Jack Teagarden

Weldon Leo "Jack" Teagarden (August 20, 1905–January 15, 1964), known as "Big T" and "The Swingin' Gate", was an influential jazz trombonist, bandleader, composer, and vocalist, regarded as the "Father of Jazz Trombone".

Born in Vernon, Texas, his brothers Charlie and Clois "Cub" and his sister Norma also became noted professional musicians. Teagarden's father was an amateur brass band trumpeter and started young Jack on baritone horn; by age 10 he had switched to trombone. He first heard jazz music played by the Louisiana Five and decided to play in the new style.
Teagarden's trombone style was largely self-taught, and he developed many unusual alternative positions and novel special effects on the instrument. He is usually considered the most innovative jazz trombone stylist of the pre-Bebop era, and did much to expand the role of the instrument beyond the old tailgate style role of the early New Orleans brass bands. Chief among his contributions to the language of jazz trombonists was his ability to interject the blues or merely a "blue feeling" into virtually any piece of music.

By 1920 Teagarden was playing professionally in San Antonio, including with the band of pianist Peck Kelley. In the mid 1920s he started traveling widely around the United States in a quick succession of different bands. In 1927, he came to New York City where he worked with several bands. By 1928 he played for the Ben Pollack band.
Within a year of the commencement of his recording career, he became a regular vocalist, first doing blues material ("Beale Street Blues", for example), and later doing popular songs. He is often mentioned as one of the better white male jazz vocalists of the era; his singing style is quite like his trombone playing, in terms of improvisation (in the same way that Louis Armstrong sang quite like he played trumpet). His singing is best remembered for duets with Louis Armstrong and Johnny Mercer.

In the late 1920s he recorded with such notable bandleaders and sidemen as Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Bix Beiderbecke, Red Nichols, Jimmy McPartland, Mezz Mezzrow, Glenn Miller, and Eddie Condon. Glenn Miller and Teagarden collaborated to provide lyrics and a verse to Spencer Williams' Basin Street Blues, which in that amended form became one of the numbers that Teagarden played until the end of his days.

In the early 1930s Teagarden was based in Chicago, for some time playing with the band of Wingy Manone. He played at the Century of Progress exposition in Chicago. Teagarden sought financial security during The Great Depression and signed an exclusive contract to play for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra from 1933 through 1938. The contract with Whiteman's band provided him with financial security but prevented him from playing an active part in the musical advances of the mid-thirties swing era.
Teagarden then started leading his own big band. Glenn Miller wrote the song "I Swung the Election" for him and his band in 1939. In spite of Teagarden's best efforts, the band was not a commercial success, and he was brought to the brink of bankruptcy.
In 1946 Teagarden joined Louis Armstrong's All Stars. Armstrong and Teagarden's work together shows a wonderful rapport, in particular their duet on Rocking Chair. In late 1951 Teagarden left to again lead his own band, then co-led a band with Earl Hines, then again with a group under his own name with whom he toured Japan in 1958 and 1959.

From left: Jack Teagarden, Sandy DeSantis, Velma Middleton, Fraser MacPherson, Cozy Cole, Arvell Shaw, Earl Hines, Barney Bigard. At the Palomar Supper Club, March 17, 1951.
Teagarden appeared in the movies Birth of the Blues (1941), The Glass Wall (1953), and Jazz on a Summer's Day (1960), the latter a documentary film of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. He was an admired recording artist, featured on RCA Victor, Columbia, Decca, Capitol, and MGM Records discs. As a jazz artist he won the 1944 Esquire magazine Gold Award, was highly rated in the Metronome polls of 1937-42 and 1945, and was selected for the Playboy magazine All Star Band, 1957-60.
Teagarden was the featured performer at the Newport Jazz Festival of 1957. Saturday Review wrote in 1964 that he "walked with artistic dignity all his life," and the same year Newsweek praised his "mature approach to trombone jazz."

