for 12 years, Harburg returned to New York to write lyrics for Broadway shows. A master lyricist, poet and book writer, he wrote the words to over 600 songs. Yip Harburg died in Los Angeles on March 5, 1981 in a car crash.
LORENZ HART - LYRICIST
May 2, 1895 - November 22, 1943
​Photo: John Springer/CORBIS Collection/Corbia via Getty Images
Born to Jewish immigrants on May 2, 1895 in Harlem, New York Lorenz (Larry) Hart was the elder of two sons. He attended Columbia Grammar School and then studied journalism for two years at Columbia University.
In 1919 a friend introduced Hart to Richard Rodgers; the two collaborated and wrote songs for amateur and student productions. They made their professional debut with the song “Any Old Place With You” featured in the Broadway musical “A Lonely Romeo” (1919). The duo was hired to write the score for the 1925 Theatre Guild production The Garrick Gaeities, which led to their acclaim.
Rodgers and Hart wrote the music and lyrics for twenty-six Broadway musicals during a partnership that spanned more than twenty years. At their pinnacle, they were averaging four new shows a year. Hart’s lyrics were praised for their wit and technical sophistication. According to Stephen Holden, a writer for The New York Times, "Many of Hart's ballad lyrics conveyed a heart-stopping sadness that reflected his conviction that he was physically too unattractive to be lovable.”
Throughout his life Hart suffered from depression. By the late 1930’s, Hart was disappearing on drinking binges for days at a time. His erratic behavior was often the cause of friction between him and Rodgers, a friction that ultimately led to the end of their partnership. The death of his mother in April 1943 devastated Hart; on the opening night of the reworked version of the musical A Connecticut Yankee, for which Hart wrote six new songs, Hart disappeared and was found in a hotel room, suffering from pneumonia. Lorenz Hart died on November 22, 1943 at the age of 48.
ELVIN JONES - DRUMMER
September 9, 1927 - May 18, 2004
Photo credit: drummerworld.com
“When I was a young man, my parents and their peers had ways of encouraging the young people, and there was an expression they would use: Tell your story.”
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American jazz drummer of the post bop era, Elvin Ray Jones was born on September 9, 1927 in Pontiac, Michigan. The youngest child in a family of ten, Jones started showing an interest for drumming at the age of two. In high school, Jones joined the black marching band to learn the rudiments of drumming. He served in the United States Army from 1946 to 1949 and played drums professionally with the Army Special Services program and Operation Happiness. After his discharge in 1949, Jones used his mustering-out pay and an additional $35 he borrowed from his sister to buy his first drum set.
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In 1949, he played in a band led by Billy Mitchell in Detroit's Grand River Street club. Eventually he went on to play with artists such as Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Wardell Gray. In 1955, after a failed audition for the Benny Goodman band, he found work in New York, joining Charles Mingus's band, and releasing a record called J is for Jazz.
In 1960, he joined the John Coltrane Quartet, a band that is widely considered to have redefined swing. Playing with bassist Jimmy Garrison and pianist McCoy Tyner, Jones became a prominent contributor to jazz drumming with masterfully constructed solos and evolving patterns.
After six years with Coltrane, Jones led some highly influential bands. Perhaps the most notable was a trio with saxophonist Joe Farrell and bassist Jimmy Garrison (from John Coltrane Quartet) with whom Jones recorded the album “Puttin’ It Together” for Blue Note. Jones recorded extensively for Blue Note under his own name in the late sixties and early seventies, with groups that featured prominent as well as up and coming greats. In the 1990s, Elvin performed and recorded with his own band, The Elvin Jones Jazz Machine.
Life Magazine called Jones “the world's greatest rhythmic drummer", his free-flowing style a major influence on many leading drummers such as Ginger Baker, Janet Weiss and Mitch Mitchell. He was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1995. On May 18, 2004, Elvin Jones died of heart failure in Englewood, New Jersey.
