Fred Elizalde

Frederick "Fred" Elizalde ( born December 12, 1907 in Manila as Federico Elizalde, † January 16, 1979 ) was a Spanish- British jazz pianist, arranger, composer and bandleader. He is considered one of the pioneers of British jazz in the 1920s and worked with Adrian Rollini.

Life and work

As a child, prosperous Spanish parents, Fred Elizalde was born in the Philippines but grew up in the United States. As a young man he moved to Cambridge, where he studied with his brother Manuel in 1927 he founded his first own band, which consisted of Cambridge students who Quinquaginta Ramblers. In the same year Elizalde was invited to put together an orchestra that would play in the ballroom of the Savoy Hotel. He telegraphed to New York and engaged Adrian Rollini and other U.S. musicians like alto saxophonist Bobby Davis and trumpeter Chelsea Quealey. The performances of the Savoy Orpheans, later Fred Elizalde and his Anglo - American Band were also broadcast on the BBC radio stations; their " Hot Music " aroused the indignation of many listeners. Among the young musicians in the British jazz scene, the band made ​​with Rollini that existed from 1928 to 1929, but for attention; Elizalde's musical views to jazz -influenced Edgar Jackson, the initiator of the music magazine Melody Maker. The New York style of the American-British band Rollini and Elizalde coined over the years until the 1940s the development of jazz in England; the New Orleans Jazz and the Chicago style had until 1940 no or little influence on the British jazz scene.

After his departure from the Savoy Orpheans 1930 Elizalde remained for a while in England and took on some records. The mid-1930s he studied in Spain with Manuel de Falla and then worked as a composer and orchestra leader in the field of classical music. During this time he took back to his birth name Federico Elizalde. Consistently he held from 1935-37 in Spain, where he fought in 1936 on the side of Franco in the Spanish Civil War and was wounded in 1937. Elizalde left Spain and lived until the late 1930s in the Philippines. During the Second World War he lived in Paris and composed, amongst others, a violin concerto. In 1946, he moved for a while to Santa Monica in California. Elizalde later ran a radio station in Manila.