Richard M. Sudhalter writes (in 'Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz', Oxford University Press, 1999): "The late trumpet player Don Goldie, who spent four years in Teagarden's band and had known him since childhood said that he 'always got a feeling that a lot of happiness was locked away inside Jack, really padlocked, and never came out..."
"Jack Teagarden died, alone, of a heart attack complicated by bronchial pneumonia in his room at the Prince Conti Hotel in the French Quarter of New Orleans on January 15, 1964. He was only 58. "I sometimes think people like Jack were just go-betweens," Bobby Hackett told a friend. "The Good Lord said, 'Now you go and show 'em what it is', and he did. I think everybody familiar with Jack Teagarden knows that he was something that happens just once. It won't happen again. Not that way..."

"...Connie Jones, the New Orleans cornetist working with Jack Teagarden at the time of the trombonist's death, was a pallbearer for the wake, held at a funeral parlor on leafy St. Charles Avenue: 'I remember seeing him there in a coffin, a travelling coffin. They were going to fly him to Los Angeles for burial right after that. The coffin was open and I remember thinking 'Boy he really looks uncomfortable in there'.
"'Not that he was that tall. Maybe five foot ten or so, at most. But he was kinda wide across the shoulders - and most of all he just gave you the impression he was a big man, in every way. In that coffin, - well, I can't really explain it, but he seemed to be scrunched up into a space that was too small to contain him'".
He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles, California.
The coda of Teagarden's recording career is the album Think Well of Me, recorded in January 1962 and made up of his singing and trombone playing, accompanied by strings, on compositions by his old musical associate Willard Robison: available on Verve CD 314 557 101-2.
In 1985, Jack Teagarden was inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame.



Jack Teagarden, cuyo nombre original era Weldon Leo Teagarden, fue un trombonista, cantante y director de orquesta estadounidense de jazz tradicional y swing, nacido en Vernon, Texas, el 29 de agosto de 1905, y fallecido en Nueva Orleans, Luisiana, el 15 de enero de 1964.

Nacido en una familia en la que todos su miembros son músicos, aprende a tocar el piano con cinco años, aunque desde 1915 se decide por el trombón. Entre 1920 y 1924, toca con Peck Kelly y Willard Robinson, y realiza sus primera grabaciones con Johnny Johnson (1927), para entrar a formar parte, en 1928, de la orquesta de Ben Pollack, con quien permanecerá hasta 1933. En este periodo, ya instalado en Chicago, tocará además en sesiones puntuales con Benny Goodman, Wingy Manone o Red Nichols. Entre 1933 y 1938, Teagarden trabajará en la orquesta de Paul Whiteman, tras lo que forma su propia banda, que mantendrá hasta 1946, con la que grabará numerosos discos para Columbia Records y Decca. Después, ya consolidado como uno de los mejores trombonistas de la ápoca, acompañará a Louis Armstrong en varias giras y grabaciones, formando parte de sus All Stars hasta 1951.

En el periodo que va desde 1951 a 1959, Teagarden reorganiza diversas big bands, entre las que destaca la de Earl Hines (1957), para realizar giras por Europa y Asia. En 1964, durante una estancia en Nueva Orleans, muere de una crisis cardíaca.
Teagarden fue un músico muy popular, que apareció en un buen número de películas. Considerado uno de los grandes representantes del trombón clásico, su estilo estuvo muy influido por la música que oyó en su infancia, especialmente por el blues y los espirituales negros, asimilando perfectamente el espíritu de éstos y desarrollando una técnica propia, con una sonoridad amplia y refinada, fácilmente reconocible. Gran improvisador sobre cualquier tempo, utilizaba la sordina de forma muy personal.

Joe Williams

Joe Williams (born Joseph Goreed; December 12, 1918 – March 29, 1999) was a well-known jazz vocalist, a baritone singing a mixture of blues, ballads, popular songs, and jazz standards.