MORDECAI MENAHEM KAPLAN - RABBI
June 11, 1881 – November 8, 1983
Dr. Mordecai M. Kaplan (Courtesy of the American Jewish University)
The son of a rabbi, Mottel Kaplan was born on June 11, 1881 in Sventiany in the Russian empire (present day Lithuania). Described as a "towering figure" for his influential work in adapting Judaism to modern society, Mordecai Kaplan was an American Conservative rabbi, writer and educator who founded Judaism’s Reconstructionist movement in 1968 with his son-in-law, Rabbi Ira Eisenstein.
In 1888 Mordecai’s father, Rabbi Israel Kaplan served as a “dayan” (religious judge) in the court of New York City’s Chief Rabbi Jacob Joseph. At the age of nine, Mordecai came to New York, was enrolled in public school and later sent to the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTSA) to pursue his rabbinic ordination in modern Orthodox Judaism. He graduated from CCNY in 1900 and went to Columbia University to study philosophy, sociology, and education. After receiving a master's degree and doctorate, he was ordained at JTSA. Though his understanding of Judaism differed from the seminary's perspective, he maintained a long-standing connection with the institution, teaching there for more than fifty years.
In 1908, he married Lena Rubin. They had four daughters. In 1909, Kaplan became principal of the newly formed teachers' institute at JTSA (which had joined the Conservative movement), a position he held until his retirement in 1963. Kaplan was not primarily interested in academic scholarship, but in teaching future rabbis and educators to reinterpret Judaism. Kaplan's Reconstructionist philosophy influenced not only his own immediate students but the American Jewish community at large. Around 1916-1918, he organized the Jewish Center in New York, a community organization with a Modern Orthodox synagogue as its nucleus, the first of its kind in the United States. He served as its rabbi until 1922.
On March 18, 1922 at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism he held the United States’ first public bat mitzvah for his daughter Judith who read from the Torah, a role that had traditionally been reserved for males. In 1968, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, in which Kaplan's philosophy Reconstructionist Judaism was promoted as a separate religious movement, was founded.
ALFRED KAZIN - WRITER
June 5, 1915 – June 5, 1998
Photo credit:Oscar White/CORBIS/Corbis Images
Alfred Kazin was born on June 5, 1915, the son of a house painter and a dress maker, both of whom had emigrated in their youths from Czarist Russia. Growing up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, his parents’ immigrant, working-class values permeated his childhood. Alfred’s younger sister Pearl also became a writer and critic. For more than 50 years Mr. Kazin wrote prolifically about two great subjects: American literature and himself.
Kazin’s politics were more moderate than most of the New York intellectuals, many of whom were socialists. He rejected Stalin. In 1934, he visited The New York Times office to express his disagreement with a book review by John Chamberlain. After meeting with Kazin and impressed by his arguments, Chamberlain recommended him to editors at The New Republic. In 1938 Kazin graduated with an MA from Columbia University. In 1942, at the age of 27, he published his first book, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature. In 1951, he wrote the acclaimed memoir A Walker in the City, where he detailed his childhood in the Jewish milieu of Brownsville. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. The sequels, Starting Out in the Thirties (1965) and New York Jew (1978) were also finalists for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. In 1996 he was awarded the first Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award in Literary Criticism. In 1963 he became a distinguished professor in the English Department at the State University of New York at Stonybrook. He stayed at Stony Brook for ten years before taking up professor positions at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
On his 83rd birthday, after facing the slow progression of prostate cancer and suffering from bone cancer Kazin died at his home on the Upper Westside in Manhattan, New York. At his request, he had a small funeral and was cremated. Philip Roth wrote of Kazin “He was America's best reader of American literature in this century.''
