[Dixielandjazz] John Dankworth Obit

[Stephen G Barbone]

Another Giant has passed.



Sadly,

Steve barbone

www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband



This from JazzwiseMagazine.com in the UK.

Jazz - breaking news: Giant of British Jazz, Sir John Dankworth Dies  
at 82.

Sir John Dankworth, who died today aged 82, was one of the totemic  
figures of British jazz, the first major jazz musician and the first  
British bebopper to be knighted, a leading musician, who with his wife  
Dame Cleo Laine, became known to the broader public beyond the jazz  
world and to an international audience particularly in America.

Born in Essex in 1927, Dankworth grew up in Walthamstow in a family of  
musicians and began to play clarinet after gaining a liking for the  
music of Benny Goodman. He later took up saxophone and studied at the  
Royal Academy of Music before national service. A high flier soon on  
the jazz scene in the UK he became a favourite with readers of Melody  
Maker in the late-1940s and was voted musician of the year, touring  
further afield with Sidney Bechet and even played with Charlie Parker  
in Paris. His group the Dankworth Seven became a favourite on the  
local scene in the 1950s and later his big band extended the scope for  
his writing activities and ambitions and played at the Newport Jazz  
Festival in the States. Cleo Laine’s singing was a feature of his  
band’s performances and the pair married in 1958.

Dankworth began a parallel career as a film and TV composer and became  
known to a wider public for the music he wrote for The Avengers,  
Tomorrow’s World and Modesty Blaise. He made the charts with ‘African  
Waltz’ and became a frequent presence on radio and TV.

Aside from his musical career he developed a theatre, The Stables, in  
the garden of his home at Wavendon in Buckinghamshire which flourishes  
to this day and he became heavily involved in jazz education and as an  
ambassador for jazz. For his services to the music he was made a  
knight bachelor in the 2006 New Year’s Honours List.

- Stephen Graham