[Dixielandjazz] Lionel Hampton Obit

[Stephen Barbone]

For those who want to see the NY Times review, but do not want to
register, here it is;

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

September 1, 2002 New York Times

Lionel Hampton, Who Put Swing in the Vibraphone, Is Dead at 94

By PETER WATROUS

     Lionel Hampton, whose flamboyant mastery of the vibraphone made him
one of the leading figures of the swing era, died yesterday morning at
Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan. He was 94.

The cause was complications of old age and a recent heart attack, said
his manager, Phil Leshin.

Mr. Hampton, who lived in Manhattan and until recently continued to tour
the world with his own immensely popular big band, was an extremely
important figure in American music, not only as an entertainer and an
improvising musician in jazz, but also because his band helped usher in
rock 'n' roll.

In 1942, Mr. Hampton recorded one of the more influential recordings in
the history of American music, "Flying Home," which featured a honking
and shouting solo by the tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet that set the
emotional atmosphere for rock.

Mr. Hampton performed on piano and drums and was one of the first
musicians to play the vibraphone in jazz, on groundbreaking recordings
with Louis Armstrong, Benny Carter and Benny Goodman in the 1920's and
30's. Mr. Hampton's harmonically and rhythmically sophisticated
performances set the parameters for virtually every vibraphonist to
appear since, including Milt Jackson, Bobby Hutcherson and Terry Gibbs.

The importance of the collaboration with Mr. Goodman cannot be
overstated, on both musical and social grounds. Not only did Mr. Hampton
and Mr. Goodman make exceptional music, but they, along with the pianist
Teddy Wilson, presented a public, integrated face for jazz. While
integration in jazz had been standard practice in back rooms and
recording studios, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Hampton were on stage with the
most important white group of the time, as featured soloists.

But Mr. Hampton's frenetic stage persona — mouth agape, mallets flying,
sweat pouring from his brow — earned him his following, and he was
legendary for not wanting to leave the stage. He truly lived to play.

Mr. Hampton was born in Louisville, Ky. His birth certificate says he
was born on April 20, 1908, said Mr. Leshin, his manager. Some reference
sources and public records give birth dates ranging from 1908 to 1914.

After Mr. Hampton was sent to the Holy Rosary Academy in Kenosha, Wis.,
a school for black and Indian children, he began playing drums in a
fife-and-drum band. When his family moved to Chicago, he played in a
band made up of newsboys. When he was 14, after receiving a set of drums
from his grandparents, Mr. Hampton went on the road with the band leader
Detroit Shannon.

"I worked hard learning harmony and theory when I was growing up in
Chicago in the 1920's," he once recalled. "I spent hours every day at a
music school for boys that had been started by The Chicago Defender, a
black newspaper, for their newsboys.

"All those altered scales and harmonic extensions people were calling
modern in the 40's and later, I knew all about those before 1930. I was
playing the timpani, xylophone and orchestra bells in the school's
concert orchestra, taking the flute parts on things like `Poet and
Peasant' Overture and also playing the snare drum
in the marching band. Then I would go home, play records by Louis
Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins, and learn the trumpet and saxophone solos
note for note on the xylophone and orchestra bells."

He moved to Los Angeles in 1927 and found work as a drummer with an
early incarnation of Les Hite's orchestra, which became the house band
at Frank Sebastian's Cotton Club in Culver City, Calif. It was the band
with which Louis Armstrong played on the West Coast, and in 1930 Mr.
Armstrong, who used Mr. Hampton on several recordings that year,
encouraged him to take up the study of the vibraphone, a metal
instrument, similar to a marimba, with electronically operated valves.

He played his first recorded vibraphone solo with Mr. Armstrong in 1930,
performing "Memories of You," by Eubie Blake and Andy Razaf. Mr. Hampton
soon formed his own nine-piece group featuring the trumpeter Buck
Clayton and the tenor saxophonist Herschel Evans.

Mr. Hampton began attracting a large audience during an engagement at
the Paradise, a Los Angeles club. In 1936 Benny Goodman, along with the
pianist Teddy Wilson and the drummer Gene Krupa, heard the band and
invited Mr. Hampton to record with them. Shortly afterward Mr. Goodman
asked Mr. Hampton to join his orchestra.

A year later, RCA Victor gave Mr. Hampton free rein in the studio, and
he proceeded to make some of the finest small-group recordings of the
swing era. He enlisted some of the best musicians playing at the time,
including Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins, Chu Berry, Ben
Webster and Charlie Christian. These recordings, along with those he
made with Benny Goodman, showed Mr. Hampton to be an effusive, swinging
soloist who had an affinity for pungent riffs.

