Max Merritt born 30 April 1941

Max Merrit (30 April 1941 – 24 September 2020) was a New Zealand-born singer-songwriter and guitarist who was renowned as an interpreter of soul music and R&B. As leader of Max Merritt & The Meteors, his best known hits are "Slippin' Away”, and "Hey, Western Union Man”. 

Born in Christchurch, New Zealand, Maxwell James Merritt was interested in music from an early age and started guitar lessons at 12. By 1955 he encountered the rock and roll of Bill Haley and Elvis Presley. After leaving school in 1956, aged 15, Merritt formed the Meteors with friends Ross Clancy (sax), Peter Patonai (piano), Ian Glass (bass) and Pete Sowden (drums). Initially a part-time group, they played dances and local charity concerts, Merritt continuing his day job as an apprentice bricklayer in his father's business. 

The band released their debut single, "Get a Haircut", in June on His Master's Voice. By 1959, the Meteors had become a top youth attraction, regularly pulling crowds of 500 or more. Merritt borrowed players from other bands if a Meteors' member was unavailable, one such band was Ray Columbus & the Invaders fronted by vocalist Columbus. Early in 1960, His Master's Voice released their debut album, C'mon Let's Go. Follow up singles were "Kiss Curl" and "C'Mon Let's Go" in 1960 and "Mr Loneliness" in 1961. They had local support but were almost unknown beyond the South Island. In an effort to break into the more lucrative North Island market, both Max Merritt & The Meteors and Ray Columbus & the Invaders relocated to Auckland in 1962 for two years before returning to Sydney. 

Johnny O'Keefe & Max

In Sydney, the Meteors made their first Australian television appearance on Johnny O'Keefe's Sing Sing Sing. By April 1965, the second Meteors' album was released on RCA Records and contained a range of styles, including the single "So Long Babe". During February 1966, visiting UK acts the Rolling Stones and the Searchers were supported on tour by Max Merritt and The Meteors. After a cruise ship gig to New Zealand Merritt heard Otis Redding's version of "Try a Little Tenderness" and recorded his own cover in 1967. Turmoil within the Meteors saw a rapid turnover of members. 

In Melbourne, Merritt and his band initially found it difficult obtaining regular gigs and so travelled widely through the state. On 24 June 1967 the van they were travelling in collided head-on with a car. Many of the band members were injured. Merrit lost his right eye and had his face scarred. It took the band nearly a year to recover. By July 1968 they competed in Hoadley's Battle of the Sounds, finishing behind winners the Groove, the Masters Apprentices and Doug Parkinson. 

                                      

In 1969 the group were re-signed by RCA and they released their first single for over two years, a cover of Jerry Butler's "Hey, Western Union Man", which reached No. 13 on the Australian singles charts. In early 1970 their third album, Max Merritt and the Meteors, was released with six original tracks and five covers. It reached No. 8 on the national albums chart. But following singles did not chart well and by 1972 Merritt had relocated again – this time to England. 

In London from early 1971, the group played the UK pub circuit, initially with little success but their popularity slowly grew and they supported Slade and the Moody Blues on their tours. They were signed by US-based Arista Records who released A Little Easier with the title single "A Little Easier" in 1975. "Slippin' Away" was their second single from the album and captured the attention of radio listeners in both Australia and New Zealand. By 1977, with the advent of punk rock the band's popularity on the UK pub circuit had declined and they effectively disbanded. Merritt then relocated to the US. 

Merritt relocated to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1977 and signed as a solo artist with Polydor Records, which released Keeping in Touch in 1979. He then moved to Los Angeles, where he continued to reside. He toured Australia in 1979, 1980 and 1981, returning there in 1996 to tour the club and pub circuit. After that, whenever Merritt returned to Australia, a reformed Max Merritt & The Meteors were in demand for special events and music festivals. 

In mid-April 2007, Merritt was admitted to a Los Angeles hospital with symptoms of kidney failure. He was diagnosed with Goodpasture syndrome, a rare autoimmune disorder that affects the kidneys and lungs. Merritt was struggling with his health and finances, so his manager organised a Concert for Max which raised $200,000. On 1 July 2008, Merritt was inducted by Glenn A. Baker into the ARIA Hall of Fame. 

Merritt died in Los Angeles, California, on 24 September 2020, at age 79, 13-years after being diagnosed with Goodpasture syndrome. Prior to his death, Merritt had recorded a new album, titled I Can Dream. The album was released on 27 November 2020. (Edited from Wikipedia)

Carl Gardner born 29 April 1928

Carl Gardner (April 29, 1928 – June 12, 2011) was an American singer, best known as the foremost member and founder of The Coasters. Known for the 1958 song "Yakety Yak", which spent a week as number one on the Hot 100 pop list, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. 

