Barnet, Charlie (26 October 1913–04 September 1991), jazz and popular bandleader and saxophonist, was born Charles Daly Barnet in New York City, the son of Willard Barnet and Charline Daly. Both parents played piano. Barnet evidently inherited his father’s ear for music, but his parents divorced when he was two years old, and Willard Barnet never saw his son again. Barnet and his mother lived with her parents. His grandfather Charles Frederick Daly was executive vice president of the New York Central Railroad, and Barnet lived comfortably in New York hotels and apartments, and a summer home....
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Burton W. Peretti
Basie, Count (21 August 1904–26 April 1984), jazz pianist, composer, and bandleader, was born William Basie in Red Bank, New Jersey, the son of African-American parents Harvey Lee Basie, an estate groundskeeper, and Lillian Ann Chiles, a laundress. Basie was first exposed to music through his mother’s piano playing. He took piano lessons, played the drums, and acted in school skits. An indifferent student, he left school after junior high and began performing. He organized bands with friends and played various jobs in Red Bank, among them working as a movie theater pianist. In his late teens he pursued work in nearby Asbury Park, but he met with little success. Then, in the early 1920s, he moved to Harlem, where he learned from the leading pianists of the New York “stride” style, ...
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Paul R. Laird
Bernstein, Leonard (25 August 1918–14 October 1990), conductor and composer, was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the son of Samuel Bernstein, a supplier of barber and beauty products, and Jenny Resnick. He began to pursue musical activities with abandon at about the age of ten and as a teen performed in classical and popular venues, including staged operettas with friends, as a jazz pianist at parties, as piano soloist with the Boston Public School Orchestra, and by playing light classics on the radio for thirteen weeks in 1934. Bernstein’s consuming interest in music was not encouraged by his father, but he never seriously considered another career. In 1939 he received a B.A. cum laude in music from Harvard University, where his teachers included Heinrich Gebhard, ...
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Brubeck, Dave (06 December 1920–05 December 2012), jazz pianist, bandleader, and composer, was born David Warren Brubeck in Concord, California, the youngest son of Howard Peter Brubeck, a rancher, and Elizabeth Ivey, a pianist and music teacher. In the mid-1890s his grandfather bought a ranch at the northern foot of Mount Diablo in Clayton, California. His parents' home was in the adjacent town, Concord, where young Dave attended elementary school. His brilliance would eventually be obvious, but as a child he was placed in a slow learning group because he had difficulty with spelling and reading. Dave was born cross-eyed and later in life speculated that he may also have had an unidentified learning disability....
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Calloway, Cab (25 December 1907–18 November 1994), jazz and popular singer and bandleader, was born Cabell Calloway III in Rochester, New York, the son of Cabell Calloway, a lawyer who also worked in real estate, and Martha Eulalia Reed, a public school teacher and church organist. Around 1914 the family moved to Baltimore, Maryland. His father died around 1920, and his mother married John Nelson Fortune, who held a succession of respectable jobs. Calloway sang solos at Bethlehem Methodist Episcopal Church, and he took voice lessons at age fourteen. He was nevertheless an incorrigible teenager, and in 1921 his stepfather sent him to Downingtown Industrial and Agricultural School, a reform school run by his granduncle, a pastor in Downington, Pennsylvania. In the spring of 1922 Calloway returned home on his own initiative, by his own account not reformed, but now a man rather than a boy. He thereafter moved comfortably between the proprieties of mainstream American life and the depravities of American entertainment....
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Robert Rollin
Chávez, Carlos (13 June 1899–02 August 1978), influential Mexican composer/conductor, author, and educator, of Spanish and some Indian descent, was born Carlos Antonio de Padua Chávez y Ramírez in Mexico City, the seventh son of Augustin Chávez, an inventor, and Juvencia Ramírez, a teacher. His mother supported the children after her husband’s death in 1902. Chávez began his musical studies at an early age and studied piano, first with his elder brother Manuel, then with Asunción Parra, and later with composer and pianist Manuel M. Ponce (1910–1914) and pianist and teacher Pedro Luis Ogazón (1915–1920). Chávez credited Ogazón with introducing him to the best classical and Romantic music and with developing his musical taste and technical formation. He received little formal training in composition, concentrating instead on the piano, analysis of musical scores, and orchestration. Chávez’s maternal grandfather was Indian, and from the time Chávez was five or six his family frequently vacationed in the ancient city-state of Tlaxcala, the home of a tribe that opposed the Aztecs. He later visited such diverse Indian centers as Puebla, Jalisco, Nayarit, and Michoacan in pursuit of Indian culture, which proved a significant influence on his early works....
