June Lawrence Cole (1903,
Springfield, Ohio
Springfield is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Clark County, Ohio, Clark County. The municipality is located in southwestern Ohio and is situated on the Mad River (Ohio), Mad River, Buck Creek, and Beaver Creek, approxim ...
– October 10, 1960,
New York City) was an American
jazz bassist, tubist, and singer.
Cole's first major employment in music was with the
Synco Jazz Band
Project Cybersyn was a Chilean project from 1971 to 1973 during the presidency of Salvador Allende aimed at constructing a distributed decision support system to aid in the management of the national economy. The project consisted of four modu ...
in Ohio; this group later became
McKinney's Cotton Pickers while Cole was still a member. He left the Cotton Pickers in 1926 to play under
Fletcher Henderson
James Fletcher Hamilton Henderson (December 18, 1897 – December 29, 1952) was an American pianist, bandleader, arranger and composer, important in the development of big band jazz and swing music. He was one of the most prolific black musi ...
, with whom he stayed until 1928. While with Henderson he played on recordings behind
Bessie Smith. In 1928 he toured
Europe with
Benny Peyton. He remained in Europe for over ten years, playing in the bands of
Sam Wooding and
Willie Lewis, but spent most of the years 1936-1939 out of music while recovering from a prolonged illness in
Paris. He returned to the United States in 1941, leading his own bands in New York and playing in a quartet with
Willie "The Lion" Smith in 1947. He continued playing locally in New York through the 1950s, and also ran a
record store
A record shop or record store is a retail outlet that sells recorded music. In the late 19th century and the early 20th century, record shops only sold gramophone records, but over the 20th century, record shops sold the new formats that were ...
in
Harlem.
References
*
June Coleat
Allmusic
*
Leonard Feather and
Ira Gitler, ''The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz''. Oxford, 1999, p. 138.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cole, June
1903 births
1960 deaths
American jazz tubists
American male jazz musicians
American jazz double-bassists
20th-century American musicians
Jazz musicians from Ohio
20th-century double-bassists
20th-century American male musicians