Born Carl Edward Gardner in Tyler, Texas, he was exposed to a wide range of music including gospel, big bands and opera. His sister, Carol, eventually became an opera singer in New York. After high school, Gardner worked in a department store by day and sang and played drums with a local dance band by night. "We played all over Texas, mostly for the real elite," he remembered. 

In the early 50s, he decided to further his career in Los Angeles. He hung around the clubs and asked every band if he could get up and sing with them. By then, big bands in the style of Count Basie were being replaced by smaller R&B groups, and the first offer of a job came from the Robins, a doo-wop group that had already made some recordings. The group's lead singer had recently been sent to jail, and Gardner was able to fill the vacancy in 1954. 

Soon he was recording Leiber and Stoller compositions with the Robins. These included some slow ballads, but the first hit to feature Gardner was Smokey Joe's Cafe. The songwriters were fascinated with the Mexican-American culture of Los Angeles and the song combined Latin rhythms with a quirky narrative. Smokey Joe's Cafe was issued on the songwriters' own Spark label, but it attracted the attention of a much bigger company, Atlantic Records in New York. Nesuhi Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic, arranged for the Spark catalogue to be purchased and reissued on Atlantic. Smokey Joe's Cafe went on to sell 250,000 copies. The plan was for Leiber, Stoller and the Robins to move to the east coast. However, three of the Robins wanted to stay in Los Angeles, so Gardner and the bass singer, Bobby Nunn, recruited new singers (Billy Guy and Leon Hughes), and their manager, Lester Sill, called this new group the Coasters. 

Their first record, Down in Mexico, released in 1956, reprised the Latin theme in its tale of a young American's misadventures south of the border, and it was another big hit with black audiences. But some of the later songs that Leiber and Stoller presented to the Coasters were targeted at white teenagers as well. The lyrics for One Kiss Led to Another made a reference to "soda pop", and Searchin', the Coasters' first pop hit, listed a series of fictional detectives. 

                                    

Searchin' went to No 3 in the US in 1957 and was followed by a number of American hits for the Coasters. They also achieved success in the UK with the singles Charlie Brown, which portrayed a high-school clown who "called the English teacher daddy-o"; Yakety Yak, the plaint of a teenager who is told to "take out the papers and the trash", "scrub that kitchen floor" and ignore his "hoodlum friend outside"; and Poison Ivy, a 1959 track that was later recorded by the Rolling Stones. 

Several other Coasters songs were favourites with British artists. Screaming Lord Sutch attempted to emulate Gardner on his version of I'm a Hog for You Baby and the Hollies reworked Ain't That Just Like Me. The group's hits gradually dried up in the 1960s and there were several changes of personnel. Eventually, several individuals, including Gardner, led their own versions of the Coasters, playing often at rock'n'roll revival events. In 1987, the Coasters were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The following year, Gardner and Guy performed at a New York concert to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Atlantic Records. 

In 1993, shortly after moving with wife Veta to Port St. Lucie, Florida, Gardner sought treatment for a nosebleed. He was ultimately diagnosed by an ENT specialist with a cancerous tumor of the nasopharynx "the size of a grapefruit", and was told chances of survival were slim. Nevertheless, after enduring weeks of radiation therapy, the cancer went into remission, never to recur. Despite some change in the sonority of his voice, Gardner continued to perform with the Coasters as lead singer until he reired in 2005. Carl Gardner, Sr. died on June 12, 2011, at a Port St. Lucie hospice care facility in Florida, after suffering with congestive heart failure and vascular dementia. He was 83. 

Carl, Jr., took over as lead singer, but was fired by Veta Gardner. Together, Carl Jr. and Thomas (Curly) Palmer vowed to keep the legacy alive by "The Coasters featuring Carl Gardner Jr. And Thomas Curly Palmer The legacy continuous". Carl Jr and Thomas Palmer both recorded with The Coasters before Carl Sr's death. Veta Gardner, Carl's widow, owns the rights to the Coasters name and manages a performing group, which has no original members. 

(Edited from Dave Laing obit @ the Guardian & Wikipedia)

 

Jean Redpath born 28 April 1937

Jean Redpath MBE (28 April 1937 – 21 August 2014) was a Scottish folk singer, best known in her native country through her recordings, especially of the songs of Robert Burns. It was in the US, however, that she established her reputation as a wonderful interpreter of Scottish folk songs, in live performance, on radio and on record. 

