Sad news came in today from the Jazz Artists of Charleston: founding JAC board member, jazz historian, and longtime producer and emcee Jack McCray has died.

McCray started writing professionally about local jazz clubs and musicians 20 years ago at The Post and Courier. McCray helped establish the

Charleston Jazz Initiative in 2003 as a research project celebrating and documenting the African-American jazz tradition in the Charleston area. In 2007, he examined Charleston’s musical background in the bookCharleston Jazz (Arcadia), a 127-page collection of essays and images.

Over the last four years, McCray worked tirelessly to establish JAC as an independent group of like-minded artists. The JAC has presented numerous big-band and small-combo events at the Charleston Music Hall, Footlight Players Theatre, Voodoo Lounge, and other venues. In 2008, the JAC helped assemble the 20-piece Charleston Jazz Orchestra with Charlton Singleton as conductor. The JAC’s popular Upstairs at McCrady’s and Upstairs at Mistral series coincided with Piccolo Spoleto in recent years. The performances featured many of the finest local jazz musicians in town.

JAC president Leah Suárez issued a press statement on Thurs. Nov. 10:

“It is with a heavy heart and enormous amount of sorrow that we send this news to our JAC family. We have all lost one of the best people to inhabit our world, our jazz angel, Mr. Jack McCray. We wanted to let our JAC family know as soon as possible. Jack adored you all and was so grateful for the opportunity to share his life’s passion and work with each and every one of you. He found victory and unbelievable joy in our ever-growing jazz family. What a gift he was to all of us. Please keep his immediate and extended families and wide-reaching network of friends and colleagues in your thoughts and prayers. We will keep you all informed as we are able. Thank you for your prayers, love and support.”

By T. Ballard Lesemann (Charleston City Paper)

11 x 17 Signed Commemorative Posters by Colin Quashie

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Rivers is a master bebop player, somewhere around Charlie Parker and Sonny Stitt, with whom he played in Chicago in the 1970’s.  When Rivers returned to Charleston he gigged in many bands on keyboards before he and his late wife, Fabian Rivers, formed Rivers and Company. Rivers has taught for decades in Charleston County public schools. He founded, leads and accompanies the Morris Brown AME Church Gospel Choir.  His trademark on the alto is “April in Paris.” He performed with the Charleston Jazz Initiative Legends Band in 2010 and is featured on its first CD recording.

Photo Courtesy of Alice Keeney

Kenny was a band director for Charleston County schools for thirty-two years before retiring in 1991.  He taught at Laing High School, C. A. Brown High School, Burke High School, Courtney Middle School, and the Jenkins Orphanage. While at C.A. Brown High School, the school’s musical production of Hello Dolly (1970) was the first to sell every seat at Charleston’s Gaillard Auditorium for three performances.

Kenny has performed as bass violinist for the Ebony Fashion Fair for several years and with such musical greats as Lou Rawls, Teddy Pendergrass, and Dizzy Gillespie.  He has also performed for the Piccolo Spoleto Festival, MOJA Arts Festival, and with most of the jazz musicians in the Charleston area. Currently, Mr. Kenny plays with the Davis Archer Band at major hotels and island resorts, and is the director of the Melody Chimes Ensemble at Calvary Episcopal Church in Charleston.  He has been featured in two motion picture films — The Notebook and Consenting Adults.

CJI’s Jack McCray lists him in his 2007 book, Charleston Jazz.  He performed with CJI’s Legends Band in 2010 and is featured on its first CD recording.  Kenny prefers to be called a “Good Sideman” as his ensemble career has spanned over 50 years. 

Photo Courtesy of Jack Alterman

Caldwell has appeared in Porgy and Bess, Clay Rice’s musical production Lowcountry Legends, and has studied with the late June Bonner who performed with the Metropolitan Opera.  She is a master of accents, accurately recreating the tonalities of speech which are important to both jazz and blues.

Caldwell has a long list of performances as a jazz and blues singer.  She is a vocalist with the Charleston Symphony Orchestra Pops Concert, as well as a featured artist for the Lowcountry Aid to Africa annual galas in Charleston.  Other performances have included the Indigo Jazz Concert, Japanese National Anthem, Charleston Symphony Orchestra Gospel Choir, Charleston Jazz Orchestra of the Jazz Artists of Charleston, and wrote and performed a short story to a sold-out crowd at South of Broadway Theatre Company in North Charleston.

Caldwell performs regularly in Charleston with the Magnolia Singers at Praise House, The Jazz Factory, and with a combination of great jazz musicians at several of the finest restaurants in Charleston — Mercato and McCrady’s.  She performed with the Charleston Jazz Initiative Legends Band in 2010 and is a featured vocalist on their first CD recording.

Photo Courtesy of Tony Bell

Charlton would then go on between the age of 3 and 16 to study and/or take lessons on the piano, organ, trumpet, violin, and cello.  In the summer of the 1988, he was the principal trumpeter with the United States Collegiate Wind Band.  This ensemble was comprised of some of the best high school musicians in the United States.  The United States Collegiate Wind Band toured over 9 different countries in Europe playing in some of the best concert halls in the world.

