NOTABLE ARKANSANS

Notable Arkansans

He was born in 1920 in a three-room flat in St. Louis — the seventh of 11 children in an impoverished family. His mother died when he was 6. The event that probably had the greatest influence on the direction his life would take was the marriage of his oldest sister, Ada Lee, to a local musician, Sy McField. McField played tuba with Dewey Jackson and the Musical Ambassadors, a popular local band. Listening to the band, he became intensely interested in music, and also became fascinated with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. He took a piece of garden hose, attached a funnel to it, and added a piece of lead pipe for a mouthpiece — crafting his first "musical instrument." He would sit outside the apartment house, playing his "trumpet" for all to hear. Before long, several neighbors pitched in to buy him a real trumpet from a pawn shop for $12.50.

His brother-in-law taught him the basics. His father, who worked as a laborer for Laclede Gas Light Co., demanded that he stop playing, but he hid the instrument and kept playing it anyway. After his father kicked him out of the apartment, he went to live with Ada Lee and Sy. Tom Powell Post #77, the local Black American Legion post, had a drum and bugle corps, and soon he played well enough to join. He later said he couldn't afford trumpet lessons "so I more or less gravitated to the scene by asking 10,000 questions" of players who did take formal lessons. He developed a smooth, melodic jazz style, and started playing in St. Louis clubs before he graduated from Vashon High School.

During World War II, he played with the U.S. Navy band at the Naval Training Center in Great Lakes, Ill. The Navy proved to be an intense self-improvement period and "finishing school" for him; he would sometimes practice all night, immersing himself in the experience of working with the other great musicians in the band. He taught himself performance "gimmicks," like playing his horn upside down, manipulating the valves with the backs of the fingers of either hand, and playing a trumpet with one hand and a flugelhorn with the other, swapping four-bar exchanges with himself. He also mastered the technique of circular breathing: being able to play without pausing for breath by forcing air out his mouth — while simultaneously inhaling through his nose. He became a mentor for younger trumpeters such as then-teenage Miles Davis and Quincy Jones.

After the war, he played with Lionel Hampton, and then with Count Basie, before joining the Duke Ellington Orchestra in 1951. He helped popularize the flugelhorn, an instrument previously used mainly in British brass bands; it became his signature instrument. In 1960, he became the first Black musician to be hired as an NBC staff musician, playing with Doc Severinsen on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show." This writer will never forget the experience of watching him once "swapping fours" with Doc Severinsen and Al Hirt on the "Tonight Show" in the 1960s. Also on Carson's show, he would occasionally sing his satirical blues number, "Mumbles," with incomprehensible vocal inflections. When the "Tonight Show" moved to California in 1972, he decided to remain in New York, forming his Big B-A-D Band, consisting mostly of young players he mentored.

Music education was always a priority of his. In 2006, he and his wife, Gwen, moved to Pine Bluff, where he became an adjunct professor at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. He mentored not just UAPB students, but students from around the world who came to study with him. In 2014 a documentary, "Keep On Keepin' On," about his mentorship of a blind Australian piano student, was released. (Due to diabetes, he had lost most of his own vision.) He died in February 2015 at the age of 94.

With over 900 recordings, he is one of the most recorded jazz artists in history. He was a three-time nominee for a Grammy Award, received two Grammy certificates, and was a recipient of the Lifetime Grammy Achievement Award.

Who was this kind, affable jazz musician and educator?

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