"He was good," Milt Jackson, the vibraphonist in the Modern Jazz
Quartet, said before he died in 1999. "He inspired me to play the
instrument. First, he was the first one of note to play it, but more
important, I liked how dynamic he was. And the way he blended with
groups and the way he played in front of a band was inspirational."

In 1940, Mr. Hampton formed his own big band. He quickly established
himself as a leader by using high-impact arrangements loaded with brass
and bluesy pieces that satisfied the postwar audience's hunger for
entertainment. Among his biggest hits were "Flying Home" and "Hey!
Ba-Ba-Re-Bop."

In Los Angeles, Mr. Hampton's band made its presence felt not only in
swing but in early bebop and rhythm and blues. He programmed his shows
regularly with boogie-woogie pieces, and his arrangements often quoted
popular light classics. It was all an attempt to make concerts and
recordings reach out to an audience. Mr. Hampton was an entertainer, and
he kept jazz a popular art.

As a soloist, he excited audiences with wildly extroverted performances,
often moving from vibraphone to drums to piano. Reviewing a 1982
Carnegie Hall concert that reunited Mr. Hampton with Mr. Wilson and Mr.
Goodman, John S. Wilson wrote in The New York Times: "Mr. Hampton still
has a way of pitter-pattering across the vibraphone keys that builds a
melodic and rhythmic flow that, at times, even seemed to mesmerize him
as he looked down at his bouncing mallets, smiling and punctuating his
musical phrases with laughing snorts."

He never lost his touch as a talent scout: his bands included Betty
Carter, Arnett Cobb, Johnny Griffin, Clifford Brown, Cat Anderson,
Charles Mingus, Wes Montgomery, Dexter Gordon, Quincy Jones, Milt
Buckner, Thomas Chapin and Terence Blanchard.

"The Hampton band I was part of was one of the most exciting bands I
have ever heard in my life," Mr. Jacquet once said. "I was 18 when I
joined, and it was like being a freshman in college."

For the next several decades Mr. Hampton relaxed into his role as one of
jazz's best-known figures, touring internationally. He recorded often
and was a regular at festivals, both as a headliner and as a guest
artist. And he was often found at jam sessions. Even in the past decade,
Mr. Hampton was sending the competition fleeing. Late one night at a jam
session in 1994 at the Iridium near Lincoln Center, Mr. Hampton, playing
two-fingered piano, dispatched a series of young musicians, outswinging
them with his ferocious solos.

In 1975 Mr. Hampton appeared in "Bette Midler's Clams on the Half Shell
Revue" in New York. His autobiography, "Hamp" (Amistad Press), written
with James Haskins, was published in 1989. Over several decades, he
continued to lead a big band, traveling extensively in Europe and Japan.

A longtime Republican, he was active in party affairs, campaigning for,
among others, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush.
He was also active in developing housing projects, among them the Gladys
Hampton Houses, a low-income complex in Harlem, which was named after
his wife, the former Gladys Riddle, who died in 1971. They had no
children, and no immediate family members survive.

In 1997, a fire that apparently started when a lamp tipped over and
ignited a bed destroyed all the belongings in Mr. Hampton's apartment.
The blaze forced residents to evacuate the 43-story tower and injured 27
people. It was followed by an outpouring of support and donations,
including a new tuxedo so Mr. Hampton could keep an appointment with
President Bill Clinton.

Some jazz critics and fans who admired Mr. Hampton for his melodic and
harmonic imagination, for his interpretations of "Moonglow" and "Dinah"
with Benny Goodman and for his own small-combo recordings, criticized
him for his raw blues riffing, a hard backbeat, screaming and honking
saxophones and stunts like marching into the audience with his horn
players or getting the audience to clap along to his orchestra.

"I learned all that in the sanctified church: the beat, the
hand-clapping, marching down the aisles and into the audience," Mr.
Hampton explained in an interview in 1987. "When I was 6 or 7 and
temporarily living with my grandmother in Birmingham, Ala., she'd take
me to the Holiness church services, not just on Sundays but all the
time. They'd have a whole band in the church, guitars, trombones,
saxophones, drums, and they'd be rocking. I'd be sitting by the sister
who was playing the big bass drum, and when she'd get happy and start
dancing in the aisle, I'd grab that bass drum and start in on that beat.
After that, I always had that beat in me."