Chase - Ennea [8]

Title: Chase - Ennea
Year/Genre/Sub-Genre/City: 1972, Jazz Rock, Progressive Rock, Squantum, Massachusetts 10/26
Matrix #: KE 31097 (Epic, orange label, gatefold); runout not legible in photo
Condition: EX (LM) | Members: Bill C (34' - 74'), G.G. Shinn (N/A) | Producer: Frank Rand, Bob Destocki
Cultural Facts: [8]

1. A Name Nobody Could Say: Bill Chase was born William Edward Chiaiese in 1934 in Squantum, Massachusetts, and his parents changed the family name to Chase because people found Chiaiese too hard to pronounce. His father played trumpet in the Gillette Marching Band and encouraged him, and he tried violin and drums before settling on trumpet in his mid-teens. Before this band he played lead trumpet for Maynard Ferguson, Stan Kenton and Woody Herman, then spent the late '60s leading a lounge band at the Dunes and the Riviera in Las Vegas.
2. The Singer Heard Stephen Foster: Original vocalist Terry Richards was fired in November 1971 before this album was finished, and Louisiana trumpeter G.G. Shinn, once a singer with the Cajun swamp pop and blue-eyed soul band the Boogie Kings, took over. Listening to playbacks, Shinn noticed a track called "Closer to the Feeling" used the same chord changes as Stephen Foster's "Old Folks at Home," so it was renamed "Swanee River" and now opens the record. The band's attorney later said the sessions ran $120,000 over budget.
3. The Last Flight: Two years after Ennea, on August 9, 1974, Bill Chase was flying to a show at the Jackson County Fair in Minnesota when the chartered Piper Twin Comanche crashed in Jackson. He was 39. Keyboardist Wally Yohn, guitarist John Emma and drummer Walter Clark were also killed, ending work on what would have been the band's fourth album.