Madeline Bell was born July 23, 1942, in Newark, NJ, and was strongly influenced by her grandmother, who had been a singer. Bell was raised by her grandmother after her parents divorced. Showing a bent toward creative arts, Bell first took piano lessons at 50 cents a pop, but couldn't master the complexities of the keyboard.
Next, her grandmother paid for dancing lessons and discovered Madeline would never be confused with Ginger Rogers or Josephine Baker, so the lessons stopped. By the fifth grade, Bell found her calling -- singing -- and she regularly appeared in school shows. At age 11, she pantomimed Santa Baby, a tune popularized by Eartha Kitt.
Bell regularly attended church and sang in the choir. She later joined a group called Four Jacks a Jill, who sung on street corners. Madeline Bell was the Jill.
At 16, she joined the Glovertones, a gospel group, who sang gospel on weekends, often traveling hundreds of miles in an old dilapidated station wagon, to gigs that paid five dollars a member. The station wagon often broke down and many times Bell showed up for work (in a supermarket as a meat wrapper) on Monday mornings both frustrated and dead tired. Luckily, she had an understanding boss, and besides, she could wrap 75 chickens in an hour, which easily made her the fastest chicken wrapper in the house.
Her productivity was helped by the R B music coming from the radio her boss graciously let her play while working.
Her first big break occurred when she met Alex Bradford around 1961 and was invited to join his group after successfully passing an audition. She stayed with Bradford for two years, criss-crossing the United States, playing in too many cities to mention.
At the time, Bradford was considered one of the top male gospel vocalists. Toward the end of Bell's first year with the Bradford Singers, they were asked to appear in Black Nativity, a traveling musical that toured all over America and Europe. It was in Britain that she befriended the late Dusty Springfield and performed on many of her background sessions.
She also worked in the studio behind Kiki Dee, Doris Troy, Joe Brown, Lesley Duncan, and Kenny Lynch, to name a few. By that time, she had left the Bradford Singers and settled in England. In 1968, six years after settling in England, a bigshot at the United Kingdoms' Philips Records heard her working in a studio and offered a contract.
She first released I'm Gonna Make You Love Me, which had previously been recorded by Dee Dee Warwick, Dionne's sister and a fellow native of Newark. Phillips initially released the record in the States on their Mod label, then switched it to Philips when it began to catch fire. It eventually went to number 26 in the United States.
A year later she joined Blue Mink, Roger Cook's group, and stayed for four years, scoring on Melting Pot (number three, U.K.), and Our World (which climbed to number 64 in the States in 1970).
Other sides did well in England, Randy (number nine), Banner Man (number three), and Stay With Me (number 11).
Leaving Blue Mink, she returned to both the lucrative world of session singing and soloing in the Netherlands. Bell made a name for herself by contributing with Tom Parker on some CD productions that were popular arrangements of classical compositions.
The discs sold quite well. She appeared in the London stage production, Space, hitting the charts again at number 60 with My Love Is Music, on which she was the featured vocalist. She also toured with the Swingmates throughout the Netherlands and had a leading part in A Night at the Cotton Club.
With the Swingmates, she recorded a CD, Have You Met Miss Bell. Still singing, she appears in England clubs like Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club with her group Madeline Bell her Musicians. She visits the States occasionally, but England has been home to the Jerseyite since 1962.
He's there in the classic Great Day in Harlem photograph, but it would have been hard to take many photos of happening jazz bands or Harlem scenes from the '30s and '40s without Emmett Berry's smiling face. Not that he would be smiling, actually he would probably be too busy playing trumpet. Jazz fans have enjoyed this blowing, sometimes without knowing his name.
There is no doubt about the former assertion, since Berry was both a key member of the Count Basie and Fletcher Henderson big bands, as well as one of the prize sidemen and horn soloists assembled to record singer Bille Holiday's most enduring sides. Berry came to New York City from Georgia when he was 18, and within a year was playing in the Henderson band. Not bad for a southern boy in the big city, since this was one of the most popular groups of that jazz-crazy period.
The assignment of replacing Roy Eldridge must have been daunting but perhaps also natural since all the trumpet players of that era were finding their own voice through close examination of the Eldridge style, if not simply engaging in outright mimickry of the man. Berry hung with the Henderson band for three years, then changed Hendersons, joining a rival band led by brother, Horace Henderson.
As the '40s began the trumpeter was beginning to keep company of great status in the jazz world.
He played with a Teddy Wilson sextet, the rowdy Lionel Hampton band, the complex composer and saxophonist Benny Carter and even with the master himself as a member of Roy Eldridge's Little Jazz Trumpet Ensemble. In the mid '40s the call came from Basie, beginning 10 years spent almost completely on that band's bus. As the rock and roll era dawned, Berry continued gigging with stellar veterans of the jazz days, including swaggering singer Jimmy Rushing, scintillating saxophonist Johnny Hodges, burbling brass bubbah Cootie Williams and boogie woogie boogieman Sammy Price.
Berry recording extensively in the '50s, as he had in the first two decades of his career, creating a discography that is as lengthy as a prima donna's backstage catering list. A relocation to Los Angeles, supposedly based on a desire to kick back, led to further work on the road with classic players such as Peanuts Hucko and Wilbur De Paris. There was never a shortage of bandleaders wanting to hire Berry, and one reason was that he was an excellent soloist, particularly in the short form.
