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Thelonious Monk, the great American jazz artist, during the first half of his junior year at Stuyvesant High School in New York, showed up in class only 16 out of 92 days and received zeros in every one of his subjects. His mother, Barbara Monk, would not have been pleased. She had brought her three children to New York from North Carolina, effectively leaving behind her husband, who suffered bad health, and raising the family on her own, in order that they might receive a proper education. But Mrs. Monk, like a succession of canny, tough-minded, loving and very indulgent women in Thelonious Monk’s life, understood that her middle child had a large gift and was put on this earth to play piano. Presently, her son was off on a two-year musical tour of the United States, playing a kind of sanctified R & B piano in the employ, with the rest of his small band, of a traveling woman evangelist.

The brilliant pianist Mary Lou Williams, seven years Monk’s senior and working at the time for Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy orchestra, heard Monk play at a late-night jam session in Kansas City in 1935. Monk, born in 1917, would have been 18 or so at the time. When not playing to the faithful, he sought out the musical action in centers like Kansas City. Williams would later claim that even as a teenager, Monk “really used to blow on piano. . . . He was one of the original modernists all right, playing pretty much the same harmonies then that he’s playing now.”

It was those harmonies — with their radical, often dissonant chord voicings, along with the complex rhythms, “misplaced” accents, startling shifts in dynamics, hesitations and silences — that, even in embryonic form, Williams was hearing for the first time. It’s an angular, splintered sound, percussive in attack and asymmetrical, music that always manages to swing hard and respect the melody. Monk was big on melody. Thelonious Monk’s body of work, as composer and player (the jazz critic Whitney Balliett called Monk’s compositions “frozen . . . improvisations” and his improvisations “molten . . . compositions”), sits as comfortably beside Bartok’s Hungarian folk-influenced compositions for solo piano as it does beside the music of jazz giants like James P. Johnson, Teddy Wilson and Duke Ellington, some of the more obvious influences on Monk. It’s unclear how much of Bartok he listened to. Monk did know well and play Rachmaninoff, Liszt and Chopin (especially Chopin). Stravinsky was also a favorite.

Robin D. G. Kelley, in his extraordinary and heroically detailed new biography, “Thelonious Monk,” makes a large point time and time again that Monk was no primitive, as so many have characterized him. At the age of 11, he was taught by Simon Wolf, an Austrian émigré who had studied under the concertmaster for the New York Philharmonic. Wolf told the parent of another student, after not too many sessions with young Thelonious: “I don’t think there will be anything I can teach him. He will go beyond me very soon.” But the direction the boy would go in, after two years of classical lessons, was jazz.

Monk was well enough known and appreciated in his lifetime to have appeared on the cover of the Feb. 28, 1964, issue of Time magazine. He was 46 at the time, and after many years of neglect and scuffling had become one of the principal faces and sounds of contemporary jazz. The Time article, by Barry Farrell, is, given the vintage and target audience, well done, both positive and fair, and accurate in the main. But it does make much of its subject’s eccentricities, and refers to Monk’s considerable and erratic drug and alcohol use. This last would have raised eyebrows in the white middle-class America of that era.

Throughout the book, Kelley plays down Monk’s “weirdness,” or at least contextualizes it. But Monk did little to discourage the popular view of him as odd. Always a sharp dresser and stickler for just the right look, he also favored a wide array of unconventional headgear: astrakhan, Japanese skullcap, Stetson, tam-o’-shanter. He had a trickster sense of humor, in life and in music, and he loved keeping people off-balance in both realms. Off-balance was the plane on which Monk existed. He also liked to dance during group performances, but this served very real functions: first, as a method of conducting, communicating musical instructions to the band members; and second, to let them know that he dug their playing when they were in a groove and swinging.

Even early in his career, Monk often insisted on showing up late to gigs, driving bandleaders, club owners and audiences to distraction. And on occasion he would simply fall asleep at the piano. He would also disappear to his room in the family apartment for two weeks at a time. When he was young, these behaviors or idiosyncrasies were tolerated and, more or less, manageable. But the manic, erratic behavior turned out to be the precursor of a more serious bipolar illness that would over time become immobilizing. From his father, Thelonious Sr., who was gone from the scene by the time Monk was 11, Thelonious Jr. seems to have gotten his musical gene (there always seems to be one in there). But he also inherited his father’s illness. Monk Sr. was committed to the State Hospital for the Colored Insane in Goldsboro, N.C., at the age of 52, in 1941. He never left.

