Merle Koch

Arriving at jazz only after he previously already been carrying out professionally for a lot more than 2 decades, Merle Koch shows great technique and a stylistic array that might be well known by any jazzman. The mainstream jazz and Dixieland stylings of clarinetist Pete Fountain had been where Koch garnered his swinging qualifications in the past due ’50s; the next name of his personal Merle Koch’s Polite Jazz Quartet suggests even more of a circulation in the Fountain design. Koch in addition has turned up water pressure on documented tributes to jazz piano greats such as for example Jelly Move Morton and Duke Ellington. A Nebraska indigenous, Koch like a teenage musician experienced dance bands, offering entertainment for just one of the primary popular activities from the prairies. He do quite well with this field, moving out to Hollywood whereby the past due ’30s he was dealing with his very own small combo. This whole period of his profession does not appear to have been noted on recording, an activity that began after the pianist threw his musical cash in to the Fountain, as they say. Available models with Fountain’s organizations consist of an early-’80s live display At Piper’s Opera Home, reissued on Compact disc in the next decade and in addition offering tenor saxophonist Eddie Miller, trumpeter John Thomas, trombonist Bob Havens, and Bunky Jones on bass. And a few recordings released under Koch’s personal name, he also collaborated on tasks with Fountain’s sidemen including Miller and Jones.