Born in Edinburgh, Redpath grew up in Leven, Fife, and chose medieval studies at the University of Edinburgh. It was there that she discovered the rich archives of the university's school of Scottish studies – and the poet and folklorist Hamish Henderson, whose name was synonymous with the work of the school. Henderson had recorded ballads by Traveller singers such as Jeannie Robertson and Belle Stewart, ensuring that they remained a vibrant part of Scottish culture during the emerging folk music revival. Redpath was inspired by the recordings that Henderson was making, and spent many hours listening to and absorbing the repertoire and style of these traditional singers. 

Like her near-contemporaries in Ireland, the three Clancy brothers and Tommy Makem, Redpath made the journey to America, where she found herself much in demand as a folk singer. This was 1961 – just as folk music was becoming a commercial success in the US – and Redpath attended the Berkeley folk festival in California that year. At a panel discussion, the unknown singer asked several questions and, after it became apparent that she knew more about Scottish folksong that anyone else, she was invited on stage to join the panel. 

She moved to Philadelphia and then gravitated to Greenwich Village, New York, the centre of the grassroots and alternative-lifestyle folk scene. Here she met Ramblin' Jack Elliott and shared a house, and concert stages, with the young Bob Dylan. After an appearance at the club Gerde's Folk City, she received a rave review in the New York Times, and her career was launched. 

Almost immediately, she was recording albums of Scottish songs, and invitations to perform took her throughout the US and Canada, and later to Australia and South America. Her first album was Skipping Barefoot Through the Heather (1962) for Professor Kenneth Goldstein's label in Philadelphia. She then signed to Elektra Records, and later to Philo, both based in the US. In all, she recorded over 40 albums, latterly on her own label. 

              Here’s “Green Grow The Rashes O” from above LP

                                    

Redpath's best-known recording project was the songs of Robert Burns. The composer Serge Hovey had compiled a book of 323 of Burns' songs compiled of both traditional songs and those written by Burns  and then wanted to record them. Henderson recommended Redpath as the singer and, from 1976, she and Hovey worked for 20 years, until his death in 1989, recording just a selection of the songs on seven out of the projected 22 albums. Hovey's arrangements were highly orchestrated and he was a perfectionist – hence the incomplete recordings, which were critically acclaimed around the world.

Redpath's beautiful, expressive voice, perhaps not as earthy as the traditional song enthusiasts might have liked, was well suited to Hovey's arrangements. Although she felt that no other musician could replace Hovey in the project, Redpath nevertheless recorded a further four albums of Burns songs in Scotland, singing a cappella. 

In the 1970s and 80s, Redpath was a regular guest on the American radio show A Prairie Home Companion, presented by Garrison Keillor, which brought her singing to millions. Here, as in her concert performances, she endeared herself to audiences with her sweet voice, witty introductions to songs and great knowledge of their background. 

In 1972, Redpath was appointed artist in residence at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and in 1979 she took a similar role at Stirling University in Scotland and was a staff member at the annual Heritage of Scotland summer schools there, giving courses in Scottish song for the next 10 years. In 2011, she was artist in residence in the department of Celtic and Scottish studies at Edinburgh University, bringing her full circle to the archive that had so interested her 50 years earlier. 

The respect for Redpath's singing was recognised by honorary doctorates from the universities of Stirling, St Andrews and Glasgow, and from the Royal Scottish Academy of Drama and Art (now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland). She performed at a royal banquet for the Queen in Edinburgh Castle during the silver jubilee year, 1977, and was appointed MBE in 1987. She was inducted into the Scottish Traditional Music Hall of Fame in 2008. In the US, she was made a Kentucky colonel by the state governor. In 2011, she returned to her alma mater to become artist-in-residence at the University of Edinburgh’s Department of Celtic and Scottish Studies. She kept her links to Scotland, owning a house in Elie during her life. 

Redpath died from cancer on 21 August 2014 at a hospice in Tucson, Arizona aged 77 years.

(Edited from Guardian obit by Derek Schofield & Wikipedia) 

Sal Mosca born 27 April 1927

Sal Mosca (April 27, 1927 – July 28, 2007) was an American jazz pianist who was a student of Lennie Tristano and reigns among the most gifted improvisers of his generation. 

