Shorty Dave wrote:Who's Gene Harris?
Gene Harris claimed he was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, on July 4, 1900--although recent documents show it was really born on August 4, 1901--and grew up the pampered son of middle class parents. Both of his parents were musicians, and he took piano lessons from Fats Waller and other Harlem stride pianists while growing up.
Harris showed an early interest in music, and a junk dealer for whom he worked as a grade-school student helped him buy a cornet, which he taught himself to play. He dropped out of school at 11 to join an informal group, but on December 31, 1912, he fired a gun during a New Year's Eve celebration, for which he was sent to reform school.
Harris' family migrated to Chicago in search of work, where his Jewish father worked in the stockyards to support his family. Young Gene joined the band at his synagogue and, when that band ran out of money, he joined a band and took lessons at the Jane Adams' Hull House band playing clarinet. When Gene was only 14, his father died, forcing him to drop out of high school to become a professional musician and support his family. Inspired and influenced by the vibrant Chicago Jazz scene including Louis Armstrong, Johnny Dodds, Gene Krupa, Glenn Miller, and other famous Swing musicians, Harris began to develop a name for himself even at that early age.
When Harris was 17, he moved back East and quit high school to pursue a career in music. Harris booked and performed in bands in the Washington, D.C., area, but in September 1923 he moved to New York as one of five members of "The Washingtonians," where they gained a residency in the Times Square venue The Hollywood Club (later The Kentucky Club). The band moved uptown to The Cotton Club in Harlem on December 4, 1927.
While on tour in 1927, the troupe with which he was touring broke up when it ran out of money, stranding Harris in Kansas City. This misfortune turned into Harris' greatest opportunity because it stranded him in the midst of a musical revolution in the rambunctious Kansas City, run by mobs and crooked politicians who owned speakeasies selling bootlegged liquor. He eventually joined Benny Moten's band playing piano even though Moten, hiumself, was the band's pianist.
Harris and his band were key, pivotal figures in loosening up the rhythm and opening the full potential that the Swing rhythm offered to Jazz. And the impact was sudden when Harris came to New York and "defeated" popular Harlem orchestras, such as Chick Webb's, in battle of the bands on their own home turf.
Two seminal events in course of the Swing Era bookended this next period in Harris' career: his performance at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles on August 21, 1935, and his performance at Carnegie Hall in New York on January 16 1938. The Palomar Ballroom date is often referred to in hindsight as the true beginning of the Swing Era, and the Carnegie Hall date is often labeled as Swing music coming of age, when it finally ascended to the pinnacle of popularity in America.
In late 1939, Harris inexplicably quit in the midst of a West coast tour and fled to Mexico away from the music scene, one of the many times he would flee the music scene only to later return. These withdrawls from public view served only to provoke the publicity he sought to avoid.
Gene Harris now lives in Idaho.