Biography
DeFranco began his professional career just as swing music and big bands — many of which were led by clarinetists like Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman and Woody Herman — were fading in popularity. While most jazz clarinet players did not adapt to this change, DeFranco successfully continued to play clarinet exclusively, and was one of the few bebop clarinetists.
In 1950, DeFranco spent a year with the famous Count Basie Septet. His small combo in the early 1950s included jazz modernist Sonny Clark on the piano and guitarist Tal Farlow. He was bandleader of the Glenn Miller Orchestra from 1966 to 1974. He has also performed with Gene Krupa, Charlie Barnet, Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson and many others, and has released dozens of albums as a leader.
Read more about this topic: Buddy DeFranco
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)