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(b Pforzheim, Germany, Oct 6, 1929; d Königsbach-Stein, Germany, Aug 5, 2015). German soprano, tenor, and bass saxophonist. After receiving three lessons on guitar from a member of the Reinhardt clan he played in dance bands until 1950. He then contacted Sidney Bechet in Paris and learned to play soprano saxophone. He played in Germany with the arranger and bandleader Ernst Simon and also with American soldiers. In 1952 he founded the Quartier Latin Jazz Band, which he led to at least 2009; among its recordings is Dieter Antritter’s Quartier Latin Jazz Band (1996, Jazzpoint 1046). It gave concerts with many visiting musicians, including Mezz Mezzrow, Michel Attenoux, Benny Waters, Nelson Williams, and Peanuts Hucko. Antritter visited Canada in 1989 and worked with local musicians. His playing was influenced by the creole New Orleans jazz musicians and by swing musicians. He also wrote many articles for various newspapers and magazines....

[Chabania, Jacinto]

(b Gary, IN, Jan 23, 1904/1906/1908; d c 1961). American saxophonist, clarinetist, arranger, and singer. Various sources give alternative birth years: 1904 appears on a 1929 passenger list; he gave his age as 20 upon marrying in 1926; 1908 appears on his 1940 draft registration, which he signed as Jacinto Chabania. Blake is the name of his adoptive parents. His birth father was Cuban and his birth mother was reportedly born in France. Blake studied violin, then alto saxophone and clarinet. After playing briefly with Charlie Turner’s Arcadians he took ship for Europe with Sam Wooding (1928), with whom he recorded in Barcelona and Paris (1929). He then moved to New York, played with Chick Webb, toured with Zack Whyte’s Chocolate Beau Brummels, and performed and recorded with Don Redman (late 1933 – spring 1934). In April 1934, calling himself Jacinto Blake, he moved to France to work with Willie Lewis, remaining in Europe until May 1935. He worked with Claude Hopkins, both in New York and on tour (mid-...

[JackJohn Crawford]

(b Washington, DC, April 29, 1909; d New York, May 9, 2003). American trumpeter and singer. Although Butler gave interviewers the April birthdate shown, and it appears in most official records, his 1942 draft registration card gives March 29, 1909; this card identifies his full name and place of birth. He began playing trumpet at the age of 17. After moving to New York in the late 1920s he worked with Cliff Jackson and with Horace Henderson (1930–31). In 1931 he joined the Alabamians, led by the reed player Marion Hardy, and he remained with the group until it disbanded the following year. Later he led his own band (1934–5) and performed and recorded with Willie Bryant (1936). He then moved to Europe, where he worked mainly with Willie Lewis (late 1936 – 1939). In May 1939 he recorded in Paris with a septet led by Frank “Big Boy” Goudie and from June he toured Scandinavia; he recorded in Oslo in ...

[née Carroll, Ernestine]

(b Memphis, Aug 5, 1909; d Chicago, Jan 30, 1994). American trumpeter and singer. Her application for social security (filed in 1941) gives a birth year of 1910, but other sources, including her interview in the film Tiny & Ruby, give 1909. She began playing trumpet at Booker T. Washington High School in Memphis at the age of 13 and embarked on her professional career in Kansas City. About October 1935 she toured with the Harlem Play-Girls, but she left the band at the end of 1936 to have a baby. In the early 1940s she was recruited by Jesse Stone to join the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, with which she was a star soloist; she participated in the group’s USO tour of Europe in 1945, appeared with it in the short film How about that Jive (1946), and remained a member until 1947, when she took over a band comprised mainly of former members of the Prairie View Co-Eds. This group, which became known as the Hell Divers, included Bert Etta Davis, the tenor saxophonist Margaret Backstrom, the drummer Helen Cole, and the double bass player Ruby Lucas (also known as Renei Phelan), with whom Davis formed a musical and personal partnership; in ...

(b Dayton, OH, Dec 30, 1928; d Dayton, May 5, 2015). American double bass and tuba player and singer. While in France he played with Claude Luter, Claude Bolling, and Don Byas (1948–9). In 1948 he founded the Dixieland Rhythm Kings, a traditional-jazz band that performed frequently in the USA and Canada and recorded several albums, among them ...

[Marion Joseph]

(b Indianapolis, July 22, 1912; d after 1975). American trumpeter, singer, and dancer. The birth year quoted is from his 1940 draft registration, which he signed “Joseph Taps Miller”; in the 1950s he told European interviewers he was born in 1915. From 1932 he was featured as a singer and dancer in New York shows, notably Blackbirds of 1939. In 1941 he was a master of ceremonies at Kelly’s Stable and took part in jam sessions as a drummer at Monroe’s Uptown House. He recorded as a singer with Count Basie in May 1942, and he may be seen in the soundie A Song and Dance Man (1943). In 1944–5 he toured North Africa and Asia as a member of a USO unit led by Alberta Hunter; this tour included a month’s residency in Casablanca. In the late 1940s and early 1950s Miller worked around New York; he recorded again as a singer with Basie in ...

