The death of Lionel Hampton,
one of
the last of the jazz giants, brought
tributes from key jazz figures among the
many who owed him their careers.
"He taught me how to groove and how to
laugh and how to hang and how to live
like a man," said Quincy Jones, the
Grammy-winning producer and composer, who
was 15 when he first played trumpet with
the jazz great's big band. "Heaven will
definitely be feeling some backbeat now,"
Jones said.
In failing health for several years after
a series of strokes, the innovative
vibraphonist and bandleader was 94 when
he died Aug. 31, 2002, in New York City.
The cause was complications of old age
and a recent heart attack, his manager,
Phil Leshin, said.
"He was really a towering jazz figure,"
said saxophonist Sonny Rollins, who
played with Hampton in the 1950s. "He
really personified the spirit of jazz
because he had so much joy about his
playing."
Among other leading names in jazz who
were schooled by "the vibes president of
the United States" were Cat Anderson,
Milt Buckner, Terence Blanchard, Clifford
Brown, Arnett Cobb, Betty Carter, Dexter
Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Illinois Jacquet,
Charles Mingus, Wes Montgomery and Dinah
Washington.
The backbeat was the thing that got the
teenage Hampton noticed when he started
playing drums with Les Hite's band at
Frank Sebastian's Cotton Club, the
mob-linked nitery across from MGM in
Culver City. A native of Louisville, Ky.
He was raised in Chicago by his
grandparents and his uncle, an affluent
bootlegger who was Bessie Smith's
boyfriend. They sent him to Los Angeles
to study music at the University of Southern California.
"I
had a different style
on drums. I was
already playing with a heavy afterbeat,
getting that rock and roll beat that
wouldn't even get popular until the
1950s. I wanted people to dance, to have
a good time and clap their hands, and
they would do it to my drumming," Hampton
wrote in his 1989 autobiography, "Hamp."
The Hite band backed Louis Armstrong when
he worked the club in 1930, and Hampton
was playing drums at a recording session
for the King of Swing when Armstrong
noticed a set of vibes in the corner of
the studio. "Louis said, 'Do you know how
to play it?' " Hampton recalled. Hamp
could only play xylophone, but he
rendered one of Pops' solos note-for-note
on the curious electrified instrument,
flooring the trumpeter. Then he backed
Armstrong on "Memories of You," and the
vibraharp was his for life.
Hampton had met Gladys Neal, a young
woman who worked at MGM, in 1929. "She
made outfits for the big stars like Joan
Crawford and Marion Davies," Hampton
said. She became his steady companion,
then his business manager and later his
wife. She kept him on an allowance and
handled his business affairs so astutely
with investments in real estate that he
became a wealthy man.
Hampton was soon touring with his own
band on the West Coast, then settled in
at the Paradise Nightclub in Los Angeles,
where Benny Goodman heard him play in
August 1936. Within days, Hampton was
recording with Goodman, pianist Teddy
Wilson and drummer Gene Krupa at a Los
Angeles studio. It was the first Benny
Goodman quartet recording; by the time
Hampton joined the others in New York,
the record was selling briskly across the
country.
Hampton started his "four gorgeous years
with Benny" at the Pennsylvania Hotel in
New York. The trailblazing quartet broke
racial barriers that had largely kept
black musicians from performing with
whites in public.
When the quartet broke up in 1940,
Hampton went out on his own and formed a
big band with the assistance of alto
saxophonist Marshal Royal. It brought the
crowds to their feet, clapping along to
ecstatic solos by Cobb, Gordon or
Jacquet, shouting brasses with Cat
Anderson or Al Killian screaming on top
and America's first Big Beat propelling
it all.
The band's 1942 recording of "Flyin'
Home," which Hamp wrote while with the
Goodman sextet in 1937, became one of the
most influential recordings in American
music history. Jacquet blew the
bar-walking, roof-raising tenor sax solo
on it that set the stage for rock 'n'
roll. Hamp played the chart and that
solo, rearranged for a saxophone section,
hundreds of times a year for the rest of
his career.
For the next several decades Hampton was
one of jazz's best-known figures, touring
internationally, recording voluminously
and playing the major festivals,
including the Playboy Jazz Festival, as a
headliner and a guest artist.
He performed at the White House for
presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson,
Nixon, Carter, Reagan and Bush.
Hampton received numerous awards during
his long career, including a jazz masters
fellowship from the National Endowment
for the Arts in 1988 and the Kennedy
Center Lifetime Achievement Award in
1992.
In 1987, the music school of the
University of Idaho was named in his
honor. It annually presents a four-day
Lionel Hampton jazz festival at its
campus in Moscow, Idaho.
