Claude Thornhill

From Wikipedia

Claude Thornhill
Claude Thornill, ca. 1947. Photography by William P. Gottlieb
Background information
Birth name	Claude Thornhill
Born	August 10, 1909 Terre Haute, Indiana, USA
Died	July 2, 1965 (aged 55) New Jersey, USA
Genres	Jazz Cool jazz
Occupations	Pianist, Bandleader, Arranger, Composer
Instruments	Piano
Years active	1924–1965
Associated acts	Paul Whiteman Benny Goodman Ray Noble Billie Holiday Lee Konitz Gil Evans Gerry Mulligan

Claude Thornhill (August 10, 1908^[1] at Terre Haute, Indiana – July 1, 1965, New Jersey) was an American pianist, arranger, composer, and bandleader. He composed the jazz and pop standards “Snowfall” and “I Wish I Had You”, the last recorded by Billie Holliday.

Career

As a youth, he was recognized as an extraordinary talent and formed a traveling duo with Danny Polo, a musical prodigy on the clarinet and trumpet from nearby Clinton, Indiana. As a student at Garfield High School in Terre Haute, he played with several theater bands.

Thornhill entered the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music at age 16. That same year he and clarinetist Artie Shaw started their careers at the Golden Pheasant in Cleveland, Ohio with the Austin Wiley Orchestra. Thornhill and Shaw went to New York together in 1931.

Claude went to the West Coast in the late 1930s with the Bob Hope Radio Show, and arranged for Judy Garland in Babes in Arms.

In 1935, he played on sessions for Glenn Miller‘s first recordings under his own name, as Glenn Miller and His Orchestra. He played on Glenn Miller’s composition “Solo Hop,” which was released on Columbia Records.

After playing for Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman, Ray Noble, Glenn Miller, and Billie Holiday, and arranging “Loch Lomond” and “Annie Laurie” for Maxine Sullivan, in 1939 he founded his Claude Thornhill Orchestra. Danny Polo was his lead clarinet player. Although the Thornhill band was originally a sophisticated dance band, it became known for its many superior jazz musicians and for Thornhill’s and Gil Evans‘ innovative arrangements; its “Portrait of a Guinea Farm” has become a classic jazz recording.

The band played without vibrato so that the timbres of the instruments could be better appreciated, and Thornhill encouraged the musicians to develop cool-sounding tones. The band was popular with both musicians and the public; the Miles Davis Nonet was modeled in part on Thornhill’s cool sound and use of unconventional instrumentation. The band’s most successful records were “Snowfall,” “A Sunday Kind of Love” and “Love for Love.”

His most famous recording, “Snowfall,” was released in 1941 as Columbia 36268. He released the song also as a V-Disc recording, as V-Disc 271A1.

Playing at the Paramount Theater in New York for $10,000 a week in 1942, Thornhill dropped everything to enlist in the US Navy to support the war effort. As chief musician, he played shows across the Pacific Theater with Jackie Cooper as his drummer and Dennis Day as his vocalist.

In 1946, he was discharged from the Navy. Then in April, he reformed his ensemble. He kept his same stylistic lines, but added some Bop lines to it. He got his old members of Danny Polo, Gerry Mulligan, and Barry Galbraith back together, but also added new members like Red Rodney, Lee Konitz, Joe Shulman and Bill Barber. Barber was a tuba player, who was considered as a “soft brass” player rather than a bass as to not interfere with (Joe) Shulman on the bass. Their creative and immaculately clean and delicate interpretation of Evans’s arrangement of Dizzy Gillespie’s fast bop theme “Anthropology” (1947) provides a particularly noteworthy example of Thornhill’s style, which influenced Miles Davis’s recordings in 1949 for Capitol and many musicians who followed .

In the mid 1950s, Thornhill became Tony Bennett‘s musical director briefly.

He offered his big band library to Gerry Mulligan when Gerry formed the Concert Jazz Band, but Gerry regretfully declined the gift, since his instrumentation was different. A large portion of his extensive library of music is currently held by Drury University in Springfield, Missouri.