Kelley, the author of “Race Rebels” and other books, makes use of the “carpet bombing” method in this biography. It is not pretty, or terribly selective, but it is thorough and hugely effective. He knows music, especially Monk’s music, and his descriptions of assorted studio and live dates, along with what Monk is up to musically throughout, are handled expertly. The familiar episodes of Monk’s career are all well covered: the years as house pianist at Minton’s after-hours club in Harlem, which served as an incubator for the new “modern music,” later to be called bebop; the brilliant “Genius of Modern Music” sessions for Blue Note, Monk’s first recordings with him as the bandleader; the drug bust, where Monk took the rap for Bud Powell and lost his New York cabaret license for six years; his triumphant return in 1957 with his quartet, featuring John Coltrane, at the Five Spot; the terrible beating Monk took for resisting arrest in New Castle, Del.; the final dissolution and breakdown. Likewise, the characters in Monk’s life and career are well served: his fellow musicians; his family; his friend and benefactor, the fascinating Pannonica (Nica) de Koenigswarter, the “jazz baroness,” at whose home in Weehawken, N.J., Monk spent his final years. He would die, after a long silence, in 1982, in the arms of his wife, Nellie.

Musicians — particularly jazz musicians of Monk’s period, and most especially Monk, taciturn and gnomic in utterance by nature — tend not, as writers do, to write hundreds of letters sharing with intimates what is going on in their hearts or heads. A biography of Monk, perforce, has to rely on the not always reliable, often conflicting, memories of others. Instinct is involved, surely as much as perspicacity, in sifting through the mass of observation and anecdote. The Monk family appears to have shared private material with Kelley that had hitherto been unavailable. This trust was not misplaced. There will be shapelier and more elegantly written biographies to come — Monk, the man and the music, is an endlessly fascinating subject — but I doubt there will be a biography anytime soon that is as textured, thorough and knowing as Kelley’s. The “genius of modern music” has gotten the passionate, and compassionate, advocate he deserves. h

August Kleinzahler’s most recent book

is “Music: I-LXXIV,” a collection of essays.

Monk’s Moods,
NYT,
16.10.2009,
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/
books/review/Kleinzahler-t.html

Freddie Hubbard,

Jazz Trumpeter,

Dies at 70

December 30, 2008

The New York Times

By PETER KEEPNEWS

Freddie Hubbard, a jazz trumpeter who dazzled audiences and critics alike with his virtuosity, his melodicism and his infectious energy, died on Monday in Sherman Oaks, Calif. He was 70 and lived in Sherman Oaks.

The cause was complications of a heart attack he had on Nov. 26, said his spokesman, Don Lucoff of DL Media.

Over a career that began in the late 1950s, Mr. Hubbard earned both critical praise and commercial success — although rarely for the same projects.

He attracted attention in the 1960s for his bravura work as a member of the Jazz Messengers, the valuable training ground for young musicians led by the veteran drummer Art Blakey, and on albums by Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and many others. He also recorded several well-regarded albums as a leader. And although he was not an avant-gardist by temperament, he participated in three of the seminal recordings of the 1960s jazz avant-garde: Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz” (1960), Eric Dolphy’s “Out to Lunch” (1964) and John Coltrane’s “Ascension” (1965).

In the 1970s Mr. Hubbard, like many other jazz musicians of his generation, began courting a larger audience, with albums that featured electric instruments, rock and funk rhythms, string arrangements and repertory sprinkled with pop and R&B songs like Paul McCartney’s “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” and the Stylistics’ “Betcha by Golly, Wow.” His audience did indeed grow, but his standing in the jazz world diminished.

By the start of the next decade he had largely abandoned his more commercial approach and returned to his jazz roots. But his career came to a virtual halt in 1992 when he damaged his lip, and although he resumed performing and recording after an extended hiatus, he was never again as powerful a player as he had been in his prime.

Frederick Dewayne Hubbard was born on April 7, 1938, in Indianapolis. His first instrument was the alto-brass mellophone, and in high school he studied French horn and tuba as well as trumpet. After taking lessons with Max Woodbury, the first trumpeter of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, at the Arthur Jordan Conservatory of Music, he performed locally with, among others, the guitarist Wes Montgomery and his brothers.