[Oran Thaddeus ]

(b Dallas, TX, Jan 27, 1908; d New York, NY, Nov 5, 1954). American jazz trumpeter and singer. He worked as a professional musician in his home state of Texas during the 1920s and later maintained that he learned to play authentic blues by listening to the local performers there. He played with Walter Page’s Blue Devils (1928–30) then with Bennie Moten’s band (1931–3 and 1934). In 1936 he worked briefly with Count Basie’s band as a principal soloist, but left to become a solo artist at the behest of Louis Armstrong’s manager Joe Glaser, a move generally regarded as having hurt a potentially illustrious career. Page gained much publicity during a brief stay with Artie Shaw’s band (1941–2). He also made many fine recordings under his own name (1938–54), often leading bands with some of the finest swing musicians, including Earl Bostic, Don Byas, J.C. Higginbotham, and Ben Webster, among his sidemen. His purposeful, exciting trumpet playing and deeply felt blues singing were probably too rugged to gain widespread favor. Throughout his career he thrived on the atmosphere of impromptu jam sessions, in which his searing tone, dramatic phrasing, and improvised blues lyrics were a source of considerable inspiration to fellow musicians....

(bandleader, singer and saxophonist)

(b Middletown, CT, Oct 26, 1907; d Old Lyme, CT, Oct 31, 1969). American bandleader, singer, and saxophonist. He began playing as a sideman in the orchestras of John Cavallaro, Irving Aaronson, and Vincent Lopez, before joining Artie Shaw’s band (1936), in which he was a tenor saxophone soloist and singer; “Indian Love Call” (1938, B♭) offers a good example of his throaty, somewhat gruff vocal style. After Shaw dissolved the band Pastor formed his own in 1940, taking some of Shaw’s players with him. Many of the group’s arrangements were written by the guitarist Al Avola, although Budd Johnson, Walter Fuller, and Ralph Flanagan also made contributions. Pastor’s singing was greatly influenced, he acknowledged, by Louis Armstrong and was always an important part of his shows. In the late 1940s Pastor also performed with Betty and Rosemary Clooney. He broke up his big band in ...

[James Gilbert ]

(b Salem, OR, June 18, 1941; d Portland, OR, Feb 10, 1992). American tenor and soprano saxophonist, singer, bandleader, and composer. Of Native American (Creek and Kaw) heritage, he was raised in Oregon and Oklahoma. Early musical influences included tap dance, big band jazz, Southern Plains powwow music and dance, and peyote music. Pepper moved to New York in 1964 and joined the Free Spirits (1966), an early fusion jazz ensemble featuring Larry Coryell and Bob Moses. After forming the group Everything is Everything (1967) with former members of Free Spirits Chris Hills and Columbus Baker, Pepper recorded “Witchi Tai To,” a composition fusing a peyote song with jazz, rock, and country influences. Released on Everything is Everything featuring Chris Hills (Vanguard Apostolic, 1969), “Witchi Tai To” peaked at number 69 on the Billboard pop charts. By 2011 it had been covered by at least 90 artists ranging from Brewer & Shipley, Jan Garbarek, and Oregon to the Paul Winter Consort and Joy Harjo. Pepper released four albums as a leader: ...

[Elvira; Meeks, Elvira; Goldberg, Elvira; Avelino, Elvira]

(b Los Angeles, CA, Sept 20, 1928). American jazz alto and soprano saxophonist, singer, and bandleader. Her father Alton Redd was a jazz drummer from New Orleans. Redd started to sing in church at about age 5 and played alto saxophone at about 12, studying with her great-aunt Alma Hightower, a noted music educator in Los Angeles. In about 1948 she formed a band with her first husband, trumpeter Nathaniel Meeks, and began performing professionally as a saxophonist and singer. She had her first son when she was in her late 20s and her second son a few years later. Between 1957 and 1961 she performed less often and taught at public schools. During the 1960s she performed at the renowned club Ronnie Scott’s for ten weeks and toured with Earl Hines and Count Basie. Leonard Feather produced her two albums, Bird Call (1962) and Lady Soul...