Salvatore Joseph Mosca Mosca, born to first-generation Italian immigrants in Mount Vernon, New York State, was fascinated in boyhood with the sounds from the household pianola and was soon attracted to the music of such early jazz pianists as James P Johnson and Fats Waller. At 12 he began formal lessons at the keyboard; three years later he played in local nightclubs, a moustache disguising his age. 

After Mosca's two years of wartime service in an army band ended in 1946, the GI bill enabled him to enrol at the New York College of Music, where he studied classical composition by day while listening to such giants as Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum in the clubs of 52nd Street at night. Soon he met Tristano, a controversial but magnetic figure who, over the next eight years of study, shaped his destiny. 

His fellow pupils included Marsh and the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, and it was with these two distinctive young musicians that Mosca made his first recordings in 1949 for Prestige. Two years later, he reunited with Konitz for Ezz-Thetic, which featured trumpeter Miles Davis and saxophonist Stan Getz. Mosca also supported the immortal Charlie Parker at Birdland and with Konitz and saxophonist Warne Marsh was a fixture at another celebrated club, the Village Vanguard. While playing opposite the comedian Lenny Bruce at Manhattan's The Den, Mosca was offered a record deal by producer Orrin Keepnews but declined, later explaining, "I never wanted to be caught in the web of commercial success." 

                    Here’s “Pub Bob” from above album

                                    

In 1957, on a Konitz album titled Very Cool, his real originality emerged in a series of short solos full of startlingly asymmetrical phrase-shapes, mixing close-voiced chordal passages with agile single-note lines that seemed to double back on themselves. He did not headline a session until 1959, teaming with bassist Peter Ind for At the Den, a live set issued on the Wave label. Mosca issued two more Wave dates, 1961's Looking Out and 1969's Sal Mosca on the Piano.Konitz and Marsh remained his most frequent musical companions and a 1971 recording with Konitz, titled Spirits, contains several duets that demonstrate how adventurously the pianist had developed away from his model. 

During the 1975-1980 period, Sal gave solo improvised concert performances in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center and the Carnage Recital Hall, both in New York City. He also made a few poorly distributed solo records, including A Concert, documenting a 1979 recital in New York and displaying the full extent of his technical resource and emotional rigour. In1981 he performed solo in Antwerp, Belgium and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. 

Like his mentor, Mosca spent most of his career shunning the public gaze and after more than a decade out of sight, he released 1990's A Concert, followed by a series of dates for the Zinnia imprint. After 1992 he was relatively inactive. After several years of health problems Sal had recovered sufficiently to begin accepting students at his home in Mount Vernon also recording and performing. Several of his peers considered him the last living great improvisational pianist of their generation. 

After a January, 2007 European concert tour, Sal fell ill once again. He died from emphysema in White Plains, New York on July 28, 2007 at the age of 80.

 (Edited from the Guradian, AllMusic & Sal Mosca’s web page) 

Some artists never receive the credit they deserve during their lifetime. Some may be go-getters with dreams of the big time, but many fly under the radar, doing their work in their own time, only allowing true aficionados or lucky, open-eared listeners into their world. Pianist Sal Mosca was definitely one of the latter, a master musician who perfected his craft and whose work has gone mostly unnoticed, until recently.

Maurice Williams born 26 April 1938

Maurice Williams (April 26, 1938 - August 6, 2024) was one of the most extraordinarily durable figures in the history of classic R&B and rock & roll, despite the fact that, as a performer, he only ever racked up one major national hit on the pop charts. That song, "Stay," became one of the classic singles in the history of rock. 

Maurice Williams was born in Lancaster, South Carolina and showed himself musically inclined from a very early age -- he started learning the piano from his older sister in the late '40s, practicing daily so that by the time he was ten years old he was having friends from elementary school over for informal jam sessions at his house. Williams had sung in church, but his interest lay more in popular music, and in 1953, he and his friends were ready to form a group that they called the Royal Charms. 

The Gladiolas

 In addition to Williams and Gainey, the Royal Charms were made up of Willie Jones (baritone), William Massey (tenor, baritone, trumpet), and Norman Wade (bass). In the winter of 1956, while still in high school, Williams and his band traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, to record for the Excello label. At the time they were going by the name the Royal Charms, but the founder of Excello Records, Ernie Young, convinced them to change their name to the Gladiolas (at the time, there were at least two other bands using the same name). The song "Little Darlin'" was a No. 11 hit on the Billboard R&B chart in 1957, but only reached number 41 on Billboard's Top 100. However, when it was covered by the Canadian group the Diamonds, it moved up to No. 2. 

