Jazz Great Lionel Hampton, 94, Dies

Associated Press, via Yahoo! News ^ | 31 August 2002 | Larry McShane

[okie01]

Hamp's band played for my senior prom in college.

He was a part of so much jazz history, so many memorable performances, that it's difficult to recall a signature moment.

For my part, I'll nominate "Stardust", as recorded live at the Hollywood Bowl. Ethereal.

His big bands were a kick -- like Ellington's, there was the same sense of organic unity, except the most notable characteristic was not discipline, but exuberance.

[BluesDuke]

Most valuable Wolf albums: the Chess CD combine of his first two Chess LPs, Moanin' At Midnight and Howlin' Wolf, and the Charly collection of his pre-Chess Sun recordings, Howlin' At The Sun. Not to mention, either of the Wolf entries in the old Chess Real Folk Blues series (More Real Folk Blues is the more cohesive of the pair as an album, but The Real Folk Blues has some of the Wolf's most chilling material, particularly "Tail Dragger," "Nature," and "Natchez Burning")...

Most fun Wolf album: The Super Super Blues Band, a rather crackpot jam album between the Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Bo Diddley.

The one he'd most like to have back, probably: This Is Howlin' Wolf's New Album. He Doesn't Like It. He Didn't Like His Electric Guitar At First, Either. (One of the ill-advised Chess attempts to semi-psychedelicise some of their blues roster in the late 1960s, though retrospectively does Muddy Waters's Electric Mud prove to have an arch charm about it...)

[Mr. Mojo]

John Coltrane who made those remarkable Atlantic albums

Ah, you're one of the (very) few people I know who appreciate his Atlantic albums more than those he recored for Impulse. ...and I'm with you there. However, my favorite 'Trane still remains Blue Train (on Blue Note).

Yeah, (I think) I've checked out pretty much everything The Hawk ever recorded, and his seminal work with Fletcher is certainly no exception.

I haven't listened to Rollins in quite a while, so I think I'll check out one of the albums you suggested.

[Mr. Mojo]

"Tail Dragger,"

Probably my all-time favorite Wolf cut. Just downright frightening.... And thanks for all the album tips, btw.

[DaughterOfAnIwoJimaVet]

Very cool, Blues. Thanks. (And thanks for pinging me anyway, OPH. Very thoughtful of you.) My dad was a huge (pardon me, that's not quite accurate: HUGE) Django Reinhardt fan, and I am one as well. I'm glad I hadn't yet been born when he died. This stuff is hard, no matter how long they live.

[RightWhale]

after 45 minutes of noodling on the instrument, Hampton felt comfortable enough to swing in behind Armstrong

We don't know why this is, but sometimes a right instrument falls into the right hands. It can be quick for the musician to get comfortable, or it might take a couple of years as with Sonny Rollins. It does make one wonder about things, though.

[mafree]

Though he lived a long, fruitful life, I am sorry to see Mr. Hampton go but we do have his music, right? May he RIP.

[BluesDuke]

Ah, you're one of the (very) few people I know who appreciate his Atlantic albums more than those he recored for Impulse. ...and I'm with you there. However, my favorite 'Trane still remains Blue Train (on Blue Note).

I'm always surprised to see Blue Train as underrated as it is against his subsequent work, but I enjoy the album. Another one which doesn't often get the credit it should get is his exquisite pairing with Milt Jackson, Bags and Trane - when those two get to playing the blues it's as transcendent a turn as you'll hear in postwar jazz. Coltrane was probably one of the best interpreters and experimenters of blues forms in the art (his Coltrane Plays The Blues is simply beauteous).

The Impulse years? Probably the earlier sets, especially those captured in live performance, are the better ones - there came a point where Coltrane seemed to be going slowly but surely out of his mind, but the earlier Village Vanguard and Birdland sets are everything they've been cracked up to be and then some. Of his more purely free-form period, aside from A Love Supreme (section one of which got a surprisingly soulful interpretation by Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin on their Love, Devotion, and Surrender) it seems kind of sad that the best of the lot wasn't issued until after his death - the tracks of Transition. The title track alone is worth the price. And for the side of Coltrane that seems never to be appreciated properly - his gripping way with ballads - there is still John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman.

[BluesDuke]

"Tail Dragger" has been a favourite of mine for years. My other particular favourite Wolf cuts: "Spoonful," "Little Baby" (which the original Blues Project performed and recorded as "You Go, I'll Go With You"), "No Place To Go" (this is the one Led Zeppelin swiped to make "How Many More Times" on their first album), "I Asked For Water (She Gave Me Gasoline)," "Natchez Burning," "Down In The Bottom," "Howlin' For My Baby," "Back Door Man," "Louise," "My Baby Walked Off," and "Just My Kind". But picking favourites from the Wolf is usually futile...

[BluesDuke]

I still love the Quintette of the Hot Club of France recordings. (Stephane Grappelli was a favourite of mine, too - I got a charge out of a set Duke Ellington made in the early 1960s, Duke Ellington's Violin Session, pairing the Ellington rhythm section with Grappelli on violin, Svend Asmussen on viola, and Ellington's own trumpeter Ray Nance on second violin.) I get a kick out of it catching "Minor Swing" turning up in this or that film, as seems to be happening lately...