LOIS BANCROFT LONG - COLUMNIST
December 15, 1901 – July 29, 1974
Photo from Andrea Long Bush. (Wikipedia)
After graduating with a degree in English from Vassar College, Connecticut-born Lois Long moved to New York and started working at Vogue then Vanity Fair. Long found her niche and fame when she was hired for Harold Ross’ new magazine, The New Yorker, a sophisticated humor magazine designed to appeal to New York City's elite. In 1925, Long became one of its original contributors and was the publication’s first guide to the fashionable world, a post she held for forty-five years.
At age 23, Long began writing her column, “Tables for Two”,” reviewing nightclubs across the New York City. Taking over the column from a writer who called himself “Top Hat,” Long chose the pen name “Lipstick”. A cabaret-reviewer and resident dancer-til-dawn, Long’s great sense of humor and adventure were the perfect combination for 1920’s Manhattan.
Nights filled with jazz, gin, and jitterbugging all made it into her column. According to historian Joshua Zeitz, she was the embodiment of the 1920s flapper, in every sense of the word. Long's columns offered women a glimpse of a glamorous lifestyle in which they could enjoy many of the same freedoms and vices as men. In 1927 she married The New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno. The couple had a daughter in 1928 and divorced two years later. Long was considered the expert on New York's nightlife. William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, said that "Lois Long invented fashion criticism," adding that she "was the first American fashion critic to approach fashion as an art and to criticize women's clothes with independence, intelligence, humor and literary style." In 1957, Long married US Air Force Major Harold A. Fox. She died of lung cancer at 72.
ABBEY LINCOLN - SINGER/SONGWRITER
August 6, 1930 - August 14, 2010
Photo credit: bbc.co.uk
Born Anna Marie Wooldridge on August 6, 1930 in Chicago, Illinois, Lincoln grew up in Michigan on a large farm with her eleven siblings. Lincoln‘s interest in music started at an early age and she started singing in school and in church. To escape the harsh Michigan winters, Lincoln moved to California where she met lyricist Bob Russell, who became her manager . . . . and renamed her Abbey Lincoln.
Lincoln’s voice evoked life’s joys and life’s pains; her versatility and depth of emotion elevated her above the rest and she successfully carved her name as a singer, songwriter, and storyteller.
While performing at the intimate supper club, Village Vanguard, Lincoln met drummer/composer/bebop innovator Max Roach. They began collaborating during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. Abbey and Max Roach were married from 1962 through 1970. It was Roach who introduced her to New York City's jazz elite and also played a major role in Lincoln becoming a socio-political artist and activist.
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In addition to her growing career in music, Lincoln found success in acting, starting with her 1956 role singing in The Girl Can't Help It, wearing a dress once worn by Marilyn Monroe. Throughout the late sixties and seventies, Lincoln appeared in episodes of television dramas and sitcoms. In 1968 she returned to film and co-starred with Sidney Poitier and Beau Bridges in
For Love of Ivy for which she received a Golden Globe nomination.
From the 1990s and until her death, Lincoln fulfilled a 10-album contract with Verve Records. These albums represent a crowning achievement in Lincoln's career. The "World Is Falling Down", released in 1990, propelled Lincoln back to stardom. In 2003, she received a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master Award. Abbey Lincoln died on August 14, 2010 in Manhattan, eight days after her 80th birthday.
ROBERT E. MARGROFF - WRITER
March 5, 1930 – May 25, 2015
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Robert E. Margroff (1930–2015) was born on a farm in Fayette County, Iowa. After training as a typesetter, he worked for various newspapers, eventually returning to the farm in the wake of his father’s death. Margroff published his first science fiction short story, Monster Tracks, in If magazine in 1964. Four years later Margroff saw a rise in popularity when he published The Ring, his first of many novels with Piers Anthony including the five-book series Kelvin of Rud.