Williams finished high school and while on the road with the band, their station wagon broke down in Bluefield, West Virginia. The band came across a British-built Ford car known as the Zodiac and changed their name based on this. Shortly thereafter, Henry Gaston replaced Earl Gainey. In the spring of 1959, Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs performed at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina. Around that time, the group split and reformed. The members were Williams, Gaston, Wiley Bennett, and Charles Thomas. Later, Little Willie Morrow and Albert Hill were added. 

                                   

One month later, in the early summer of 1959, the band recorded in a Quonset Hut on Shakespeare Road in Columbia. The recording engineer, Homer Fesperman, recorded several tracks that the band had hoped would include a hit. One of the last tracks that they recorded that day was "Stay", a song that Williams had written in 1953. Williams sang lead and Henry Gaston sang the counter-verse falsetto. After taking the demo of "Stay" to Al Silver at Herald Records in New York City, the song was pressed and released in early 1960. 

"Stay" is the shortest recording ever to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the United States. At the end of 1963, the British band the Hollies recorded "Stay", which gave the group their debut Top Ten hit single in the UK, peaking at No.8 in January 1964, three years after the Zodiacs' version had peaked at No. 14 on the UK Singles Chart (January 1961). Later versions of "Stay", by the Four Seasons (1963) and Jackson Browne (1978),reached the Top 20 in the U.S., each selling over one million copies in the United States alone. A 1965 recording by the group, "May I", released by Vee Jay Records and Dee-Su Records, became, over the years, another million-selling record. 

Throughout the '70s and '80s, Williams led various incarnations of the Zodiacs on oldies tours, primarily on the beach music circuit on the U.S. East Coast. He kept up a schedule of 200 shows a year from his base in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he ran his own record label and played the piano in the New Emanuel Church of Christ. In the wake of Dirty Dancing, which yielded sales of another eight million copies of "Stay," he re-emerged as a recording artist on the Ripete label, based in Columbia, South Carolina, which specializes in beach music. Ripete has since released the impossible-to-find 1965 live album on CD, and an excellent career anthology of Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs. 

Williams was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2010. He also made several performances for the PBS "Doo Wop 50" show series in 2001. He continued to record, tour, and release music until his death on August 6, 2024, at the age of 86.  Other band members including Henry Gaston died in Charlotte, North Carolina, on August 24, 2015, at the age of 79 and Earl Gainey died on February 4, 2025, at the age of 87. 

(Edited from Wikipedia, AllMusic & The Guardian)

Vin Bruce born 25 April 1932

Vin  Bruce (April 25, 1932 – June 8, 2018) was one of the first Cajun musicians to appear on the Louisiana Hayride and Grand Ole Opry. 

Born Ervin Bruce in Cut Off, Louisiana, on April 25, 1932, Cajun singer Vin Bruce grew up in the musical environment provided by his father Levy Bruce, whose fiddle playing for the local Cajun dances influenced Bruce to take up the guitar at the age of 10. He honed his smooth and gentle vocal style by playing with local groups the Southern Serenaders  and the Hillbilly Swing Kings, and by the age of 18, Bruce decided to take his career solo and caught the ears of Columbia Records. 

Vin was eighteen and singing primarily English songs at a New Orleans radio station when he was discovered by a Columbia talent scout in 1951. Among the 78's that Columbia released was a French tune entitled, Dans la Louisianne. This sold half a million records and Vin mentioned shyly that for a short while he had a fan club with members from all across the country. 

On October 22, 1951, Bruce signed a recording contract with Columbia Records in Nashville, Tennessee. With a distinctive, rich baritone voice, he recorded many popular songs like “Dans la Louisiane,” “Dans la claire de la lune,” “Coeur de la ville,” and “Fille de compagnie,” recording with Chet Atkins, Grady Martin, Tommy Jackson, Owen Bradley and Shook Jackson. Bruce was one of the first Cajuns to perform on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry and the Louisiana Hayride. Vin is also noteworthy for having been one of the artist who performed at Hank Williams’ wedding to Biller Jean Eshliman in New Orleans, Louisiana. 

                                   

In the mid-1950s, when the first wave of rock & roll devoured the industry, Bruce was dropped from Columbia, so he played locally for a long time until he could no longer support himself by singing. He started to roughneck on the offshore oil rigs. Bruce returned to Louisiana and raised cattle. In 1961 he signed a contract with Swallow Records, and had a hit single with Jole Blon. 

