That Jazz - Monkey Max Music and File Download

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Part II: Jazz Greats and Great Jazz: An Evolutionary Riff
Carter went to London during the mid-1930s to become a staff songsmith
and arranger for the BBC dance orchestra. While in London,
Carter eventually had a tremendous influence on the jazz of Western
Europe. When Carter returned to the United States, he led a popular big
band in New York City, and his career continued into the 1990s.
� Lionel Hampton (1909–2002): A jazz institution as both a musician and
bandleader — Hampton reigns as the most famous of all jazz vibraphonists.
In fact, in 1930, Hampton sat in on a recording session with
Armstrong, and during a break Hampton walked over to a vibraphone
and started to play. He ended up playing the vibes on one song. The
song became a hit; Hampton had introduced a new voice to jazz and
became “King of the Vibes.” His bands swung wildly.
� Earl Hines (1903–1983): Hines led one of the Midwest’s most popular
1930s big bands, home-based at Chicago’s Grand Terrace hotel. His
music gained more influence in some ways than Duke Ellington’s from
the same period. NBC radio carried the Hines band to points west and
south of Chicago.
� Andy Kirk (1898–1992): Kirk’s Clouds of Joy featured the arrangements
and piano of Mary Lou Williams. Unlike the ensemble’s Kansas City
peers, the band relied less on collective riffing (short, rhythmic phrases)
and more on Williams’s imagination, as well as solos by saxman Don
Byas (who became a leading soloist of both swing and bebop but fell
from American radar when he moved to Europe during the 1940s) and
trumpeter Howard McGhee.
� Jimmie Lunceford (1902–1947): Showmanship, swing, and tight arrangements
mark characteristics of Lunceford’s band, beginning with a 1934
stint at New York’s fabled Cotton Club. Sy Oliver’s lyrical arrangements
enabled some of the band’s finest music. In July of 1947, Lunceford
collapsed and died while signing autographs in a Seaside, Oregon, record
store. The record of his death sites a heart attack as the cause, but
rumors circulated that a racist restaurant owner poisoned him.
� McKinney’s Cotton Pickers: Formed in Detroit during the early ’20s by
drummer William McKinney (who expanded his group from six to ten
pieces), the band made a big bang in Harlem ballrooms beginning in
1929. McKinney plucked arranger Don Redman from Fletcher Henderson
in 1927, and he also recruited star players such as saxophonist Coleman
Hawkins and pianists James P. Johnson and Fats Waller. The Cotton
Pickers were hot enough to hold their own with the more famous Duke
Ellington and Count Basie bands before they disbanded in 1934.
� Chick Webb (1909–1939). Hunchbacked and less than five feet tall,
Webb fought off congenital tuberculosis of the spine to become one of
the most competitive drummers and bandleaders of the big band era. In
a 1937 battle of the bands at New York City’s Savoy Ballroom, Webb’s
band blew away the rival Benny Goodman big band (with Gene Krupa on