Word: lunceford
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...performances begin Saturday night at the Berklee Performance Center with nationally acclaimed tap dancer Leon Collins and the spirited Danny Sloan Dance Company. Sloan features a repertory of jazz, ethnic, modern and ballet, while Collins, who teaches at the Harvard Dance Center, has toured nationally with the Jimmy Lunceford Band, Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Saturday night's bill will also include the Jassin' Singers and the Joel Press Jazz Quartet, both of which are local groups who regularly perform new works. The festival will receive a strong kickoff Friday night when world-famous ballet dancer Edward Villella hosts...
...largely forgotten ensembles of the period: the sizzling band headed by tiny, hunchbacked Drummer Chick Webb, featuring Ella Fitzgerald, which triumphed at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom in a 1937 battle of the bands with Goodman's group; the lush, colorfully textured Claude Thornhill band; the showmanlike Jimmie Lunceford unit, whose buoyant two-beat style influenced such latter-day bands as Billy May's; and one of the rare curiosities of big-band history-the 35-piece, all-reed-and-woodwind ensemble of the 1940s fronted by Shep Fields, otherwise an undistinguished leader of ricky-tick commercial groups...
...were too short to play the trombone, but he took up the trumpet, eventually graduated to the small Louisville combos-Tinsley's Royal Aces, Perdue's Pirates, etc. After that he "gigged around" with most of the famous bands of the '20s and '303-Jimmie Lunceford, McKinney's Cotton Pickers, Benny Carter, Fletcher Henderson, Cab Galloway-but eventually all the jobs seemed to peter out, and by the time The Embers offer came along, Jonah had been playing in Broadway pit orchestras...
...trio sings broadly swinging, word-for-note versions of arrangements by such famed big bands as Count Basic, Jimmy Lunceford, Duke Ellington. Jon Hendricks himself composes most of the lyrics, which are supposed to approximate-in sound and sense-the instrumental feel of the original band arrangement. Example: last week Singer Annie Ross, cast in the role of "brass," opened with the line "Dig Count Basie blow Joe's blues away," was seconded by the "reeds" (Hendricks, Arranger Dave Lambert) with the line "Blow Joe's blues away." After that the two sections sang together in a bouncing...
...weekends when he could hang out at the Moonglow or the 308 Club or one of the other wonderful, schizofrantic jazz joints that flourished in the Chicago of the '20s. Soon Big Bill was playing far and wide with the best of them-Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford, Lionel Hampton, Louis Armstrong, Bunk Johnson, Fats Waller. And always there was time to write his own songs: Partnership Woman, House Rent Stomp, Outskirts of Town...