In 1994, Charlton received a Bachelor of Arts in Music from South Carolina State University.  It was at SCSU that he would learn such important lessons in performance, songwriting, arranging, and teaching.  He would return to the Lowcountry and join 6 other musicians to form the band SKWZBXX (pronounced – “squeeze box”).  The band would play from 1995 to 1999, release three CDs to great Regional success, and tour the East Coast and Southeastern region of the United States.  It was also during this time that he would meet, befriend, and share the stage with such performers and members of bands including the O’Jays, Jerry Butler, Fred Wesley, and Hootie and the Blowfish, to name a few.

In 2000, he became a public school music teacher and band director.  He has worked at the elementary, middle, and high school levels as well as an adjunct jazz trumpet instructor at the College of Charleston.  With such a vast background, he is in demand as a lecturer, performer, clinician, and arranger for many school bands, professional artists, and their recording projects.

Currently, as a performer, Mr. Singleton leads three groups under his name:  The Charlton Singleton Trio, The Charlton Singleton Quintet, both of which perform traditional jazz music, the Charlton Singleton Band (contemporary jazz/r&b/funk) and he is the Artistic Director/Bandleader of the Charleston Jazz Orchestra (CJO) under the auspices of the Jazz Artists of Charleston.  Mr. Singleton is also the Organist/Choir Director for Our Lady of Mercy and St. Patrick Catholic Churches in Charleston.  Singleton was the bandleader/trumpeter for CJI’s Legends Band in 2010 and its first CD recording.

CJI’s first recording scheduled for release in December 2010 features music from the early 20^th century to 2010 that documents Charleston’s influence in the jazz performance traditions of many of this country’s big bandleaders, sidemen, and soloists. It will mark the first CD recording of tunes composed, arranged or performed by musicians of  Charleston and South Carolina’s rich jazz legacy!

In June 2010 during CJI’s Legends Festival, the CJI Legends Band, an eighteen-piece big band, performed and completed a live and studio recording.  The concert was recorded live at Sottile Theatre on June 5, and the next day, musicians completed a studio recording at Charleston Sound in Mount Pleasant, SC, the area’s premier recording studio.

A $40,000 Access to Artistic Excellence grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), has helped to fund the CD and is a significant national distinction for CJI’s efforts, Charleston’s flourishing jazz scene, and the city’s rich jazz legacy.  It marks the first time that the federal arts agency has awarded funds to promote, record, document and preserve the jazz performance and historic traditions of Charleston.

The recording is scheduled for release in December (watch this website for details).   A highlight of the CD are compositions, solos, and performances by several Legends Festival guests including NEA Jazz Masters Slide Hampton^TM and Jimmy Heath; Florence, SC native and tenor saxophonist Houston Person; drummer/percussionist Tootie Heath; John Williams, baritone saxophonist, 25-year veteran of the Count Basie Orchestra and Orangeburg, SC native; Joey Morant , trumpeter, touring musician and Charleston’s jazz ambassador; and Charleston jazz legends, Lonnie Hamilton III, George Kenny, Oscar Rivers Jr., Ann Caldwell, Quentin Baxter, and Charlton Singleton.

CD selections will include features by Slide Hampton and Jimmy Heath — Hampton’s world premiere, “Gullah Suite: A Tribute to Buddy Johnson & John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie,” a CJI-commissioned tune in three movements, and Jimmy Heath’s “Without You, No Me,” his tribute to Dizzy Gillespie.  Hampton’s premiere and Heath’s composition will be the first time compositions by these two NEA Jazz Masters have been performed and recorded live in Charleston with local and nationally-recognized musicians. 

Other featured new music will include “437 Race Street,” a big band composition by Joey Morant that highlights a familiar street on Charleston’s east side; “Brother Blake,” a 2005 CJI-commissioned work by Quentin Baxter that is a tribute to William Blake, Jenkins Orphanage Band director from 1920-1958; and “Step Lightly,” composed by Grammy award-winning producer, composer and former A & R head of Blue Note Records, Bob Belden, a former resident of Goose Creek, SC. 

Other CD selections will include jazz standards popularized by Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Erskine Hawkins, and Cab Calloway in which many Charleston/South Carolina musicians were featured as sidemen (Cat Anderson, Freddie Green. Jabbo Smith), and those that have been composed, arranged, and performed by South Carolinians’ Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Johnson (“Since I Fell for You”), Fud Livingston (“I’m Through With Love”), Julian Dash (“Tuxedo Junction”) and Freddie Green (“Corner Pocket”).

The musicians of the band are professional local and internationally-recognized instrumentalists, several featured soloists, musicians of the Franklin Street Five, a Jenkins Orphanage Tribute band debuted by CJI in 2005, and featured guests. Charlton Singleton, a CJI musician since 2003 and artistic director of the Charleston Jazz Orchestra (CJO) – Charleston’s new resident big band orchestra under the auspices of the Jazz Artists of Charleston (JAC), served as bandleader.