Bruce remained somewhat busy between the 1960s and the 1990s, releasing several albums and singles on various small labels. He continued to play regularly in and around Louisiana, and eventually he converted a barn into a recording studio and released the album Carousel for Two on the Louisiana Red record label in the fall of 2000. 

Vin Bruce has performed in many countries during his career. During the early 80's, Cajun music began to develop a new following in the U.S.A., Europe, and Canada. Vin and his band, "The Acadians," were invited and performed in Canada on the Willie Lamont television show, the National Folk Festival, Wolf Trap Park in Virginia, the Border Festival in El Paso, Texas, the Frontier Life Festival in St. Louis, Missouri, the Westville Festival in Americus, Georgia and the New Orleans World's Fair. 

For his contribution and performance in Cajun music, Bruce is known as "the King of Cajun Singers" and has been inducted into the Nashville Music Hall of Fame in 1986, the CFMA Cajun Music Hall of Fame in 1997, the Louisiana Hall of Fame Living Legend in 1998, the Eunice Hall of Fame and the Westbank Musicians Hall of Fame. He was also chosen as the Lafourche Parish Citizen of the Year in 2017. Former Lafourche Parish Assessor Leroy Martin said Vin Bruce was always there when someone asked him to sing at birthday parties and celebrations. 

The native and longtime resident of Cut Off was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia three months before he died in his home town on June 8, 2018 at the age of 86. 

(Edited from AllMusic Wikipedia, Arcadian Museum, bigfrenchdance, Houma Today

 

Frank Strazzeri born 24 April 1930

Frank Strazzeri (April 24, 1930 – May 9, 2014) was an American jazz pianist who was in demand for straight-ahead sessions for decades. 

Frank (John) Strazzeri began on tenor saxophone and clarinet at age 12, but soon switched to piano. After attending the Eastman School of Music, in 1952 the 22-year-old Strazzeri worked as house pianist at a Rochester nightclub, accompanying visiting performers including Roy Eldridge, J.J. Johnson and Billie Holiday. He moved to New Orleans in 1954 and played traditional jazz in bands led by Sharkey Bonano and Al Hirt, but his main interest was in bebop. Soon, he went on the road with Charlie Ventura (1957-8), then Woody Herman (1959). 

At Herman’s suggestion, he settled in Los Angeles in 1960. There he worked extensively as a studio musician on the West Coast jazz scene, and toured with Joe Williams, Maynard Ferguson, and Les Brown. He also toured with Elvis Presley in June 1972, including four Madison Square Garden shows in New York, and the following January for the "Aloha from Hawaii" worldwide telecast. He struck up a friendship with Elvis based on a mutual interest in karate. 

After three years with Les Brown’s band he joined Cal Tjader’s quintet in 1974. From 1975 he led his own groups and undertook session work playing with a cross section of jazz artists, among them Herb Ellis Bill Perkins, Art Pepper, Terry Gibbs, Bud Shank, The Lighthouse All-Stars and Chet Baker, in addition to recording as a leader, He also recorded with Louie Bellson (in London 1980 & 1982) and Tal Farrow (1984). 

                                    

When filmmaker Bruce Weber was producing the Baker documentary Let’s Get Lost, the trumpeter designated Strazzeri to supervise the music.“I was extremely surprised when I was asked to do the film,” Strazzeri told Bill Kolhaase of The Los Angeles Times in 1993. “(Baker) played with hundreds of piano players. But I think he felt an alignment with me, a buddy thing that made him feel comfortable. I used to break him up quite a bit. He lived on the sad side of life, you know, the doom-and-gloom thing. So I’d crack jokes and make him smile.” 

Strazzeri’s primary source of income, however, was from his music, which continued long after his work with Presley. Among the colleagues with whom he worked most closely was saxophonist and flutist Bill Perkins. They recorded together on several occasions in, among other settings, Strazzeri’s sextet Woodwinds West. As a leader, Strazzeri headed sessions for Revelation, Glendale, Sea Breeze, Catalyst, Discovery, and Fresh Sound. 

He spent most of his career in Los Angeles, but moved back to Rochester in late April 2014 following a final engagement at the Glendale club Jax, where he often played in his final years. He died in Rochester, New York, at the age of 84 on May 9, 2014. Strezzeri’s generally conservative playing reflected the relaxes approach and technical competence of the finest keyboard players in Los Angeles. Bobby Shew spoke glowingly of him as “a giant, a master, an incredibly underrated player, a complete genius.” 

(Edited from Arts Journal, Wikipedia, AllMusic & New Grove Dictionary of Jazz)