Williams was born Joseph Goreed in the small farming town of Cordele, Georgia. His father, Willie Goreed, left the family early on, but Williams' mother, Anne Beatrice Gilbert, who was 18 when she had her only child, provided a strong emotional bond until her death in 1968. Soon after Williams was born, his mother moved them in with her parents, who had enough money to support an extended family. During this time, Anne Gilbert was saving for a move to Chicago. Once she had made the move — alone — she began saving the money that she earned cooking for wealthy Chicagoans so that her family could join her. By the time Williams was four, he, his grandmother, and his aunt had joined his mother in Chicago, where they would live for many years.

Probably most important to Williams' later life was the music scene — fueled largely by African-American musicians — that thrived in Chicago in the early 1920s. Years later, he recalled going to the Vendóme Theatre with his mother to hear Louis Armstrong play the trumpet. Chicago also offered a host of radio stations that featured the then-rebellious sounds of jazz, exposing Williams to the stylings of Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, Big Joe Turner, and many others. By his early teens, he had already taught himself to play piano and had formed his own gospel vocal quartet, known as "The Jubilee Boys", that sang at church functions.

During his mid-teens Williams began performing as a vocalist, singing solo at formal events with local bands. The most that he ever took home was five dollars a night, but that was enough to convince his family that he could make a living with his voice; so, at 16, he dropped out of school. After discussing it with his family, he began using the name "Williams" as a stage name, and he began marketing himself in earnest to Chicago clubs and bands. His first job was at a club called Kitty Davis's. Williams was allowed to sing with the band in the evening and keep the tips, which would sometimes amount to $20.

Williams had his first real break in 1938 when clarinet and saxophone player Jimmie Noone invited him to sing with his band. Less than a year later, the young singer was earning a reputation at Chicago dance halls and on a national radio station that broadcast his voice from Massachusetts to California. He toured the Midwest in 1939 and 1940 with the Les Hite band, which accompanied the likes of Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller. A year later, he went on a more extensive tour with the band of saxophonist Coleman Hawkins.

In 1942, Lionel Hampton hired him to fill in for his regular vocalist, both for the Hampton orchestra's home performances at the Tic Toc Club in Boston and for their cross-country tours. Williams' work with Hampton ended when the band's former singer returned, but by that time Williams was in great demand, his fame particularly burgeoning back in Chicago. In the mid-'40s he toured with Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy (making his first recording with that band). From 1951 through 1953, he recorded with Red Saunders and his band for OKeh Records and Blue Lake Records.

He got his big break in 1954, when he was hired as the male vocalist for with Count Basie Orchestra. He remained with Basie until 1961, garnering some of the best exposure a blues and jazz singer could have. His first LP, Count Basie Swings, Joe Williams Sings, appeared in 1955, containing definitive versions of Memphis Slim's "Every Day I Have the Blues" (already his signature song) and "Alright, Okay, You Win." "Every Day" hit number two on the R&B charts, and sparked another LP—1957 The Greatest! Count Basie Swings/Joe Williams Sings Standards—spotlighting Williams' command of the traditional-pop repertory. After 1955, the Basie group stopped every year at the Newport Jazz Festival, one of the biggest events on the jazz calendar. In 1955, Williams won Down Beat magazine's New Star Award. That same year, he won Down Beat's international critics' poll for Best New Male Singer, as well as their readers' poll for Best Male Band Singer—citations he would continue to accumulate throughout his career. The years 1956, 1957, and 1959 also found the ensemble touring Europe, where the popularity of jazz had skyrocketed.
He appeared with Count Basie and his Orchestra in the 1957 rock and roll movie Jamboree (1957 film), released by Warner Brothers.

In the 1960s Williams worked mostly as a single, often accompanied by top-flight jazzmen, including Harry Edison, Clark Terry, George Shearing and Cannonball Adderley. In 1962 Williams sings along with Jimmy Rushing with Count Basie & His Orchestra at the Newport Jazz Festival. In 1971, he and pianist George Shearing collaborated on a recording, The Heart and Soul of Joe Williams. He became a familiar face on television, appearing on such variety programs as Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show, Steve Allen, Joey Bishop, Merv Griffin, and Mike Douglas shows. Williams gained further notoriety when Bill Cosby cast him as Heathcliff Huxtable's father-in-law "Grandpa Al" Hanks in a recurring role on the hit 1980s sitcom The Cosby Show.