DWIKE MITCHELL - JAZZ PIANIST
February 14, 1930 - April 7, 2013
(Photo credit: Dunedin Historical Society)
Dwike Mitchell (Ivory Mitchell Jr.) was born on February 14, 1930 in Dunedin, Florida, a small city on the Gulf of Mexico. An only child, Mitchell started teaching himself chords on a used piano his father picked up on his garbage route. Mitchell attended Chase Memorial Elementary School, a school for black students. He had fond memories of school, possibly because of Mrs. Whitehead, one of his teachers who played the piano and taught him how to read music. Wanting a name that did not sound like a gimmick for a piano player, his mother came up with Dwike (a combination of several family names).
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In 1946, Mitchell joined the US Army and was stationed at Lockbourne Airforce Base, an all-black facility known for its excellent music program, particularly its concert band and the legendary bandmaster John Brice. While in the Army, he was introduced to the music of Russian composer Rachmaninoff and also learned how to play concerto scores. After his service, Mitchell attended the Philadelphia Musical Academy. In 1954, Mitchell reunited with his army buddy Willie Ruff, a bassist and French horn player, and the two became members of Lionel Hampton’s band. They left the orchestra in 1955, and the Mitchell-Ruff Duo began opening for major acts like Duke Ellington and Count Basie. They were not embraced by jazz critics, who considered their classical training a detriment. It was their academic backgrounds that catapulted them into world fame, when the Mitchell-Ruff Duo accompanied the Yale Russian Choir on a 1959 visit to the Soviet Union. The duo performed an impromptu concert at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, hailed by Time magazine as the first unofficial concert by US jazz musicians in the Soviet Union. In 1981, the duo demonstrated jazz techniques at conservatories in Shanghai and Beijing. Headlines called it the first jazz performance in China after the Cultural Revolution.
The Mitchell-Ruff Duo gave thousands of concerts at schools and colleges and in foreign countries where jazz was taboo. Ruff, who became Mitchell’s lifelong musical partner, told the Tampa Bay Times "(Lionel) Hampton became the first in a long line of legendary jazzmen … who became devout admirers of Mitchell's awesome technique, his stunning harmonies and his boundless range. He is a pianist who can do it all. Relatively unknown to the public, he is a giant to his peers."
Throughout his time playing with Ruff, Mitchell maintained a New York City residence and taught piano there. In 2012, Mitchell returned to Florida. On April 7, 2013 he died from pancreatic illness.
MAX ROACH - JAZZ DRUMMER
January 10, 1924 - August 16, 2007
Photo credit: Reddit
An American jazz drummer and composer, Maxwell Lemuel Roach was born January 10, 1924 in Newland, North Carolina. When he was four, his family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Gospel music was quite prominent in his home; his mother was a gospel singer and at ten years of age, Roach began drumming in a gospel ensemble. After graduating from The Boys School, he was called to fill in for Sonny Greer in the Duke Ellington Orchestra playing at the Paramount Theatre. His first professional recording took place in December 1943, supporting Coleman Hawkins.
From 1950 to 1953, he gained his formal music education at the Manhattan School of Music. He became house drummer at Monroe's Uptown House, where he interacted and played with some of the giants of the bebop era. In 1952, Roach co-founded Debut Records with bassist Charles Mingus.
One of the two leading drummers of the bebop era, Roach was also one of the leading musicians, composers, and bandleaders in jazz. Roach participated in recordings by Parker’s quintet in 1947–48 and in the Miles Davis sessions that were later collected in the album "Birth of the Cool" (1957). In 1954 he became co-leader of a quintet with trumpeter Clifford Brown. Roach and Kenny Clarke devised a new concept of musical timing, playing the beat-by-beat pulse of standard 4/4 time on the ride cymbal instead of on the bass drum. The two drummers developed a flexible and flowing rhythmic pattern that allowed soloists to play freely, a pattern that gave a drummer the ability to insert dramatic accents on the snare drum, crash cymbal, and other components of the drum set.
Ken Micallef of Modern Drummer wrote: “Max Roach brought jazz drumming into the modern age. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell revolutionized jazz with new melodies and concepts; Max matched these musical geniuses with startling rhythms and reactive, action-packed drumming that still influences drummers on a profound level today.”
