BENNY GOT HIS VIBE GUY BACK:

Our jazz correspondent, Glenn Dryfoos, was slacking on the Scottish links and so missed the recent death of Lionel Hampton, who played at our high school when we were in jazz band (Mr. Dryfoos was one of the best schoolboy sax players in the state. I was the third best bass drummer of our three.) Here are some of his thoughts on a great jazz man:

Hampton was the first great vibes player in jazz, and how he came to the instrument is one of those too-good-to-be-true stories: in 1930, Louis Armstrong was playing in Los Angeles with a group of local musicians, including Hampton, who was then a drummer. Hamp found a vibraphone (or "vibraharp" as he called it) -- which he had never seen before -- in the hallway of a recording studio and started messing around with it. Armstrong loved the sound and asked Hamp if he could play it. Since he had some familiarity with a piano keyboard, Hampton said "yes", and Armstrong decided to have him play it during that day's recording session on "Memories of You." Very quickly, Hampton became a virtuoso on the instrument. Another visiting musician, Benny Goodman, heard Hampton play during a visit to L.A. in 1936 and invited him to join his small bandÉthe Goodman Trio became the Goodman Quartet. Goodman's band was the first integrated group in the country, putting Hampton, Teddy Wilson (the other black in the quartet), Gene Krupa and Goodman at the vanguard of the civil rights movement. After leaving Goodman, he formed his own big band, which was the launching pad for stars like Dexter Gordon, Quincy Jones, Charles Mingus and Dinah Washington. Hamp remained a champion of civil rights issues and involved in politics throughout his life. Although he was a Republican, he was a friend of Presidents Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan and GHW Bush. (He switched party allegiances to vote for LBJ because Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act.) He was the first African American to perform at an inauguration (Truman), he played at Nelson Rockefeller's funeral and GHWB spoke at his funeral the other day. For over 70 years, Hampton's music was characterized by great joy and swing.

Oh yeah, and when the Lionel Hampton Band played at Mountain High School in 1979, I had the pleasure of eating takeout Chinese food with him in the band room.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 12, 2002 7:58 AM