Calvin Boze born 15 October 1916

Calvin Boze (October 15, 1916 – June 18, 1970) was an American trumpeter and bandleader who was one of the many West Coast singers who took part in the development of the rhythm and blues scene in the late 1940s and early 1950s. His recordings are often reminiscent of Louis Jordan with their easy going swing and slyly witty lyrics. 

Born in Trinity County, Texas, Calvin B. Boze, Sr.,  began his musical career as a trumpet player in a high school band in his native Wheatley in the 1930s. This band also featured Illinois Jacquet along with his brother Russell Jacquet and tenor saxophonist Arnett Cobb. In college he played with the Prairie View Collegians, a group that included Charles Brown. In the early forties Boze branched out as a vocalist with the Southwestern territory band of Marvin Johnson. By the mid-1940s he was a member of the Milton Larkins Orchestra where he was reunited with Illinois Jacquet. Another member of this band was alto sax player and singer Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson. 

After wartime service, he settled in Los Angeles and, as singer and trumpet player, took part in the development of the jump blues style, heavily influenced by Louis Jordan. He was signed by Aladdin Records in 1949 and had his first recording session on August 15, 1949. All four tracks from this session were released, first on Aladdin's Score subsidiary ("Working With My Baby"/ "Satisfied") and then the parent label ("Waitin' And Drinkin'"/"If You Ever Had the Blues"). 

                                   

His second session, in January 1950, would result in his only hit, "Safronia B", which went to # 9 on Billboard's R&B charts in June 1950. "Safronia B" is a classic if unsophisticated recording which, with its refrain of "I surrender! I surrender!", epitomises the sense of fun in the West Coast music scene just before the dawn of rock and roll. It was reissued on Imperial in 1962, the year in which Imperial purchased the Aladdin catalog. The song was later recorded by The Manhattan Transfer. 

Starting in January 1950, Boze had formed his own band, the Calvin Boze Combo (soon rechristened The Calvin Boze All-Stars), which toured heavily, not only on the West Coast, but also in the North East (including an appearance at the Apollo Theatre in New York) and in the Midwest, with Dinah Washington. Several more Aladdin sessions followed, always with Maxwell Davis and his orchestra, but the sales figures of his later singles did not measure up to those of his earlier efforts. These later recordings include "Looped" (also recorded by Melvin Smith and Tommy Ridgley), "Shamrock", the instrumental "Fish Tail" and "Hey Laudie Miss Claudie" (which preceded Lloyd Price's Specialty recording of "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" by five months). 

Calvin Boze did not record after 1952, but he continued to play at jam sessions around Los Angeles, while also developing a career as a social worker and school teacher, before his early death, aged 53, after prolonged ill health.

He died in Los Angeles, California on  the 18^th June,1970. 

(Edited from Wikipedia & This Is My Story)

Joyce Bryant born 14 October 1927

Joyce Bryant (October 14, 1927 – November 20, 2022) was an American singer, dancer, and civil rights activist who achieved fame in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a theater and nightclub performer. With her signature silver hair and tight mermaid dresses, she became an early African-American sex symbol. 

Emily Ione Bryant, the third of eight children, was born in Oakland, California, and known from her early childhood as Joyce. She was raised in San Francisco. Bryant eloped at the age of 14 but the marriage ended that same evening. In 1946, while visiting cousins in Los Angeles, she agreed on a dare to participate in an impromptu singalong at a local club. "After a while," Bryant recounted in a 1955 Jet interview, "I found I was the only one singing. A few minutes later the club owner offered me $25 to go up on stage, and I took it because I needed the money to get home." 

During the late 1940s, Bryant had slowly acquired a series of regular gigs, from a $400-per-week engagement at New York City's La Martinique nightclub to a 118-show tour of the Catskill Mountains hotel circuit. Her reputation and profile eventually grew to the level that one night, she appeared on the same bill as Josephine Baker. Not wanting to be upstaged, Bryant colored her hair silver using radiator paint, and performed wearing a tight silver dress and silver floor-length mink. Bryant recalled when she arrived onstage, "I stopped everything!" Bryant's silver hair and tight, backless, cleavage-revealing mermaid dresses became her trademark look and, combined with her four octave voice, further elevated her status into one of the major headlining stars of the early 1950s, by which time she became known by such nicknames as "The Bronze Blond Bombshell", "the black Marilyn Monroe", "The Belter", and "The Voice You'll Always Remember". 