Mr. Hubbard moved to New York in 1958 and almost immediately began working with groups led by the saxophonist Sonny Rollins, the drummer Philly Joe Jones and others. His profile rose in 1960 when he joined the roster of Blue Note, a leading jazz label; it rose further the next year when he was hired by Blakey, widely regarded as the music’s premier talent scout.

Adding his own spin to a style informed by Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Clifford Brown, Mr. Hubbard played trumpet with an unusual mix of melodic inventiveness and technical razzle-dazzle. The critics took notice. Leonard Feather called him “one of the most skilled, original and forceful trumpeters of the ’60s.”

After leaving Blakey’s band in 1964, Mr. Hubbard worked for a while with another drummer-bandleader, Max Roach, before forming his own group in 1966. Four years later he began recording for CTI, a record company that would soon become known for its aggressive efforts to market jazz musicians beyond the confines of the jazz audience.

His first albums for the label, notably “Red Clay,” contained some of the best playing of his career and, except for slicker production and the presence of some electric instruments, were not significantly different from his work for Blue Note. But his later albums on CTI, and the ones he made after leaving the label for Columbia in 1974, put less and less emphasis on improvisation and relied more and more on glossy arrangements and pop appeal. They sold well, for the most part, but were attacked, or in some cases simply ignored, by jazz critics. Within a few years Mr. Hubbard was expressing regrets about his career path.

Most of his recordings as a leader from the early 1980s on, for Pablo, Musicmasters and other labels, were small-group sessions emphasizing his gifts as an improviser that helped restore his critical reputation. But in 1992 he suffered a setback from which he never fully recovered.

By Mr. Hubbard’s own account, he seriously injured his upper lip that year by playing too hard, without warming up, once too often. The lip became infected, and for the rest of his life it was a struggle for him to play with his trademark strength and fire. As Howard Mandel explained in a 2008 Down Beat article, “His ability to project and hold a clear tone was damaged, so his fast finger flurries often result in blurts and blurs rather than explosive phrases.”

Mr. Hubbard nonetheless continued to perform and record sporadically, primarily on fluegelhorn rather than on the more demanding trumpet. In his last years he worked mostly with the trumpeter David Weiss, who featured Mr. Hubbard as a guest artist with his group, the New Jazz Composers Octet, on albums released under Mr. Hubbard’s name in 2001 and 2008, and at occasional nightclub engagements.

Mr. Hubbard won a Grammy Award for the album “First Light” in 1972 and was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2006.

He is survived by his wife of 35 years, Briggie Hubbard, and his son, Duane.

Mr. Hubbard was once known as the brashest of jazzmen, but his personality as well as his music mellowed in the wake of his lip problems. In a 1995 interview with Fred Shuster of Down Beat, he offered some sober advice to younger musicians: “Don’t make the mistake I made of not taking care of myself. Please, keep your chops cool and don’t overblow.”

Freddie Hubbard, Jazz Trumpeter, Dies at 70,
NYT,
29.12.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/
arts/music/30hubbard.html

Saxophonist Johnny Griffin Dies at 80

July 26, 2008

The New York Times

By BEN RATLIFF

Johnny Griffin, a jazz tenor-saxophonist from Chicago whose speed, control, and harmonic acuity made him one of the most talented musicians of his generation, and who abandoned his hopes for an American career when he moved to Europe in 1963, died Friday at his home in Availles-Limouzine, a village in France. He was 80 and had lived in Availles-Limouzine for 24 years.

His death was announced to Agence France-Presse by his wife, Miriam, who did not give a cause. He played his last concert Monday in Hyères.

His height — around five feet five — earned him the nickname “The Little Giant”; his speed in bebop improvising marked him as “The Fastest Gun in the West”; a group he led with Eddie Lockjaw Davis was informally called the “tough tenor” band, a designation that was eventually applied to a whole school of hard bop tenor players.

And in general, Mr. Griffin suffered from categorization. In the early 1960s, he became embittered by the acceptance of free jazz; he stayed true to his identity as a bebopper. When he felt the American jazz marketplace had no use for him (at a time he was also having marital and tax troubles) , he left for Holland.

At that point America lost one of its best musicians, even if his style fell out of sync with the times.

“It’s not like I’m looking to prove anything any more,” he said in a 1993 interview. “At this age, what can I prove? I’m concentrating more on the beauty in the music, the humanity.”

Indeed his work in the 1990s, with an American quartet that stayed constant whenever he revisited his home country to perform or record, had a new sound, mellower and sweeter than in his younger days.

