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| Benny Golson, 95, saxophonist and compos |
| 23 Sep 24 20:19:26 |
From: countymayo@yahoo.com https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/23/arts/music/benny-golson-dead.html Benny Golson, Saxophonist and Composer of Jazz Standards, Dies at 95 After forming a lauded band and writing tunes like “I Remember Clifford,” “Whisper Not” and “Killer Joe,” he had a second career composing and arranging music for television. By Leonard Benardo Sept. 23, 2024 Updated 2:27 p.m. ET Benny Golson, a tenor saxophonist and composer who played with some of the biggest names in jazz and was a founder of one of the leading groups of the hard bop era, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 95. Jason Franklin, his agent for more than 25 years, confirmed the death. Mr. Golson was a rarity in jazz: a highly accomplished musician who was also sought after as a composer. Indeed, he later had a flourishing second career writing and arranging music for television shows. A number of his compositions are regarded as jazz standards, among them “I Remember Clifford” (written in memory of the trumpeter Clifford Brown, shortly after he died in a car accident in 1956), “Whisper Not,” “Blues March” and “Killer Joe.” Quincy Jones recorded a memorable version of “Killer Joe” in 1969, and Miles Davis recorded Stablemates,” which Mr. Golson wrote after John Coltrane, a close friend, told him that Mr. Davis had been looking for new material. Mr. Golson wrote or co-wrote four of the six tracks on “Moanin’,” a celebrated 1958 album by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. All five of the tunes on the trumpeter Lee Morgan’s 1957 album “Lee Morgan, Vol. 3” were written by Mr. Golson. Asked whether he preferred composing or playing, Mr. Golson once replied: “It’s like having two wives. I’m a musical bigamist. I can’t decide, so I just go on with both of them.” As a player, Mr. Golson had a big tone and a style with roots in the sound of Coleman Hawkins and other saxophonists who predated the bebop era. During his time with the Jazz Messengers, and later as the co-leader of the Jazztet, he became closely associated with the driving style known as hard bop, and his tone hardened. A traditionalist at heart, Mr. Golson was known to dismiss the avant-garde and musicians who, in his view, valued pyrotechnics over style. “There’s a sameness about them,” he once said, referring to the pyrotechnicians. “In times gone by, if you heard Ben Webster or Don Byas or Dexter Gordon,” he said, it took only a few bars and “you knew who it was right away.” Bennie (he would later change the spelling to Benny) Golson was born on Jan. 25, 1929, in Philadelphia. His father, also named Bennie, worked for the National Biscuit Company; his mother, Celedia, was a seamstress in a factory. Bennie grew up in a musically inclined middle-class household. He started playing the family’s upright piano at 9 but switched to saxophone at 14 after watching an arresting performance by the wild Texan tenor player Arnett Cobb with Lionel Hampton’s big band at the Earle Theater in Philadelphia. As a teenager, Bennie played with local musicians who would soon be jazz luminaries, among them Mr. Coltrane, the drummer Philly Joe Jones and the Heath Brothers. This explosion of talent would make Philadelphia a jazz capital. Mr. Golson attended Howard University in Washington, where he played in the jazz and marching bands, but he left before graduating to become a full-time musician. He cut his teeth as both a saxophonist and an arranger with the Hampton ensemble and the bands of Earl Bostic, Tadd Dameron and Dizzy Gillespie. “I wanted to do more than play the tenor sax,” he would later say. I wanted to write.” In 1958, the same year he joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, he married Bobbie Hurd, who survives him, along with his daughter, Brielle Golson, and several grandchildren. Three sons — Odis, Reggie and Robert — died earlier. Mr. Golson formed his best-known group, the six-member Jazztet, with the trumpet and fluegelhorn player Art Farmer in 1959. The group helped launch the careers of several younger musicians, including the pianist McCoy Tyner and the trombonists Grachan Moncur III and Curtis Fuller. Critics praised the Jazztet, but its New York debut, at the Five Spot that year, was less than auspicious. They shared the bill with the radically innovative alto saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman, who was also making his New York debut — and who stole their thunder. The Jazztet, Mr. Farmer later said, “just didn’t seem to be as adventurous, stepping out into the unknown like what Ornette was doing. Ornette got more notice than we did. I don’t think we ever recovered from that.” The Jazztet broke up in 1962. By the mid-1960s, the jazz audience was shrinking, and the rise of the avant-garde (and, a little later, fusion) left Mr. Golson feeling increasingly out of step. Following the example of his friend Quincy Jones, the arranger and producer, he decamped to Los Angeles, where for the next decade he wrote and arranged music for television and film. His work was heard on several popular television shows of that era, including “M*A*S*H,” “Mission: Impossible,” “The Mod Squad” and “The Partridge Family.” He also wrote the music for the 1969 movie “Where It’s At,” a comedy written and directed by Garson Kanin. After he returned to New York (“I wanted to establish myself as a player once more,” he said), Mr. Golson reunited with Mr. Farmer to re-form the Jazztet in 1982. The group released another six albums and toured the world in the 1980s, to considerable success. Mr. Golson continued to tour into his 90s and racked up awards and recognition along the way. He was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 1996; that same year, the Benny Golson Jazz Master Award was established at Howard University. The power of his distinctive, elliptical saxophone sound had diminished somewhat, but his lyricism remained. So did his wit, as reflected in his banter on the bandstand, which carried on the tradition of Dizzy Gillespie. Mr. Golson was one of the last two survivors (the other is his fellow tenor player Sonny Rollins) of the famous photograph of 57 jazz musicians taken in 1958 by Art Kane for Esquire magazine at East 126th Street. The photo was later the subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary “A Great Day in Harlem,” and it would later figure in an unexpected chapter of Mr. Golson’s life. In Steven Spielberg’s 2004 movie, “The Terminal,” Tom Hanks plays a man from Eastern Europe who was on his way to New York to find Mr. Golson, [continued in next message] --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2) |
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