Muggsy Spanier. The name suggests a gangster from the Al Capone era, but Francis Joseph “Muggsy” Spanier was a musician. Given that the mob controlled all the best nightclubs in those days, and that, like Capone, Spanier was a native of Chicago, they might have crossed paths. Muggsy played the cornet. The what? It’s a […]
Tag: Jazz
On Sunday, my wife and I saw a jazz band, Sandra Tulty’s Swing Quartet. Australians all, and all stellar musicians: one of those jaw-dropping jazz ensembles, which sing, play multiple instruments, and take on solos without so much as raising a sweat. I was particularly impressed by the clarinettist, Michael McQuaid. He moved in and […]
“Jazz is a team game”. This was said a few days ago by T. S. Monk, a stellar jazz drummer who is touring Australia. Monk (son of Thelonious) was chatting on community radio about his art. “In a jazz group, everyone gets to solo. No one is the star, because everyone’s the star.” I’d never […]
The technology for stereo sound was invented in the 1930s. No one used it much. It was partly that the equipment, both to record and play back stereo, was expensive. But mostly, no one saw much point in stereo music. The first stereo LPs came out in the mid-1950s, and they were all of sound […]
The true test of whether a record is both obscure and alternative? You should be able to pick it up and look at the cover, read the words on it, and have no idea what is the band name, and what is the record title. Equal Local (which turns out to be the band) pass […]
“Bobby who?” That is what people will say if you mention Bobby McFerrin. But start to sing “Don’t worry”, they will instantly join in “be happy”, and most of the time will also start to smile. I too knew “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”, a novelty hit from 1988, which I liked at the time and […]
Poor old Johnny Ray … This was a first line of “Come On Eileen”, which was a huge hit in the early 1980s for a UK band, Dexy’s Midnight Runners. I loved the song, but I was a teenager and had no idea who Johnny Ray was, so asked my Dad. “Hmmph. He was a […]
Marie Warder was a teacher, writer and pianist who grew up in South Africa. Not long after the end of the Second World War, she was walking on a street in Johannesburg. I was about nineteen, newly married and very much in love, when I happened to pass by a music store one day, and […]
I will admit to having low expectations when I picked up this single. The name Jive Bunny, and the image of said bunny in a Hawaiian shirt aboard a Polynesian war canoe – not promising. Apart from anything else, rabbits are a major pest in Australia. Anyone who grew up in a rural area here, […]
Another star of another time, now pretty much forgotten. Carmen Cavallaro. “The Poet of the Piano”, they called him. American born, of Italian heritage, Cavallaro was classically trained but in the 1930s he shifted to playing jazz and swing in ballrooms and nightclubs. He used his classical expertise to adorn popular tunes with what the […]
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