Jammin'
with Bill
Playing in a jam session at the White
House is no new thing for a guy like
Lionel Hampton, who's been buds with
every president since "the Kansas City
president,'' Harry Truman.
So after he heard President Clinton
jamming with tenorman Illinois Jacquet at
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. this spring, Hamp
knew just what to tell the white sax boy
from Hope. "I said if he ever
wanted to give up the president business
he could get with my band,'' Hamp
cackled.
The Clintons had Hampton over to a
concert and reception at the White House
the other night. But it's not likely
the Arkansas Traveler will be able to
break away in time to join the ensemble
that the 85-year-old Hampton is about to
bring into New York's Blue Note. His
latest ensemble band will play the club
for a week starting Sept. 28, 1993, then
go out, with or without Clinton, for a
U.S. tour in November.
"It's a helluva big band,'' says Hamp. "I
got a guy, Wally Gaytor, on drums, from
out in Brooklyn, he's fantastic. I got
four outstanding trumpet players, Barry
Reese is one, and Tony Barrero from Cuba.
All of 'em play solos. I got some
fantastic boys in this band.''
"You're gonna hear some dynamite --
because that's the one thing I know how
to do is swing.''
Nobody who heard him on his European tour
that concluded last month has any
doubt on that score, despite the fact
that he suffered a severe stroke two
years ago.
Completely recovered and fronting a group
called the Golden Men of Jazz, Hamp
played to SRO houses one July in Portugal,
the Netherlands, France, Germany and
Italy. Then he went back in August to
play France again, plus Switzerland,
Wales and Belgium.
"We broke records everywhere we went. I
got this all-star band with Clark Terry,
Al Gray and Sweets Edison. And 'there I
go, there I go, there I go' James Moody.
Also the guy that wrote 'I Remember
Clifford,' Benny Golson. Grady Tate on
drums, Arvell Shaw on bass, Junior Mance
on piano.'' Hamp will rejoin this combo
on the S.S. Norway jazz cruise in
October.
The Golden Men, all of them
silver-haired, stuck close to the pond
and gave Hamp no trouble, he said,
attendance-wise or punctuality-wise.
"The crowds loved us, we couldn't stop
playing,'' Hamp said. "I would sing,
'It's a Wonderful World' at the end, and
we had to do four or five encores.''
After the tours wrap, the Hampton forces
will concentrate on plans for a
television special, now in the early
stages of development.
This could be a killer project. If all
Hamp did was call the roll of the alumni
of the band and the guys he's recorded
with, it would be pretty much a complete
history of jazz.
An astounding number of the jazz pantheon
have been in one or more of Hamp's bands:
Jacquet, Dizzy Gillespie, Quincy Jones,
Joe Wilder, Joe Newman, Wendell Cully,
Snooky Young, Nat Adderley, Ernie and
Marshall Royal, Charlie Mingus, Dexter
Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Arnette Cobb, to
name but a few of those who learned to play "Hey, Ba-Ba-Re-Bop.''
And glancing through his discography in
his autobiography "Hamp'' is a cook's
tour of a half-century of great recorded
music, studded with bandmates like Benny
Goodman, Gene Krupa, Teddy Wilson, Benny
Carter, Coleman Hawkins, Stan Getz,
Charlie Christian, Zutty Singleton,
Jerome Richardson, James P. Johnson,
Chick Corea, Miles Davis, Bing Crosby and
-- remember this one? -- Sugar Chile
Robinson.
Not to mention Hampton's vocal
discoveries, such as Dinah Washington,
Aretha Franklin, Joe Williams and Betty
Carter.
"Illinois Jacquet I picked up when he was
a kid,'' Hamp liked to recall 50 years
later, remembering how he formed his
first big band. "He was playing with a
little junior band out in Los Angeles,
playing alto saxophone. I say, 'You play
tenor, man, because they need good tenor
players. Herschel Evans was a great tenor
sax player and he's gone,' I told him,
'and Chu Berry is gone.' So I got him on
tenor.
"And some guy told me about hearing some
kid named Dexter Gordon playing with a
high school band out in Los Angeles. He
came out to audition with me and he
didn't have no horn at all, he had a
clarinet wrapped up in a newspaper.
"And he played and I said, 'Oh man, this
is a good style you play on clarinet, but
you should play tenor,' and I talked to
my wife and we got him a tenor.''
The wife referred to was the former
Gladys Riddle, whom he met in 1929 when
she was a seamstress for the movie
studios. Back in those days, she used to
baby him by slipping him Douglas
Fairbanks' old silk underwear. Later, she
made sure he held onto his money by never
letting him see any cash, and although
she died in 1971, Hamp today is holding
property in places like Las Vegas and
Atlanta, still flush -- and still
swinging. It's the one thing he knows how
to do.