                                    

Beginning in 1952, Bryant released a series of records for Okeh, including "A Shoulder to Weep On", "After You've Gone", and "Farewell to Love". Two of her most well-known standards, "Love for Sale" and "Drunk with Love", were banned from radio play for their provocative lyrics. Upon the release of "Runnin' Wild" two years later, Jet noted that the song was Bryant's "first to be passed by CBS and NBC radio censors, who banned three previous recordings for being too sexy." Bryant remarked in 1980, "what an irony that my biggest hit record was 'Love for Sale'. Banned in Boston it was, and later...just about everywhere else." Bryant, who often faced discrimination and was outspoken on issues of racial inequality, became in 1952 the first black entertainer to perform at a Miami Beach hotel, defying threats by the Ku Klux Klan who had burned her in effigy. 

Bryant was critical of racial billing practices at night clubs and hotels and advocated for entertainers as a group to fight Jim Crow laws. In 1954, she became one of the first black singers to perform at the Casino Royal in Washington, D.C., where she said that she had heard so much about the segregation practiced there that she was surprised to see so many African-Americans attend the downtown club. "It was a great thrill," she said, "to see them enter and be treated so courteously by the management." Bryant, along with Lena Horne, Hilda Simms, Eartha Kitt, and Dorothy Dandridge were named in an issue of Ebony as five most beautiful black women in the world. 

Bryant earned up to $3500 a performance in the early 1950s, but she had grown weary of the industry. The silver paint had damaged her hair, she did not enjoy working on the Sabbath, and she felt uneasy with her image. Further, Bryant hated the men, often gangsters, who frequented the clubs in which she worked. She was once beaten in her dressing room after rejecting a man's advances. Her disenchantment with the drug and gangster subcultures, combined with pressures from her management, led Bryant to quit performing late in 1955. 

Devoting herself to the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Bryant enrolled in Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama. Traveling for years through the South, Bryant grew angry when she saw hospitals refuse care for those in critical need because they were black. As a result, she organized fundraisers for blacks to buy food, clothing, and medicine, and she continued to put on concerts (wearing her natural black hair and no makeup) to raise money for her church. 

Disillusioned, Bryant returned to entertaining in the 1960s and trained with vocal teacher Frederick Wilkerson at Howard University, which led to her winning a contract with the New York City Opera. She also toured internationally with the Italian, French, and Vienna Opera companies. She returned to performing jazz in the 1980s and began a career as a vocal instructor, with such clients as Jennifer Holliday, Phyllis Hyman, and Raquel Welch. 

In the early 1990s Ms. Bryant, who was living in New York at the time, was walking near Lincoln Center on a sidewalk that was being repaired. She took a fall and was injured, breaking a knee and chipping some teeth after which she  moved back to California and faded into relative obscurity. She died of complications from Alzheimer's disease in Los Angeles on November 20, 2022, at the age of 95. (Edited from Wikipedia & New York Times)

 

My 500th show on Angel Radio

Hello music lovers, I have been so busy today that I just haven't got time to do a birthday profile, but I have just been sent a copy of my 500th show from the manager of Angel Radio, which I would like to share. I'm in the process of highlighting the songs of Tepper & Bennett so here is my latest program in the series...

https://www.imagenetz.de/bRS7r

Please look us up here;

https://www.angelradio.co.uk/

Hidehiko "Sleepy" Matsumoto born 12 October 1926

Hidehiko "Sleepy" Matsumoto (October 12, 1926 – February 29, 2000, Tokyo) was a Japanese jazz saxophonist and bandleader. His contributions to the jazz industry of Japan were many and recognized by many awards and honors. 

Born in Okayama Prefecture and raised in Fuchū, Hiroshima,  Matsumoto played bebop in Japan in the late 1940s with the group CB Nine, then joined The Six Josés and The Big Four, a group which included George Kawaguchi, Hachidai Nakamura, and Mitsuru Ono. His nickname was given by an American soldier when he was playing in a US military camp after the war. 