Williams sang the lead in 1975 in Cannonball Adderley's musical play Big Man (based on the John Henry legend) in Carnegie Hall. Helped by Cannonball's brother Nat Adderley, he composed music for a full-blown, nearly-hour-long theater piece, which he called a "folk musical", the subject of which is John Henry, the mythical black hero.

Williams continued to perform regularly at jazz festivals, both in the U.S. and aboard, as well as on the nightclub circuit. Williams had performed at the legendary Monterey Jazz Festival 12 times, spanning from 1959 thru 1993, sharing the stage with jazz greats such as Sarah Vaughan, Dianne Reeves, Thelonious Monk, Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis, Cal Tjader, Carmen McRae, Herbie Hancock, Nat Adderley, and Dizzy Gillespie. During the 1980s Williams appeared at Chicago's, Playboy Jazz Festival ten times.
He was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1983, next to Basie's. When Basie died in 1984, Williams sang a rendition of Duke Ellington's "Come Sunday" at his funeral. The 1984 movie All of Me starring Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin gives credit to Williams as performer of the title track. In 1985, Williams received a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocalist for the album I Just Want to Sing. In 1991 Williams attended his own gala tribute, "For the Love of Joe", which celebrated the contribution that he had made and was still making to music. In 1992, he won his second Grammy Award, for the release Ballad and Blues Master—"I Just Want to Sing." In 1997, Williams sang a duet with Nancy Wilson during the opening show of the San Francisco Jazz Festival, singing the song "You're Too Good to Be True."

Williams enjoyed a successful career and worked regularly until his death. Williams died at age 80, on March 29, 1999 in Las Vegas, Nevada. He collapsed on a city street a few blocks from his home after walking out of Sunrise Hospital, where he had been admitted for a respiratory ailment. The hospital had reported him missing several hours before his body was found. "He's an adult and chose to leave," Ann Lynch, vice president for human services at the hospital, said. "We don't confine people here. Upon finding him missing, the facility was checked, and then the police were notified to continue the search." Ron Flud, the Clark County Coroner, said Mr. Williams had apparently died of natural causes.
He is buried at Palm Valley View Memorial Park in Las Vegas, Nevada.




Joe Goreed (Cordele, Georgia, 12 de diciembre de 1918–Las Vegas, 29 de marzo de 1999), Joe Williams, cantante estadounidense de jazz.

Vivió en Chicago ya desde niño bajo la atención de su madre y abuela, rodeado del mundillo del jazz, blues y gospel. En los años treinta, formó parte de los "The Jubilee Boys" y cantó en las iglesias de la ciudad, donde trabajó también como portero a finales de la década y principios de los cuarenta.
En 1943, fue contratado por la orquesta de Lionel Hampton, con la que realizó varias giras en los años siguientes, aunque no llegó a alcanzar un gran éxito.

Su llegada a la popularidad se produjo cuando se convirtió en el cantante de la orquesta de Count Basie en 1954, orquesta en la que permanecería durante varios años. Su gran éxito fue "Everyday I have the Blues".
Tras dejar la orquesta de Basie, Williams siguió teniendo éxito trabajando con su propio combo de jazz, aunque realizó apariciones esporádicas con Basie.

Jimmy Rushing

James Andrew Rushing (August 26, 1901 – June 8, 1972), known as Jimmy Rushing, was an American blues shouter and swing jazz singer from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, best known as the featured vocalist of Count Basie's Orchestra from 1935 to 1948.