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Marianne Fedunkiw Stevens
Cugat, Xavier (01 January 1900–27 October 1990), bandleader, was born in Gerona, near Barcelona, Spain, the son of Juan Cugat, an electrician, and Mingall de Bru y Deulofeo. His full name was Francisco de Asis Javier Cugat Mingall de Bru y Deulofeo. When he was two or three years old, his family moved to Cuba. His musical career is reported to have begun when a neighbor who was a violinmaker gave young Cugat a miniature violin. His first appearance with the Cuban Symphony was at age six....
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Eddie S. Meadows
Dameron, Tadd (21 February 1917–08 March 1965), arranger, bandleader, and composer, was born Tadley Ewing Peake Dameron in Cleveland, Ohio. Information on his parents is not available. Dameron attended Oberlin College and took premed courses before deciding to become a musician. His career began rather inauspiciously as a singer in 1938 with Freddy Webster’s band. It then continued with several lesser-known groups that included Zach Whyte, Blanche Calloway ( ...
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Barry Kernfeld
Davis, Miles (25 May 1926–28 September 1991), jazz trumpeter and bandleader, was born Miles Dewey Davis III in Alton, Illinois, the son of Miles Dewey Davis, Jr., a dentist, and Cleota Henry. When Davis was one year old, the family moved to East St. Louis, Missouri, where his father practiced dental surgery and farmed, raising special breeds of hogs. They settled in a white neighborhood while Davis was in elementary school....
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Antoinette Handy
Dixon, Dean (10 January 1915–04 November 1976), orchestra conductor, was born Charles Dean Dixon in New York City, the son of Henry Charles Dixon, a lawyer and hotel porter, and McClara Dean Ralston. Both of Dixon’s parents were West Indian—his mother was born in Barbados and his father in Jamaica. Because more than two decades elapsed before his parents secured their U.S. passports, according to Dixon, “[T]here is a lot of legal questioning as to whether I am an American or whether I only have an American passport. Both [of] my parents were Commonwealth citizens when I was born” (Dunbar, pp. 189–90)....
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Donahue, Sam (08 March 1918–22 March 1974), jazz and popular tenor saxophonist and bandleader, was born Samuel Koontz Donahue in Detroit, Michigan. His parents’ names and occupations are unknown. Donahue began clarinet at age nine and saxophone in high school. He played in the Redford High School band while also working locally as a sideman and with his own band from 1933 until 1938. In the latter year he gave his Detroit band over to arranger Sonny Burke and became a soloist in ...
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Eckstine, Billy (08 July 1914–08 March 1993), vocalist and band leader, known as “Mr. B”, was born William Clarence Eckstein in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of William Eckstein, a chauffeur, and Charlotte (maiden name unknown), a seamstress. He changed the spelling of his name as a young adult, at the suggestion of a nightclub owner who thought his name looked too Jewish. Eckstine had no extensive formal musical education while he was growing up, but his mother was always singing hymns and popular songs, and he sang at local social events and for a short time in the Episcopal choir in Pittsburgh. Around age sixteen he moved to Washington, D.C., and lived with his sister Maxine while finishing high school. On a dare, in 1933 he sang at an amateur show at the Howard Theater in Washington, D.C., and won first prize. In his last year of high school, much to his parents’ dismay, Eckstine worked at the Howard Theater, singing songs while the chorus girls danced. His parents had their hearts set on all of their children going to college, and Eckstine, undecided between singing or football, won a scholarship in 1934 to study physical education at Howard University but quit after a year after he broke his collar bone. Returning to Pittsburgh, he sang in local clubs and then made his way to Chicago, where, while singing in the DeLisa Club, he was heard by ...