 In 1959 he became a member of Hideo Shiraki's small ensemble, and played with Gerald Wilson at the 1963 Monterey Jazz Festival and Toshiko Akiyoshi in 1964. Starting in 1964 he led his own ensembles, which have included as sidemen Takeshi Inomata, Akira Miyazawa, George Otsuka, and Isao Suzuki. On July 22 and 24, 1966, he played with the John Coltrane quintet in Tokyo while the group was touring Japan. 

He died in Tokyo on 29^th February 2000 

(Not much information on the web about “Sleepy.”  All I could find was this very small Wikipedia entry) 

 

Harmonica Frank Floyd born 11 October 1908

Frank Floyd, known as Harmonica Frank (October 11, 1908 – August 7, 1984) was an American blues singer, guitarist and harmonicist. He was his own best caricature. A hobo and refugee from the old Southern medicine shows who sang and played like a throwback from the 1920s, he was as colorful as they come, and a case could be made that without Frank there wouldn't have been an Elvis. 

He was born to itinerant parents in Toccopola, Mississppi, and his parents promptly separated without even giving him a proper name (he decided to call himself Frank Floyd as a teen), leaving Frank to be raised by his sharecropping grandparents. He taught himself to play harmonica when he was ten, and eventually became a pretty decent guitar player as well. 

Following the death of his grandparents, and while still a teenager, Floyd began working as a clown and musician on the carnival and medicine show circuits. His circus skills are said to have included fire-eating, hypnotism and make-up artistry.  He performed as a bogus Hawaiian, and specialised in nonsense talk and farmyard noises, leading to some 30 years of hoboing that would generate his frequent boasts that he never spent two nights in the same place. 

He learned many types of folk music and became a mimic, effortlessly switching from humorous hillbilly ballads to deep country blues. With his self-taught harmonica technique, he was a one-man band, able to play the instrument without his hands or the need for a neck brace. While also playing guitar, he perfected a technique of manipulating the harmonica with his mouth while he sang out of the other side. He could also play harmonica with his nose and thus play two harmonicas at once, a skill he shared with blues harp players Walter Horton and Gus Cannon's partner Noah Lewis. 

                                    

He began working in radio in 1932, and cut a few sides for Chess Records in 1951, the most notable of which was "Swamp Root." He cut the ultra-primitive "Rockin' Chair Daddy" for Sam Phillips' Sun Records in 1954, becoming the first white musician to record at the studio. "Rockin' Chair Daddy" sounded like a song and recording straight out of the country blues era of the 1920s, but it had just a tinge of what would eventually be called rockabilly, and one can imagine Phillips wondering what would happen if he could find a young, good looking white guy who could sing this kind of stuff -- enter Elvis. 

Harmonica Frank's songs appeared on many all-black blues compilations in the 1960s and 1970s, collectors being unable to distinguish his race. In 1972 he was "rediscovered" by Stephen C. LaVere and in the following years recorded two albums for the Adelphi and Barrelhouse labels, including a compilation of the early material. Additional full albums were recorded before his death in 1984, many of which have become available on CD, though his vintage recordings (1951–59) remain mostly out of print and unavailable aside from occasional tracks on compilations. 

In his 1975 book Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music, author Greil Marcus presented a unique vision of America and music, and how they relate by using (as metaphors) six musicians, one of whom was Harmonica Frank. 

Floyd never abandoned his archaic, medicine show-derived style, and when the folk revival hit, he found himself in demand again. He continued to perform and record occasionally right up until his death in Blanchester, OhioH, on August 7, 1984 due to complications from Type II diabetes (which had previously cost him his leg) and lung cancer. 

An American original, his life linked the medicine show tradition to early rock & roll, and there are precious few who could ever make that claim. 