After his discharge from the Navy he continued to perform with his orchestra until his death of a heart attack at 1:30 a.m., July 2, 1965, at his home in Caldwell, New Jersey.^[3]Claude was booked at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, New Jersey, at the time, the engagement was kept in his honor with his music director in his place. He was survived by his wife, actress Ruth Thornhill, and his mother, Maude Thornhill (81 at the time), of Terre Haute, Indiana, still active at the time conducting choirs.

Compositions by Claude Thornhill

Claude Thornhill’s compositions included the standard “Snowfall”, “I Wish I Had You”, recorded by Billie Holiday and Fats Waller, “Let’s Go”, “Shore Road”, “Portrait Of A Guinea Farm”, “Lodge Podge”, “Rustle Of Spring”, “It’s Time For Us To Part”, “It Was A Lover And His Lass”, “The Little Red Man”, “Memory Of An Island”, and “Where Has My Little Dog Gone?”

Claude Thornill Orchestra, with Joe Shulman,Danny Polo, Lee Konitz, Louis Mucci, Barry Galbraith, Bill Barber, ca. 1947.
Photography by William P. Gottlieb.

Marion Harris

From Wikipedia

Marion Harris
Marion Harris in 1924
Background information
Birth name	Mary Ellen Harrison
Born	April 4, 1896 Indiana, United States
Died	April 23, 1944 (aged 48) New York City
Genres	Jazz, blues, pop
Occupations	Singer
Years active	1914—1930s
Labels	Victor, Columbia, Brunswick

Marion Harris (April 4, 1896 — April 23, 1944)  was an American popular singer, most successful in the 1920s. She was the first widely known white singer to sing jazz and blues songs.

Early life

Mary Ellen Harrison, probably in Indiana, she first played vaudeville and movie theaters in Chicago around 1914. Dancer Vernon Castle introduced her to the theater community in New York where she debuted in a 1915 Irving Berlin revue, Stop! Look! Listen!

Recordings

In 1916, she began recording for Victor Records, singing a variety of songs, such as “Everybody’s Crazy ’bout the Doggone Blues, But I’m Happy”, “After You’ve Gone“, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (later recorded by Bessie Smith), “When I Hear that Jazz Band Play” and her biggest success, “I Ain’t Got Nobody“.

In 1920, after the Victor label would not allow her to record W.C. Handy‘s “St. Louis Blues“, she joined Columbia Records where she recorded the song successfully. Sometimes billed as “The Queen of the Blues,”  she tended to record blues- or jazz-flavored tunes throughout her career. Handy wrote of Harris that “she sang blues so well that people hearing her records sometimes thought that the singer was colored.”  Harris commented, “You usually do best what comes naturally, so I just naturally started singing Southern dialect songs and the modern blues songs.”

In 1922 she moved to the Brunswick label. She continued to appear in Broadway theatres throughout the 1920s. She regularly played the Palace Theatre, appeared in Florenz Ziegfeld‘s Midnight Frolic and toured the country with vaudeville shows.  After a marriage which produced two children, and her subsequent divorce, she returned in 1927 to New York theater, made more recordings with Victor and appeared in an eight-minute promotional film, Marion Harris, Songbird of Jazz. After a Hollywood movie, the early musical Devil-May-Care (1929) with Ramón Novarro, she temporarily withdrew from performing because of an undisclosed illness.

Radio

Between 1931 and 1933, when she performed on such NBC radio shows as The Ipana Troubadors and Rudy Vallee‘s The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour, she was billed by NBC as “The Little Girl with the Big Voice.”

In early 1931 she performed in London, returning for long engagements at the Café de Paris. In London she appeared in the musical Ever Green and broadcast on BBC radio. She also recorded in England in the early 1930s but retired soon afterwards and married an English theatrical agent. Their house was destroyed in a German rocket attack in 1941, and in 1944 she travelled to New York to seek treatment for a neurological disorder. Although she was discharged two months later, she died soon afterwards in a hotel fire that started when she fell asleep while smoking in bed.