Mr. Griffin grew up on the South Side of Chicago and attended DuSable High School, where he was taught by the high school band instructor Capt. Walter Dyett, who also taught the singers Nat (King) Cole and Dinah Washington and the saxophonists Gene Ammons and Von Freeman.

Mr. Griffin’s career started in a hurry: At the age of 12, attending his grammar school graduation dance at the Parkway ballroom, he saw Ammons play in King Kolax’s big band and decided what his instrument would be. By 14, he was playing alto saxophone in a variety of situations, including a group called the Baby Band with schoolmates, and occasionally with the guitarist T-Bone Walker.

At 18, three days after his high school graduation, Mr. Griffin left Chicago to join Lionel Hampton’s big band, switching to tenor saxophone. From then until 1951, he was mostly on the road, though based in New York City. By 1947 he was touring with Joe Morris, a fellow Chicagoan who ran a rhythm-and-blues band, and with Morris he made his first recordings for the Atlantic record label. He entered the army in 1951, was stationed in Hawaii, and played in an army band.

Mr. Griffin was of an impressionable age when Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie became a force in jazz. He heard both with the Billy Eckstine band in 1945; having first internalized the more ballad-like saxophone sound earlier popularized by Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster, he was now entranced by the lightning-fast phrasing of the new music, bebop. In general, his style remained brisk but relaxed, his bebop playing salted with blues tonality.

Beyond the 1960s, his skill and his musical eccentricity continued to deepen, and in later years he could play odd, asymmetrical phrases, bulging with blues honking and then tapering off into state-of-the-art bebop, filled with passing chords.

Starting in the late 1940s, he befriended the pianists Elmo Hope, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, and he called these friendships his “postgraduate education.” After his army service, he went back to Chicago and started playing with Monk, a move that altered his career. He became interested in Monk’s brightly melodic style of composition, and he ended up as a regular member of Monk’s quartet back in New York in the late ‘50s; later, in 1967, he played with Monk’s touring eight- and nine-person groups.

In 1957, Mr. Griffin joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers for a short stint, and in 1958 started making his own records for the Riverside label. On a series of recordings, including “Way Out” and “The Little Giant,” his rampaging energy got its moment in the sun: on tunes like “Cherokee,” famous vehicles to test a musician’s mettle, he was simply blazing.

A few years later he hooked up with Eddie Lockjaw Davis, a more blues-oriented tenor saxophonist, and made a series of records that act as barometers of taste: listeners tend to either find them thrilling or filled with too many notes, especially on Monk tunes. The matchup with Davis was a popular one, and they would sporadically reunite through the ‘70s and ‘80s.

In 1963 he left the United States, eventually settling in Paris and recording thereafter mostly for European labels — sometimes with other American expatriates like Kenny Clarke, sometimes with European rhythm sections. In 1973 he moved to Bergambacht, in the Netherlands; in the early 80s he moved to Poitiers, in southwestern France.

With his American quartet — including the pianist Michael Weiss and the drummer Kenny Washington — he stayed true to the bebop small-group ideal, and the 1991 record he made with the group for the Antilles label, called “The Cat,” was received warmly as a comeback.

Every April he returned to Chicago to visit family and play during his birthday week at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago, and usually spent a week at the Village Vanguard in New York before returning home to his quiet countryside chateau.

Saxophonist Johnny Griffin Dies at 80,
NYT,
26.7.2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/26/
arts/music/26griffin.html

Max Roach Is Remembered

for Music and More

August 25, 2007

The New York Times

By PETER KEEPNEWS

Max Roach was remembered at his funeral not just as a brilliant drummer who helped bring about radical changes in American music, but also as a committed activist who worked hard to bring about radical changes in American society.

Mr. Roach “used his music as an instrument of our struggle,” the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III of Abyssinian Baptist Church said in eulogizing Mr. Roach, who died on Aug. 16 at the age of 83. Mr. Roach’s funeral, held yesterday morning at Riverside Church in Morningside Heights, drew a capacity crowd of friends, admirers and fellow musicians.

Former President Bill Clinton, in a statement read by Representative Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York, praised Mr. Roach as “one of the first jazz musicians to align his craft with the goals of the civil rights movement.”