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James Lincoln Collier
Ellington, Duke (29 April 1899–24 May 1974), jazz musician and composer, was born Edward Kennedy Ellington in Washington, D.C., the son of James Edward Ellington, a butler, waiter, and later printmaker, and Daisy Kennedy. The Ellingtons were middle-class people who struggled at times to make ends meet. Ellington grew up surrounded by a large, concerned family. His mother was particularly attached to him; in her eyes he could do no wrong. They belonged to Washington’s black elite, who put much stock in racial pride. Ellington developed a strong sense of his own worth and a belief in his destiny, which at times shaded over into egocentricity. Because of this attitude, and his almost royal bearing, his schoolmates early named him “Duke.”...
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Gillespie, Dizzy (21 October 1917–06 January 1993), jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer, was born John Birks Gillespie in Cheraw, South Carolina, the son of James Gillespie, a mason and musician, and Lottie Powe. Gillespie’s father kept his fellow band members’ instruments at their home, and thus from his toddler years onward Gillespie had an opportunity to experiment with sounds. He entered Robert Smalls public school in 1922. He was as naughty as he was brilliant, and accounts of fighting, showing off, and mischief extend from his youth into adulthood....
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Stephen C. Galleher
Goldkette, Jean (18 May 1893–24 March 1962), dance bandleader, businessman, and classical pianist, was born in Patras, Greece, the son of Angelina Goldkette, an actress. It is not known who Jean's father was. The Goldkette family was a troupe of entertainers that traveled throughout Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Angelina met and married John Poliakoff, a journalist, in Moscow in 1903. Raised in Greece and Russia, Jean studied classical piano from an early age, and he attended the Moscow Conservatory of Music. He moved to Chicago in 1910, when he was 17, to live with George Goldkette, an uncle. His mother and stepfather moved to the United States in 1919....
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James Lincoln Collier
Goodman, Benny (30 May 1909–13 June 1986), jazz musician and bandleader, was born Benjamin David Goodman in Chicago, the son of David Goodman, a garment worker, and Dora Rezinsky. His parents were Jewish immigrants from East Europe, and Goodman was raised in near poverty in Chicago’s Jewish enclave....
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Ann T. Keene
Gould, Morton (10 December 1913–21 February 1996), composer and conductor, was born in Queens, New York, to James Gould, a real estate agent, and Frances Arkin Gould. His parents had immigrated to America as children, his father from Vienna, his mother from Russia. He grew up in Queens and remained a resident of that borough for the rest of his life, living as an adult in Great Neck, only a few miles from his childhood home....
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William Thomson
Gray, Glen (06 July 1906–23 August 1963), saxophonist and band leader, also known as “Spike” Gray, was born Glen Gray Knoblaugh in Roanoke, Illinois, the son of Lurdie C. Knoblaugh, a clerk in the family store, and Agnes Cunningham.
Not an innovator nor performer of extraordinary gifts, Gray’s significance was more historical than musical, residing in the transitional role he and his Casa Loma Orchestra played in the evolution of the large dance orchestra—the big band—between 1930 and the end of World War II. Together they helped to transform the “salon” commercial dance orchestra of the 1910s and 1920s into the swing-oriented bands that began to dominate the business during the mid-1930s....
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Barry Kernfeld
Grimes, Tiny (07 July 1916?–04 March 1989), jazz and rhythm-and-blues guitarist and bandleader, was born Lloyd Grimes in Newport News, Virginia. Grimes told interviewer Bob Kenselaar that he was unsure of his birth date, there being no certificate. He told writers Stanley Dance and Arnie Berle that he was born in 1917, but other published sources give 1916 or 1915. Details of his parents are unknown. Grimes took up drums in a Boy Scout marching band. He played regularly at a beach dancehall near Newport News until a storm and subsequent flood destroyed the hall and his drums. Around the seventh grade he dropped out of school to work typical boyhood jobs selling papers and shining shoes. He taught himself to play piano, and while living in Washington, D.C., he became a pianist and singer in a trio called Wynken, Blynken and Nod. The group performed regularly on radio on “ ...