[BluesDuke]

We don't know why this is, but sometimes a right instrument falls into the right hands. It can be quick for the musician to get comfortable, or it might take a couple of years as with Sonny Rollins. It does make one wonder about things, though.

Many if not most things which turn up as musical blessings occur by accident, I've discovered. One of the few things in the film The Benny Goodman Story which actually may have been true was the boy Goodman, when he and his brothers went to that special music program for poor children, was handed a clarinet because the facility was booked completely for the instrument he'd actually wanted to play. And I once read a charming story I hope is true about Charlie Watts, the drummer for the Rolling Stones: that his parents started him on drums because, as a toddler, he had a habit at a meal table of tapping his utensils along if jazz or dance music was on the radio (R and B hadn't yet hit England when he was toddler) and almost never dropping a beat.

[BluesDuke]

We'll always have the music - unless the mandarins at BMG (who own the RCA and Bluebird catalogs) decide to pull the plug on it for awhile, regarding Hampton's own recordings as a leader.

[Misterioso]

I'm always surprised to see Blue Train as underrated as it is against his subsequent work, but I enjoy the album. Another one which doesn't often get the credit it should get is his exquisite pairing with Milt Jackson, Bags and Trane - when those two get to playing the blues it's as transcendent a turn as you'll hear in postwar jazz. Coltrane was probably one of the best interpreters and experimenters of blues forms in the art (his Coltrane Plays The Blues is simply beauteous).

The mention of "Bags and Trane" instantly brings "The Late, Late Blues" into my head. One of my favorite Milt Jackson albums. "Blue Train" contains one of Kenny Drew's best pre-ex-pat solos, and I think will stand with "Giant Steps" as the pinnacle of Coltrane's recording output, leaving aside his Miles Davis sideman years.

[DaughterOfAnIwoJimaVet]

I love Hot Club, too. I grew up on that stuff. When my dad died, my family played two hours of it at his visitation; I'm confident that's what he would have wanted.

You're right about it showing up in films; I heard "Honeysuckle Rose" in one last week ("The Royal Tennenbaums", maybe?), and Woody Allen has been using it for years.

Speaking of which, have you ever seen the movie "Sweet and Lowdown"? I think you'd like it; it's about a guitar player who is obsessed with Django:

Stephane Grappelli was awesome; he is missed, as well. I thought it was so hip of him to pair with Jean Luc Ponty. Very cool.

[weegee]

Don't feel so bad about the 'toon trying to look good standing next to Lionel Hampton, there was another musician who received an award that day who was more excited to meet Lionel Hampton than he was to meet impeached president X42!

The Lalo Guerrero story

...and President Clinton awarded him the National Medal of the Arts. When asked if he was thrilled about getting medal, he shrugs.

"I guess so. They were giving one to Lionel Hampton the same night, and I was more excited about meeting Lionel Hampton and spending time with him."

So some good can come out of even sour situations.

[weegee]

The record labels keep changing the copyright laws, those recordings should become public domain soon. An American copyright can't renewed forever (although the corporate interests would like to see it that way).

[BluesDuke]

It shouldn't be (it generally isn't) just corporate interest who have an interest in continuing a copyright; Hampton, I understand, owned a number of copyrights himself, and they should be at least allowed to stay in such family as he had, assuming others do not screw the pooch the way, for example, the Beatles' song publishing pooch got screwed enough to allow Michael Jackson to buy the catalog right out from under Paul McCartney some years ago...The good news: Hampton at least does not have to worry about a head-up-his-ass father bamboozling a creative son into signing over the song rights and then selling the whole damn catalog out of spite, as Murry Wilson did to son Brian after Brian Wilson began the long plunge into insanity that followed the collapse of the legendary Smile project in 1967...

[BluesDuke]

Peter Frampton once said his most prize possession was a Gibson acoustic guitar that once belonged to Django Reinhardt, whom Frampton's father is said to have known once.

[weegee]

Lionel Hampton played for George Bush's father (that's president 41's dad!). He was a lifelong Republican. I believe that Lionel Hampton was even a voter in the Electoral College.

I met him in 1992 when he came to Houston for the Republican National Convention. He played 2 shows at Rockefeller's. We caught the first show and wanted to go backstage to meet with him.

We were told "no dice" as he slept between performances. One of the men in his entourage was with HUD and when he found out that my brother was volunteering as an usher at the RNC convention, we got to go backstage.

My brother had met Lionel Hampton before that when Lionel played some outlying town near Houston.

We've always regretted not going to see him play at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage festival in the mid to late 1990s. Does anyone know when his last performance was?

[Lurking Libertarian]

John Lee Hooker was the last of the great bluesmen, and he died last year. A lot of great jazzmen are still around, but no absolute legends

I'd say that BB King (blues) and Sonny Rollins (jazz) are firmly in the legend category. On the jazz side, you could also argue for Elvin Jones, Max Roach, McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock (when he's not playing fusion).