But Mr. Roach’s musical contributions were not neglected. The writer Amiri Baraka, while noting that the music Mr. Roach and the singer Abbey Lincoln made in the 1960s was “part of the liberation movement,” also read a poem that included a long list of musicians who owed Mr. Roach an artistic debt. Bill Cosby said that he owed Mr. Roach a different kind of debt — and that Mr. Roach had owed him one, too.

“Why I became a comedian is because of Max Roach,” he said. “I wanted to be a drummer.”

As a young jazz fan in Philadelphia, Mr. Cosby explained, he tried to teach himself to play drums by copying records and watching the great jazz drummers in action. But when he first saw Mr. Roach, he said, he was awed by his virtuosity and realized that “there were no tricks, nothing I could take.”

Shortly thereafter, Mr. Cosby told the crowd, he decided that the rudimentary drum kit for which he had paid $75 was not for him. And, he added, when he finally met Mr. Roach some years later, the first thing he said to him was, “You owe me $75.”

As befits a memorial for a man recognized as one of the architects of modern jazz, music played an important part in the service. The vocalist Cassandra Wilson, the pianists Randy Weston and Billy Taylor, and the saxophonist Jimmy Heath were among those who performed.

Mr. Heath performed an unaccompanied improvisation on a song whose title encapsulated what many of the speakers said about Mr. Roach: “There Will Never Be Another You.”

Max Roach Is Remembered for Music and More,
NYT,
25.8.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/25/arts/music/25roach.html

Obituary

Max Roach

One of the great bebop drummers,
he went on to help define modern jazz

Saturday August 18, 2007
Guardian
Ronald Atkins

It says much for Charlie Parker's ability to spot talent that two young sidemen from his most famous quintet, Miles Davis (obituary September 30, 1991) and Max Roach, left him far behind. Roach, who has died aged 83, was rated among the greatest of pioneering drummers and later shone as an innovative composer and bandleader.

Parker brought an unprecedented rhythmic intensity to jazz, packing his solos with phrases that used the gap between beats as a springboard. The underlying pulse had quickened during the swing decade from two beats to four. Parker and other bebop masters stretched it to eight in a bar. It followed that a swing-style background guitar strumming would impede the soloists. So, strummers were outlawed, which left more flexible, less intrusive bassists to combine metric and harmonic roles.

Roach, barely 20 when he recorded Koko with Parker, reinvented the role of the drums to exploit these changes. He had the imagination and the quickfire hands, not merely to tap eight beats evenly on his top cymbal at speed but to elaborate them or vary the tones. Bebop's doubling the number of beats created space that encouraged the drummer to overlap between bars, and Roach did so with an endless array of fill-ins and paradiddles. Inventiveness and technical dexterity were equally balanced in his solos, which he built with impeccable logic.

Born in New Land, North Carolina, Roach was four when his family moved to New York. His aunt was pianist in the local baptist church, where the young Max sang. When he was eight, he began studying piano, when he was 12, his father bought him a drum kit. He taught himself music and had a succession of gigs while still at the boy's high school in Brooklyn. At 16 he briefly played with Duke Ellington's orchestra. Later he studied theory and composition at the Manhattan School of Music.

Roach's recording debut was with Coleman Hawkins in 1943 and he toured with Benny Carter's big band. By 1945, firmly into bebop mode, he worked with Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, appearing on all the Parker classics, from Koko to Billie's Bounce and Parker's Mood. In 1949-50 he featured on Davis's Birth of the Cool sessions.

In the early 1950s Roach gravitated to Los Angeles, working with west coast musicians and appearing in the film Carmen Jones (1954). In the same year, offered the chance to form a group, he recruited the superlative trumpeter Clifford Brown into what became known as the Roach-Brown quintet. Brown's saxophone partners were successively Teddy Edwards, Harold Land and Sonny Rollins. Kenny Dorham joined after Brown was killed in a car crash. Brown's death sent Roach into a profound, alcohol-fuelled depression, for which he received psychiatric help. He also defeated a heroin habit.

Parker died in 1955, and modern jazz, via groups led by Davis, Art Blakey, Horace Silver and others ironed out bebop's jagged edges. The first Roach quintets fitted this pattern, though even then, the leader's tendency to pick very fast tempos added an abrasiveness that became more marked when, after Rollins and then Dorham left, he brought in younger men. Replacing the piano with tuba or trombone pushed the drums further towards the front line.