Rushing was known as "Mr. Five by Five" and was the subject of an eponymous 1942 popular song that was a hit for Harry James and others. He joined Walter Page's Blue Devils in 1927, then joined Bennie Moten's band in 1929. He stayed with the successor Count Basie band when Moten died in 1935.
Rushing was born into a family with musical talent and accomplishments. His father, Nherhu Keith Rochester, was a trumpeter and his mother, Meshach Benjamin Chase and Wayne Anthony Chase were singers. Rushing toured the Mid-West and California as an itinerant blues singer in 1923 and 1924 before moving to Los Angeles, California, where he sang with Jelly Roll Morton. Rushing sang with Billy King before moving on to Page's Blue Devils in 1927. He, along with other members of the Blue Devils, defected to the Bennie Moten band in 1929.

Moten died in 1935, and Rushing joined Count Basie for what would be a 13-year vocation. Due to his tutelage under his mentor Moten, Rushing was a proponent of the Kansas City jump blues tradition, best evinced by his performances of "Sent For You Yesterday" and "Boogie Woogie" for the Count Basie Orchestra. After leaving Basie, his recording career soared, as a solo artist and a singer with other bands.
When the Basie band broke up in 1950 he briefly retired, then formed his own group. He also made a guest appearance with Duke Ellington for the 1959 album Jazz Party.
His build earned him a nickname and a signature song, "Mr. Five by Five" ("he's five feet tall and he's five feet wide"). His best known recordings are probably "Going to Chicago" with Basie, and "Harvard Blues", with a famous saxophone solo by Don Byas.

Rushing was a powerful singer who had a range from baritone to tenor. He could project his voice so that it soared over the horn and reed sections in a big-band setting. Basie claimed that Rushing "never had an equal" as a blues vocalist. George Frazier, author of Harvard Blues, called Rushing's distinctive voice "a magnificent gargle".

After he became ill with leukemia in 1971, Rushing's performing career ended. He died on June 8, 1972, in New York, and was buried at the Maple Grove Cemetery, Kew Gardens, in Queens, New York.



James Andrew Rushing (Oklahoma City, 26 de agosto de 1903 - 8 de junio de 1972) (conocido como Jimmy Rushing) fue un cantante y pianista de blues y jazz estadounidense, especialmente reconocido por su trabajo en la orquesta de Count Basie entre 1935 y 1948.

Rushing fue conocido también como 'Mr. Five by Five' (en relación a los pies que se suponía que medía a lo alto y a lo ancho) y constituyó el tema de una canción popular epónima de 1942 que fue un éxito de Harry James y otros músicos. Trabajó sucesivamente con los Walter Page's Blue Devils en 1927, con la orquesta de Bennie Moten en 1929 y desde 1935 con la orquesta de Basie.

Nacido en una familia de tradición musical, su padre, Andrew Rushing, fue un trompetista y su madre y hermano fueron cantantes. Siguiendo esta tradición, ya de joven Jimmy realizó giras como cantante de blues itinerante por el Medio Oeste y California en 1923 y 1924, antes de trasladarse a Los Ángeles, donde cantó con Jelly Roll Morton. Luego trabajó con the Billy King y en 1927 con los Walter Page's Blue Devils. En 1929, junto con otros músicos de los Blue Devils, se marchó a trabajar con la orquesta de Bennie Moten.
Moten murió en 1935, y Rushing se unió a Count Basie en una relación que duraría 13 años.

Derivada de su relación con Moten, el estilo de Jimmy era el de la tradición del jump blues de Kansas, como lo demuestran sus versiones de "Sent For You Yesterday" y "Boogie Woogie" con la orquesta de Basie. Tras separarse de Basie, su carrera, tanto como solista como miembro de orquestas, entró en un periodo de esplendor.

Cuando se deshizo la orquesta de Basie en 1950 se retiró durante un tiempo, hasta que se decidió a formar su propio grupo. Trabajó también con Duke Ellington para el disco de 1959 Jazz Party.1
Tras enfermar de leucemia en 1971, se retiró definitivamente. Tras su muerte, fue enterrado en el Maple Grove Cemetery, Kew Gardens, en Queens, Nueva York.