In the late 1950s, Roach added political commentary to his recordings, starting with "Deeds Not Words", followed by "We Insist! Freedom Now Suite" in 1960. The work’s theme of racial equality reflected Roach’s political activism. In the early 1970s he established an all-percussion ensemble, M’Boom, and from 1972 through the 1990s, he brought jazz education to students at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst. In the 80s and 90s, Roach embarked on solo concerts, demonstrating that his multi-percussion instrument could satisfy audiences. Roach also started a series of improvisation duet recordings and wrote the music for theatrical productions.
Jazz historian Burt Korall wrote “When Max Roach's first records with Charlie Parker were released by Savoy in 1945, drummers experienced awe and puzzlement and even fear." Stan Levey, one of those drummers said of Roach "I came to realize that, because of him, drumming no longer was just time, it was music.”
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Max Roach was inducted into the DownBeat Hall of Fame in 1980 and the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1992. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in 1990 from Manhattan School of Music and was inducted into the North Carolina Hall of Fame in 2009. Max Roach died on August 16, 2007.
TEDDY WILSON - JAZZ PIANIST
November 24, 1912 - July 31, 1986
Photo credit: news.allaboutjazz.com
Theodore Shaw Wilson was born in Austin, Texas on November 24, 1912. His parents moved him and his brother to Alabama six years later and his parents secured employment at the Tuskegee Institute. Wilson learned piano in grade school, and in high school he played with a dance band and also learned the oboe, clarinet and violin. He received a year of classical music training at Talladega College in Alabama.
In 1929, 17-year-old Wilson left home to become a professional musician in Detroit. That same year Wilson heard 19-year-old Art Tatum who was filling in at a Detroit club. In an interview with Jazz Profiles, he said of Tatum “He was a phenomenon. He brought an almost unbelievable degree of intense concentration to the piano, and he had a keyboard command that I have heard with no other jazz pianist and with very few classical pianists….”
After working in Speed Webb's band (with Louis Armstrong), Wilson joined Benny Carter's Chocolate Dandies in 1933 and the Benny Goodman Trio in 1935 making Wilson one of the first black musicians to be a prominent performer in a racially integrated group. Wilson formed his own short-lived big band in 1939 then led a sextet at Café Society from 1940 to 1944. As a result of his support for left-wing causes, Wilson was dubbed “Marxist Mozart:” by Howard “Stretch” Johnson. Wilson also performed in benefit concerts for The New Masses journal and for Russian War Relief, and he chaired the Artists' Committee to elect Benjamin J. Davis, a New York City council member running on the Communist Party USA ballot.
A follower of Earl Hines' distinctive "trumpet-style" piano playing, Teddy Wilson was lauded as one of the swing era's finest pianists. From the influence of Hines, Art Tatum and Fats Waller, Teddy Wilson developed his own unique approach and was considered an orchestral pianist who engaged the complete range of the keyboard in a slightly restrained, wholly dignified manner. Wilson’s sophisticated and elegant style led critic Scott Yanow to describe him as "the definitive swing pianist".
In 1936, Wilson became a part of the Benny Goodman trio, the first African- American musician to work with one of the first bandleaders to integrate a jazz band. Wilson later appeared as himself in the cinematic treatment of The Benny Goodman Story. After a long illness, Teddy Wilson died in New Britain, Connecticut, on July 31, 1986. He was 73 years old.
Credits: NPR, Wikipedia, Modern Drummer, artblakey.com, marycolum.com, yipharburg.com, poemhunter.com, wusf.org, New York Times, Tampa Bay Times, ‘‘Mitchell & Ruff: An American Profile in Jazz’’, Encyclopedia Britannica, Playbill, National Endowments for the Arts, Jazz Profiles, Downbeat Magazine (January 22, 1959), Flickr API, American Jewish University, Reddit, Getty Images, CORBIS, BBC, Zodiac Photographs