After 1955, a radical tide inspired black Americans to focus on African culture. Increasingly writing the material for his groups, Roach's contributions intensified through an association with singer Abbey Lincoln - they later married - and Lincoln introduced him to lyricist Oscar Brown Jr (obituary June 1, 2005). The three collaborated on the Freedom Now Suite (1960). Roach broke entirely fresh ground with the album, It's Time, composing the music for a 16-piece choir and a jazz sextet, followed by the equally gripping Lift Every Voice And Sing, made up of his arrangements of spirituals.

Among musicians who identified with black consciousness, Roach was most frequently involved in direct action. Together with Charles Mingus - with whom he had set up the shortlived Debut label in 1952 - he organised the Newport Rebels concert, featuring musicians allegedly ignored by the main Newport festival. Roach even interrupted a Miles Davis Carnegie Hall charity performance because he disapproved of the beneficiary. The Village Vanguard club's owner once pleaded with him to just play music and stop lecturing the audience.

In the 1980s, he set Martin Luther King Jr's I Have A Dream speech to a drum accompaniment. His British appearances included a 1986 concert during Africa Week. Its organisers, the then Greater London Council, named a Brixton park after him.

Many young musicians he employed carved out their own niches. Among them were trumpeter Booker Little and saxophonists Stanley Turrentine and George Coleman. Little's partnership with the reedsman Eric Dolphy, a double-act that thrived on extremes of emotional contrast, works to perfection on Tender Warriors, from another classic Roach album, Percussion Bitter Suite. Their successors, trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater and saxophonist Odean Pope, appeared in a number of Roach's groups during a period of 20 years.

By then, jazz musicians were in demand for academic posts and in 1972, Roach had begun a long association with the University of Massachusetts where he joined the department of music and dance. His awards included an honorary doctorate in music from the New England Conservatory. In 1988, he became the first jazz musician to be given a MacArthur fellowship, reserved for those making major contributions to American culture and science.

Roach outgrew the conventions of bebop to the extent that younger innovators such as Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor played duets with him. He played his last concert with Taylor at Colombia University in 2000. Never interested in retracing his career, he continued to break fresh ground well into his 70s. He was among the first jazz stars to claim rappers followed a black tradition by making music without expensive instruments. In 1983 he shared the stage with a team of breakdancers, a rapper and two DJs. He won an Obie for his music for three Sam Shepard plays in 1984. He performed with symphony orchestras, classical string quartets - in one of which his daughter Maxine played cello - as well as with Japanese drummers and Chinese free improvisers, and composed music for Alvin Ailey dance pieces. Perhaps the most telling long-term outcome of his interest in Africa was the splendidly named M'Boom, first set up in the early 1970s, an African-related percussion ensemble including marimba and xylophone that incorporated jazz ideas. His last recording was with Clark Terry in 2002.

Roach's three marriages ended in divorce. His survivors include a son and daughter from his first marriage, a son from another relationship and twin daughters from his third marriage.

· Maxwell Lemuel Roach, musician,

born January 10 1924; died August 16 2007

Max Roach,
G,
18.8.2007,
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2007/aug/18/
guardianobituaries.obituaries

From The Times Archives

On This Day - June 14, 1986

Benny Goodman was at one time
the best-known musician in the US,
and was the first to play jazz
in Carnegie Hall, New York

BENNY GOODMAN, one of the world’s greatest jazz clarinettists and the first man to bring together blacks and whites in one band, died from a heart attack at his Manhattan home yesterday. He was 77.

His body was found in his East Side apartment yesterday afternoon, said Mr Lloyd Rausch, his personal assistant.

The “King of Swing”, who dominated jazz for 50 years, was raised in Chicago and started playing in a synagogue when he was 13. He went on to become the first person to play jazz in New York’s Carnegie Hall.

He had recently emerged from semi-retirement, and finding his sound and techniques were still good, formed a new band last year and began accepting engagements.

He brought blacks into his band in the 1930s, using the piano of Teddy Wilson and the vibes of Lionel Hampton.

“He was really a great man, a godsend to the world,” Mr Wilson said yesterday. “We’ve lost another giant,” said big band leader Ray Anthony.

A blunt, grumpy man who was not afraid to call rock‘n’roll “amplified junk”, he made numerous recordings and was known throughout the world.

Ronnie Scott paid tribute to Goodman last night. “You cannot overestimate his talent, he was one of the greats.

“He was known as a hard man to work with and was famous for the glare he would give people when they did something he did not like.

“As a musician he was hard to fault and to me was the greatest jazz clarinet player of all time,” he said.