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Joe Sullivan
Michael Joseph O'Sullivan (November 4, 1906 – October 13, 1971) was an American jazz pianist. Sullivan was the ninth child of Irish immigrant parents. He studied classical piano for 12 years and at age 17, he began to play popular music in silent-movie theaters, on radio stations, and then with the dance orchestras, where he was exposed to jazz. He graduated from the Chicago Conservatory and was an important contributor to the Chicago jazz scene of the 1920s. Sullivan's recording career began towards the end of 1927, when he joined McKenzie and Condon's Chicagoans. Other musicians in his circle included Jimmy McPartland, Frank Teschemacher, Bud Freeman, Jim Lanigan and Gene Krupa. In 1932 he was a member of recording group the Rhythmakers. In 1933, he joined Bing Crosby as his accompanist, recording and making many radio broadcasts. He contracted tuberculosis in 1936, and while he was convalescing at a sanitarium in Monrovia, California in 1937, Crosby organized and appeared ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the United States, and is more than twice as populous as second-place Los Angeles. New York City lies at the southern tip of New York State, and constitutes the geographical and demographic center of both the Northeast megalopolis and the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass. With over 20.1 million people in its metropolitan statistical area and 23.5 million in its combined statistical area as of 2020, New York is one of the world's most populous megacities, and over 58 million people live within of the city. New York City is a global cultural, financial, entertainment, and media center with a significant influence on commerce, health care and life sciences, research, technology, educa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rhythmakers
Rhythmakers, sometime known as The Rhythmakers or the Chicago Rhythm Kings in later re-issues of their music, was a jazz recording group which recorded music in four sessions in New York City in 1932. A racially integrated ensemble, the group was unable to tour or perform publicly due to racial segregation laws enforced throughout the country. Nevertheless, the group's popularity on record helped to bolster support for racially integrated music groups in the years to come. Rhythmakers was organized by American music publisher and jazz impresario Irving Mills; initially as a means of featuring and promoting the singer Billy Banks. Banks was the featured singer in nine songs recorded during the first two sessions with trumpeter Red Allen, clarinet and saxophone player Pee Wee Russell, banjoist Eddie Condon, pianist Joe Sullivan, double bassist Al Morgan, and guitarist Jack Bland. Drummer Gene Krupa played for the first session, but was then succeeded by Zutty Singleton who played pe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Johnny Mercer
John Herndon Mercer (November 18, 1909 – June 25, 1976) was an American lyricist, songwriter, and singer, as well as a record label executive who co-founded Capitol Records with music industry businessmen Buddy DeSylva and Glenn E. Wallichs. He is best known as a Tin Pan Alley lyricist, but he also composed music, and was a popular singer who recorded his own songs as well as songs written by others from the mid-1930s through the mid-1950s. Mercer's songs were among the most successful hits of the time, including "Moon River", " Days of Wine and Roses", " Autumn Leaves", and " Hooray for Hollywood". He wrote the lyrics to more than 1,500 songs, including compositions for movies and Broadway shows. He received nineteen Oscar nominations, and won four Best Original Song Oscars. Early life Mercer was born in Savannah, Georgia, where one of his first jobs, aged 10, was sweeping floors at the original 1919 location of Leopold's Ice Cream. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Connie Boswell
Constance Foore "Connie" Boswell (December 3, 1907 – October 11, 1976) was an American vocalist born in Kansas City but raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. With sisters Martha and Helvetia "Vet", she performed in the 1920s and 1930s as the trio The Boswell Sisters. They started as instrumentalists but became a highly influential singing group via their recordings and film and television appearances. Connie herself is widely considered one of the greatest female jazz vocalists and was a major influence on Ella Fitzgerald, who said, "My mother brought home one of her records, and I fell in love with it... I tried so hard to sound just like her." In 1936, Connee's sisters retired and Connee continued on as a solo artist (having also recorded solos during her years with the group). Biography Boswell was born in Kansas City, Missouri, United States. The Boswells came to be well known locally while still in their early teens, making appearances in New Orleans theaters and on radio. T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Victor Young
Albert Victor Young (August 8, 1899– November 10, 1956)"Victor Young, Composer, Dies of Heart Attack", ''Oakland Tribune'', November 12, 1956. was an American composer, arranger, violinist and conductor. Biography Young is commonly said to have been born in Chicago on August 8, 1900, but according to Census data and his birth certificate, his birth year is 1899. His grave marker shows his birth year as 1901. He was born into a very musical Jewish family, his father being a tenor with Joseph Sheehan's touring opera company. After his mother died, his father abandoned the family. The young Victor, who had begun playing violin at the age of six, and was sent to Poland when he was ten to stay with his grandfather and study at Warsaw Imperial Conservatory (his teacher was Polish composer Roman Statkowski), achieving the Diploma of Merit. He studied the piano with Isidor Philipp of the Paris Conservatory. While still a teenager he embarked on a career as a concert violinist with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harry Owens
Harry Robert Owens (18 April 1902 – 12 December 1986) was an American composer, bandleader and songwriter best known for his song " Sweet Leilani." Biography Harry Robert Owens was born April 18, 1902, in O'Neill, Nebraska. He learned to play the cornet in a small band on an Indian reservation in Montana. Early years Owens was working the vaudeville circuit by age 14. He studied for a career in law, but then started a band in 1926, when he was booked into the Lafayette Cafe in Los Angeles and auditioned a young Bing Crosby. Hawaii The big turning point in his career came in 1934 with his arrival in Hawaii and his appointment as music director of The Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Waikiki. He tried to learn all he could about the local culture by mixing and working with native Hawaiians. He learned many traditional and more modern Hawaiian songs and tunes which he wrote down and orchestrated using Western notation for the first time. Many had never been written down ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Louis Prima