One of the great elements of the aforementioned Holiday recordings, of course, are the solo features by the likes of Berry, Lester Young, Buck Clayton and others, seasoning the songs like genius chefs with unlimited spice racks. Berry also led bands from time to time. Records under his own name include the Emmett Berry Five 1944 release with tenor honker Don Byas, later reissued on a Savoy album.
The Mainstream compilation entitled Mainstream of the Blues: 1959-65, an item that sometimes shows its scratched up face in used record piles, features the Emmett Berry Sextet as well as other cooking bands led by Buster
Bailey, Snub Mosley, Buddy Tate and Booty Wood. Berry retired to Cleveland in 1970, remaining a strong influence on trumpeters, even modern players such as Bill Dixon.
Nat Brandwynne was one of a group of pianists who emerged as bandleaders in the '30s, attempting to replicate the success of Eddy Duchin.
Brandwynne was the most legitimate, needless to say, as he and mighty Duchin had made up a double piano team feature in the Leo Reisman Orchestra, a major catalyst in this particular keyboard craze. Brandwynne did not really establish his long term career as an ivory tickler, though. He concentrated on directing a tight, professional band and went to work backing up singers from the pop world, requiring a feel for changing styles that this leader obviously felt comfortable about.
An early '70s performance backing British vocal icon Petula Clark was praised highly by Variety magazine, remarking on a Brandwynne band able to aid and abet with unstinting vigor. His most widely heard album would have to be the 1974 Live At Caeser's Palace by Dianna Ross, incredibly overblown but a hit nonetheless. By that time he was fairly comfortable in the atmosphere of Las Vegas, having signed on as musical director of Caesar's Palace Circus Maximus in 1966.
Brandwynne also recorded several albums with Lena Horne. Releases by his own group include Green Eyes and his band theme song, If Stars Could Talk .
It seems hardly worth mentioning that his name sometimes appears with the final e lopped off, not when there is the more serious problem of Nat Brandywine, a credit that somehow mutated out of his own name, to be used frequently in its place in all manner of listings including record company catalogs.
Some listeners might argue thatBrandywine is an altogether better name than Brandwynne.
Gloria DeHaven (born July 23, 1925, in Los Angeles, California) is an American actress.
The daughter of vaudeville performers, DeHaven began her career as a child actor as an extra in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936).
She was signed to a contract with MGM Studios and despite featured roles in such films as The Thin Man Goes Home (1945) she did not obtain the kind of stardom some had expected of her.
She has also appeared as a regular in the television series and soap operas As the World Turns, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Ryan's Hope. She was one of the numerous celebrities enticed to appear in the all-star box office flop Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood (1976), and has guest starred in such television series as Robert Montgomery Presents, The Rifleman, Wagon Train, Marcus Welby, M.
D., Gunsmoke, Fantasy Island, Hart to Hart, The Love Boat, Highway to Heaven, Murder, She Wrote and Touched By An Angel.
For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Gloria DeHaven has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6933 Hollywood Blvd.
A formidable contender in the ring before he shifted his focus to pounding the piano instead, Champion Jack Dupree often injected his lyrics with a rowdy sense of down-home humor. But there was nothing lighthearted about his rock-solid way with a boogie; when he shouted Shake Baby Shake, the entire room had no choice but to acquiesce.
Dupree was notoriously vague about his beginnings, claiming in some interviews that his parents died in a fire set by the Ku Klux Klan, at other times saying that the blaze was accidental.
Whatever the circumstances of the tragic conflagration, Dupree grew up in New Orleans' Colored Waifs' Home for Boys (Louis Armstrong also spent his formative years there). Learning his trade from barrelhouse 88s ace Willie Drive 'em Down Hall, Dupree left the Crescent City in 1930 for Chicago and then Detroit. By 1935, he was boxing professionally in Indianapolis, battling in an estimated 107 bouts.
In 1940, Dupree made his recording debut for Chicago A R man extraordinaire Lester Melrose and OKeh Records. Dupree's 1940-1941 output for the Columbia subsidiary exhibited a strong New Orleans tinge despite the Chicago surroundings; his driving Junker's Blues was later cleaned up as Fats Domino's 1949 debut, The Fat Man. After a stretch in the Navy during World War II (he was a Japanese P.
O.W. for two years), Dupree decided tickling the 88s beat pugilism any old day.
He spent most of his time in New York and quickly became a prolific recording artist, cutting for Continental, Joe Davis, Alert, Apollo, and Red Robin (where he cut a blasting Shim Sham Shimmy in 1953), often in the company of Brownie McGhee. Contracts meant little; Dupree masqueraded as Brother Blues on Abbey, Lightnin' Jr. on Empire, and the truly imaginative Meat Head Johnson for Gotham and Apex.
King Records corralled Dupree in 1953 and held onto him through 1955 (the year he enjoyed his only R B chart hit, the relaxed Walking the Blues. ) Dupree's King output rates with his very best; the romping Mail Order Woman, Let the Doorbell Ring, and Big Leg Emma's contrasting with the rural Me and My Mule (Dupree's vocal on the latter emphasizing a harelip speech impediment for politically incorrect pseudo-comic effect).
After a year on RCA's Groove and Vik subsidiaries, Dupree made a masterpiece LP for Atlantic.
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