(Edited from Wikipedia, AllMusic & Mustrad.org)

Oscar Brown Jr born 10 October 1926

Oscar Brown Jr. (October 10, 1926 – May 29, 2005) was an American singer, songwriter, playwright, poet, civil rights activist, and actor. Brown discovered The Jackson 5. Aside from his career, Brown ran unsuccessfully for office in both the Illinois state legislature and the U.S. Congress. Brown wrote many songs (125 have been published), 12 albums, and more than a dozen musical plays. 

Born on Chicago's South, Brown was the son of a successful attorney and property broker who wanted his firstborn to someday assume control of the family business; instead, Brown was drawn to writing and performing, and by 15 was a regular on writer Studs Terkel's radio program Secret City. After skipping two grades, he entered the University of Wisconsin at 16, but finding the world of academia little to his liking, he returned to broadcasting, and in 1944 was tapped to host Negro Newsfront, the nation's first Black news radio broadcast. Dubbed "America's first Negro newscaster," he relinquished the gig in 1948 to run for the Illinois state legislature on the Progressive Party ticket -- he didn't win, and spent the remainder of the decade working on writer/producer Richard Durham's Black Radio Days series, followed by a two-year stint in the U.S. Army. 

Though a card-carrying Communist, in 1952 Brown mounted an unsuccessful campaign for U.S. Congress on the Republican ticket, aligning himself with the right wing solely to get his name on the ballot. (He resigned from the Communist Party in 1956, declaring himself "just too Black to be red.") All this time, singing and songwriting remained little more than sidelines, but all that changed in 1958, when Brown attended the opening of Lorraine Hansberry's landmark play A Raisin in the Sun -- there he met Hansberry's husband, the New York City music publisher Robert Nemiroff, and their fledgling friendship soon yielded a record deal with Columbia. 

In 1960, Brown collaborated with Max Roach on the legendary bop drummer's trenchant Civil Rights project We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, soon followed by his solo debut, Sin & Soul. Launched after an extended residency at the famed Village Vanguard, the record featured readings of popular jazz instrumentals like Nat Adderley's "Work Song" and Mongo Santamaria's "Afro Blue" with new, socially charged lyrics penned by Brown himself. " 

                                    

The creative and commercial success of Sin & Soul made Brown a star, and after writing lyrics for Miles Davis' classic "All Blues," he reunited with Hansberry and Nemiroff for Kicks & Co., a stage musical that earned Brown an unheard-of two-hour appearance on NBC's Today Show. The musical nevertheless closed shortly after its preview series at Chicago's McCormick Place in 1961, and after reworking some of the material to create a one-man show, he toured the U.S. and Europe in 1962, stopping long enough to host the television series Jazz Scene USA. During the taping, he met his future wife, singer/dancer Jean Pace. 

Through his concert appearances and LPs, including 1963's Tells It Like It Is! and 1965's Mr. Oscar Brown, Jr. Goes to Washington, he kept his social and political beliefs front and center, refusing to accept the common wisdom that mainstream audiences wanted no part of such things -- with Pace, he wrote and directed a series of stage shows casting teens from Chicago's impoverished neighborhoods, and the most famous of the couple's collaborations, 1967's Opportunity Please Knock, was even produced in conjunction with the Blackstone Rangers youth gang. The Browns' work with underprivileged youth also earned a 1968 invitation from Gary, Indiana mayor Richard Hatcher to helm a summer talent project that was a springboard for then-unknowns the Jackson 5 and actor/singer Avery Brooks. 

After relocating to San Francisco in 1969, Brown and Pace transformed the stage comedy Big Time Buck White into a musical that, upon making the leap to Broadway, starred boxing legend Muhammad Ali in the title role. Brown spent much of the '70s as an artist-in-residence teaching musical theater at Washington, D.C.'s Howard University, New York City's Hunter College, and Chicago's Malcolm X College. In 1972, after a seven-year hiatus from the recording studio, he delivered Where Are You?, followed by a pair of releases for Atlantic: 1973's Brother Where Are You? and 1975's Fresh. 

Also in 1975, he starred in the revived Evolution of the Blues and starred in a Chicago television special, Oscar Brown Is Back in Town, which earned a pair of local Emmy Awards. Brown was next tapped to host the acclaimed 1980 PBS series From Jump Street: The Story of Black Music, and went on to appear in network series including Brewster Place and Roc. His first album in two decades, Then and Now, appeared on Weasel Disc in 1995, and in 2001 he was the subject of a documentary, Music Is My Life, Politics My Mistress. 