(b North Plains, OR, May 31, 1917; d Las Vegas, NV, Jan 18, 2014). American trumpeter and singer. Born in Oregon, she was raised in Rainier, Washington, and then in Missoula, Montana, as a teenager. Her father was a violinist, her mother was a pianist, and her older brother performed and arranged music. She played in the family band, and then in vaudeville and theater bands. In 1936 she married Guy C. Rogers; they divorced in 1941, but she kept the surname Rogers for her career in jazz.

Upon moving to California she joined Woody Herman’s big band from October 1941 to spring 1943, when she left to form her own group. In April 1944 she married Jack [Barnes E.] Archer, who had been Herman’s road manager; she appears in the Cook County, Illinois, marriage index as Zelda Billie Rogers. She recorded as a leader in 1944 and may be heard playing trumpet and singing on ...

[Cladys ]

(b Pembroke, GA, Dec 24, 1908; d New York, NY, Jan 16, 1991). American jazz trumpeter, valve trombonist, and singer. Sent by his mother to the Jenkins Orphanage in Charleston South Carolina at age six, he learned to play trombone at ten and made fund-raising tours with one of the orphanage’s brass bands. Around 1925 he was given nine dollars and sent home to his mother, but went to his sister in Philadelphia and on to Atlantic City, where bandleader Charlie Johnson hired him and eventually brought him to New York’s Small’s Paradise. He replaced Bubber Miley on a 1927 Duke Ellington recording session, declined an invitation to stay in the orchestra, and accepted a job with James P. Johnson’s and Fats Waller’s Broadway show Keep Shufflin’. When the show disbanded in Chicago at the end of 1928, Smith remained and found ample work. An imaginative trumpeter with a fiery style, he was often likened to Louis Armstrong, which prompted producer Mayo Williams to have him form a quintet that could be the Brunswick label’s answer to Armstrong’s popular Hot Five recordings. The Rhythm Aces recorded 20 selections and sales were disappointing, but these performances would, with time, establish his importance to the evolution of jazz trumpet style. Roy Eldridge, who cited Smith as a vital influence, would later serve as an inspiration to Dizzy Gillespie....

(b Chattanooga, TN, 2 June ?1900; d New York, NY, May 30, 1956). American singer, trumpeter, and dancer. Daughter of a mixed-race couple who were both entertainers and musicians, she learned several instruments before deciding to concentrate on trumpet. By the 1920s she was touring the T.O.B.A. circuit with various revues, and in 1926 she visited Shanghai. In 1935, her performance in Blackbirds of 1934 brought her to England, where she began making records that showed her chief instrumental and vocal influence to be Louis Armstrong. After a brief return in 1936 to the United States, where she performed with Earl Hines in Chicago and made films in Hollywood, Snow moved to Europe, where she made more films and recordings. She was incarcerated in a Nazi concentration camp in Denmark in 1940 and was badly injured before being exchanged in 1943. After a recuperation period she continued touring and recording until her death during a comeback appearance at the Palace Theatre. Snow stands out from other women performers of her time in that she was known as much as an instrumentalist as a singer. Her extensive touring probably cost her the name recognition that professional stability might have brought, but her recordings show her to have been a fine, swing-influenced trumpeter and vocalist....

(James, jr)

(b Dallas, Oct 26, 1906; d probably Los Angeles, Feb 3, 2000). American trombonist and singer. Details of his full name, birth, death, and military service appear on his World War II draft registration card, in Army Enlistment Records, and in the Department of Veterans Affairs Death File. Having studied music at Fisk University and Cincinnati Conservatory he began playing professionally in 1926. He worked with Jimmie Lunceford (1929 – early 1935), with whom he made several recordings (1933–4, including Jazznocracy, 1934, Vic. 24522), Claude Hopkins (1932), and Cab Calloway. His association with Andy Kirk (1936–9, 1940–41, 1946) was interrupted by a period in which he led his own big band and worked with Gene Krupa and Teddy Hill, and another when he served in the army. Wells recorded frequently with Kirk and from 1940 served as his principal vocalist. After leaving Kirk he worked with Rex Stewart (...

[Harry]

(b Beuthen, Germany [now Bytom, Poland], Sept 24, 1914; d Vienna, Dec 3, 2001). Austrian clarinetist, singer, and bandleader. He began to play jazz in Berlin in the 1930s. During World War II he made recordings for the German record label Tempo with Willi Berking, Meg Tevelian, and others. He moved to Vienna in 1945 and became an Austrian citizen the following year. Also in 1946 he formed the Wiener Tanz Orchester, with which he made many recordings, including Gin Fizzes (1947, ES 8225). A gifted swing clarinetist, Winter played in the style of Artie Shaw. He ceased to perform jazz in the mid-1950s. As Harry Winter, he participated in the Eurovision Song Contest in London in 1960. In 1977 he became the director of the Austrian Hoch- und Deutschmeister military orchestra.