Jazzbeaux Collins

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Albert Richard "Al Jazzbo" Collins , also Jazzbeaux Collins , (born January 4, 1909 in Rochester , New York, † September 30, 1997 in Marine County , California ) was an American jazz disc jockey and radio and television presenter.

Life

Collins grew up on Long Island and attended the University of Miami in 1941 to become a teacher. As an announcer on the campus radio program, he had the idea of ​​switching to radio entirely and dropped out of his studies. Via stops in Logan (West Virginia) (in a station for bluegrass music), Pittsburgh , Chicago and Salt Lake City , he came to New York City in 1950 , where he worked for the radio station WNEW and from 1955 on the radio news program Monitor of NBC . On WNEW, he had a jazz show that was hot at the time, pretending to be broadcasting from a cave-like studio called Purple Grotto deep below Manhattan, populated by a 176-year-old purple Tasmanian owl named Harrison, a flamingo, who adored Paul Desmond and Dave Brubeck Leah ( who liked music to fly by ), the Dixieland-loving crow Clyde and the female chameleon and swing fan Jukes, who lived in a jukebox designed by Dr Caligari. His moderation (with favorite topics in addition to jazz such as fast cars, flying saucers and culinary delights) was accompanied by an easy listening piano game by Nat King Cole . In the broadcast occurred among others Art Tatum on (six months Live) and Count Basie with orchestra.

He briefly hosted the Tonight Show on NBC television for five weeks in 1957 as the successor to Steve Allen . In 1959 he moved to the west coast of San Francisco , where he had a radio show Collins on the clouds on KSFO and a morning TV show The Al Collins Show on KGO-TV, in which he took his guests, some of them off the street, interviewed in a barber's chair and briefly performed in Mexican bandit costume with a sentence from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by John Huston . He then went to various radio stations in Los Angeles in the 1960s . From 1969 he was in Pittsburgh , where he also had his own television program Jazzbeauxz Rehearsal from 1973 . From 1976 he was back in San Francisco, where he worked for KGO, among other things. He switched several times between California and New York City, where he hosted again for WNEW from 1981-1983 and 1986-1990. Most recently, he had a weekly jazz show for the KCSM of the College of San Mateo in California, again from his Purple Grotto . He died of pancreatic cancer .

His name Jazzbo , which he had since his time in Chicago at the station WIND and which he switched to Jazzbeaux in 1969 (and had it entered as the official first name), came from the name of tie-on ties that were fashionable in hipster jazz circles in the 1940s. The outward appearance of the weighty Collins wore a goatee à la Dizzy Gillespie , which he came close to with glasses and (occasionally) beret. In the USA he had his own fan base ( Al's Pal's ) even after his death .

He also released several records with his hipster talk, for example for Brunswick Records in 1953 (including his hit Little Red Riding Hood - a Grimm fairy tale for Hip Kids based on the lyrics by Steve Allen in Down Beat with Lou Stein at the piano, the sold over 750,000 copies), 1954 for Capitol Records (after the success Collins hired his own copywriter for other Fairy Tales for Hip Kids , such as Snow White , Jack and the Beanstalk ), 1967 A lovely bunch of Al Jazzbo Collins (from Jazzbo and the Bandidos , with Steve Allen, Terry Gibbs ) and in 1983 for the label Doctor Jazz by Bob Thiele again with Steve Allen ( Steve Allen´s Hip Fables , with Slim Gaillard , who also contributed translations into fake Spanish, Ray Mantilla ). In 1955 he was also involved as a presenter on a live recording sponsored by his radio station East Coast Jazz Scene with , among others, Coleman Hawkins and Gene Quill , which was also released as a record.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ digging
  2. ↑ Similar to Martin Block 's Make Believe Ballroom show from the swing era .
  3. ^ Branch of ABC
  4. ↑ As early as 1949 in New York he was a pioneer in spontaneously interviewing people for the radio on the street
  5. ↑ I don't go to show you no stinkin 'badges . Collins liked the film so much that he initiated a film festival in the Los Angeles suburb of Sierra Madre in the early 1970s.
  6. ↑ Douglas Jones
  7. ↑ among other things with a jazz fair
personal data
SURNAME Collins, Jazzbeaux
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Collins, Albert Richard (real name); Collins, Al Jazzbo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American disc jockey
DATE OF BIRTH 4th January 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Rochester , New York
DATE OF DEATH September 30, 1997
Place of death Marine County , California