Louis Leo Prima (December 7, 1910 – August 24, 1978) was an American singer, songwriter, bandleader, and trumpeter. While rooted in New Orleans jazz, swing music, and jump blues, Prima touched on various genres throughout his career: he formed a seven-piece New Orleans-style jazz band in the late 1920s, fronted a swing combo in the 1930s and a big band group in the 1940s, helped to popularize jump blues in the late 1940s and early to mid 1950s, and performed frequently as a Vegas lounge act beginning in the 1950s. From the 1940s through the 1960s, his music further encompassed early R&B and rock 'n' roll, boogie-woogie, and Italian folk music, such as the tarantella. Prima made prominent use of Italian music and language in his songs, blending elements of his Italian and Sicilian identity with jazz and swing music. At a time when ethnic musicians were discouraged from openly stressing their ethnicity, Prima's conspicuous embrace of his Sicilian ethnicity opened the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jimmy Dorsey
James Francis Dorsey (February 29, 1904 – June 12, 1957) was an American jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, composer and big band leader. He recorded and composed the jazz and pop standards " I'm Glad There Is You (In This World of Ordinary People)" and " It's The Dreamer In Me". His other major recordings were " Tailspin", " John Silver", " So Many Times", " Amapola", "Brazil ( Aquarela do Brasil)", " Pennies from Heaven" with Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, and Frances Langford, "Grand Central Getaway", and " So Rare". He played clarinet on the seminal jazz standards " Singin' the Blues" in 1927 and the original 1930 recording of " Georgia on My Mind", which were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Early life Jimmy Dorsey was born in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, United States, the first son of Theresa Langton Dorsey and Thomas Francis Dorsey. His father, Thomas, was initially a coal miner, but would later become a music teacher and marching-band director. Both Jimmy and his ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ray Noble
Raymond Stanley Noble (17 December 1903 – 2 April 1978) was an English jazz and big band musician, who was a bandleader, composer and arranger, as well as a radio host, television and film comedian and actor; he also performed in the United States. Noble wrote both lyrics and music for many popular songs during the British dance band era, known as the "Golden Age of British music", notably for his longtime friend and associate Al Bowlly, including " Love Is the Sweetest Thing", "Cherokee", " The Touch of Your Lips", " I Hadn't Anyone Till You", and his signature tune, "The Very Thought of You". Noble played a radio comedian opposite American ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's stage act of Mortimer Snerd and Charlie McCarthy, and American comedy duo Burns and Allen, later transferring these roles from radio to TV and popular films. Early life and career Noble was born at 1 Montpelier Terrace in the Montpelier area of Brighton, England. A blue plaque on the house commemorates him ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Woody Herman
Woodrow Charles Herman (May 16, 1913 – October 29, 1987) was an American jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, singer, and big band leader. Leading groups called "The Herd", Herman came to prominence in the late 1930s and was active until his death in 1987. His bands often played music that was cutting edge and experimental; their recordings received numerous Grammy nominations. Early life and career Herman was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on May 16, 1913. His parents were Otto and Myrtle (Bartoszewicz) Herrmann. His mother was born in Poland. His father had a deep love for show business and this influenced Woody at an early age. As a child he worked as a singer and tap-dancer in vaudeville, then started to play the clarinet and saxophone by age 12. In 1931 he met Charlotte Neste, an aspiring actress; the couple married on September 27, 1936. Woody Herman joined the Tom Gerun band and his first recorded vocals were "Lonesome Me" and "My Heart's at Ease". Herman also performed wit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Los Angeles
Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world's most populous megacities. Los Angeles is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Southern California. With a population of roughly 3.9 million residents within the city limits , Los Angeles is known for its Mediterranean climate, ethnic and cultural diversity, being the home of the Hollywood film industry, and its sprawling metropolitan area. The city of Los Angeles lies in a basin in Southern California adjacent to the Pacific Ocean in the west and extending through the Santa Monica Mountains and north into the San Fernando Valley, with the city bordering the San Gabriel Valley to it's east. It covers about , and is the county seat of Los Angeles County, which is the most populous county in the United States with an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pan-Pacific Auditorium
The Pan-Pacific Auditorium was a landmark structure in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, California. It once stood near the site of Gilmore Field, an early Los Angeles baseball venue predating Dodger Stadium. It was located within sight of both CBS Television City on the southeast corner of Beverly and Fairfax Avenue and the Farmers Market on the northeast corner of Third Street and Fairfax. For over 35 years it was the premier location for indoor public events in Los Angeles. The facility was closed in 1972, beginning 17 years of steady neglect and decay. In 1978, the Pan-Pacific Auditorium was included in the National Register of Historic Places, but eleven years later the sprawling wooden structure was destroyed in a fire. Architectural icon Built by event promoters Phillip and Cliff Henderson and designed by Los Angeles architects Wurdeman & Becket, the Pan-Pacific Auditorium opened to a fanfare of Boy Scout bugles on May 18, 1935 for a 16-day model home exhibition. N ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