Brown died from complications from a blood infection on May 29, 2005.    (Edited from article by Jason Ankeny @ AllMusic)

Yusef Lateef born 9 October 1920

Yusef Abdul Lateef (October 9, 1920 – December 23, 2013) was an American jazz multi-instrumentalist, composer, and prominent figure among the Ahmadiyya Community in the United States. 

A man of many talents and a born scholar, Yusef Lateef was born William Emanuel Huddleston in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His mother played the piano in church and he remembered his father as having “a beautiful singing voice”. In 1925 his family moved to Detroit, Michigan, where his father changed the family's name to Evans. Lateef grew up amid the sounds of the burgeoning swing era and made up his mind to be a musician at the age of 12. He finally acquired a saxophone, with his father’s help, at 18. 

In his twenties, Lateef played with several well-known bands of the period, including those of Lucky Millinder, Roy Eldridge, Hot Lips Page and Ernie Fields. In 1949 he was touring in California with Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra when he received news that his wife was ill. Hurrying home to Detroit, he was forced to take a job in the Chrysler factory, there being no regular musical work available. This experience affected him deeply. In a search for spiritual development, he had recently embraced Islam, which stresses the obligation to care for one’s family. The life of a jobbing musician would not provide this. The answer, he concluded, lay in getting himself an education. 

He enrolled at Wayne State University to study composition and flute. At the same time his professional fortunes improved, and he was soon leading his own quintet in clubs around the Detroit area. He made his recording debut as a leader in 1956, for the Savoy label. The flute was not widely used in jazz at the time and, together with the growing Eastern influences in Lateef’s music, its novelty proved popular with record buyers. That album, Jazz for the Thinker, did so well that 1957 saw the release of seven Yusef Lateef albums (four on Savoy, one each on Verve, Prestige and New Jazz). 

                                    

In 1960 Lateef moved to New York, where he worked briefly with Charles Mingus’s band, as well as leading quartets and quintets of his own. He was now playing along with the tenor saxophone and flute, the oboe, bassoon and a range of Eastern wind instruments, including the shanai, the arghul and the algaita, plus a collection of Chinese wooden flutes, bells and gongs. A single from his 1961 album Eastern Sounds, a version of the “Love Theme” from the film Spartacus, reached the top of the jazz charts. 

He continued to work occasionally under the leadership of other musicians, notably the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley. He can be seen and heard playing with Adderley’s sextet in a recording from the television show Jazz Scene USA (1962). Lateef resumed his studies at the Manhattan School of Music, gaining his performer’s degree on flute in 1969 and a Master’s degree in Music Education in 1970. He then began teaching at the School, running classes in improvisation, which he called “autophysiopsychic music”. 

In 1975 Lateef was awarded a Doctorate in Education by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, for a dissertation on Western and Islamic education. Between 1981 and 1985 he was a senior research fellow at the University of Ahmadubelo, Nigeria. On his return he took up a teaching post at The University of Massachusetts, to which he remained attached for the rest of his life. Although he continued to perform professionally almost until the end (his last tour was in the summer this year), Lateef gave up playing in nightclubs in 1981, because their atmosphere had become obnoxious to him. In later years his gradual move from hearty blues-flavoured playing to a more meditative, introspective style was not always well received by audiences and critics. 

In addition to his musical and academic activities, Lateef published several books of short stories and novellas; towards the end of his life he was a keen painter, specialising in studies of trees. He twice made the Hajj to Mecca. During his career he recorded more than 100 albums. From 1992 these were made for his own label, YAL Records. He received a Grammy Award in 1987, for the album Yusef Lateef’s Little Symphony. His last albums were recorded for Adam Rudolph's Meta Records. To the end of his life, Lateef continued to teach at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Smith College, and Hampshire College in western Massachusetts. 

Lateef died of prostate cancer on the morning of December 23, 2013, at the age of 93. 

(Edited from The Telegraph & Wikipedia)