[Dixielandjazz] NY TIMES OBIT - Bud Shank

[Stephen G Barbone]

Music was Bud Shank's greatest passion. He died the day after he  
worked as a sideman on a recording date. His Doctor cautioned him he  
would die if he did the gig. Bud Shank, a man who did things his way,   
did the gig, and the next day, he was dead.

Sadly,
Steve Barbone

April 7, 2009 - NY TIMES - by Bruce Weber
Bud Shank, Jazz Saxophonist, Is Dead at 82

Bud Shank, an alto saxophonist and flutist who helped propel cool- 
school West Coast jazz to prominence in the 1950s and fostered the  
melding of American and Brazilian music that created the bossa nova,  
died on Thursday in Tucson, Ariz. He was 82.
The cause was a pulmonary embolism, his wife, Linda, said.

Mr. Shank, whose career spanned 60 years, was a versatile player, both  
as a sideman and bandleader, in a wide variety of musical arenas, from  
big band swing to symphonic to pop, with a wide variety of  
collaborators. He played with the Stan Kenton big band in the early  
1950s; in the 1960s he accompanied the sitarist Ravi Shankar, and he  
recorded with the Mamas and the Papas, playing the flute solo on their  
hit “California Dreamin.’ ” In 1985, he was the featured soloist with  
the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on a recording of a concerto for alto  
sax and orchestra.

But he thought of himself primarily as a bebop alto sax player, and no  
matter whom he was playing with, his sound, crisply melodic with an  
underlying swing, reflected his earliest influences: Lester Young, the  
great swing saxophonist of the 1930s and 1940s, and the bebop  
generation that followed him.

In the 1950s, living in Los Angeles along with musicians like the  
trumpeter Chet Baker and the baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, Mr.  
Shank helped establish the laid-back, nonchalant-seeming sound that  
came to be called West Coast jazz. With other Kenton big band alumni,  
he was a regular presence at the legendary jam sessions at the  
Lighthouse Cafe in Hermosa Beach.

It was also in the Kenton band that he met Laurindo Almeida, a  
Brazilian guitarist, with whom he recorded two 1953 albums, known as  
“Brazilliance” Volumes 1 and 2, that anticipated the emergence of the  
bossa nova, the fusion of Latin music and cool jazz that would be  
popularized a few years later by Antonio Carlos Jobim and João  
Gilberto. Mr. Shank reunited with Almeida in 1974 in a band known as  
the L.A. Four, which toured internationally and recorded several albums.

Clifford Everett Shank was born in Dayton, Ohio, on May 27, 1926; he  
was known as Bud from childhood, Linda Shank said, though she did not  
know why. “I can just tell you he hated the name Clifford,” she said.

As a young man he studied clarinet, flute and tenor saxophone as well  
as alto. He attended the University of North Carolina, studying music  
and business, and eventually dropped out because he wanted to play jazz.

“He hitched a ride with a friend to L.A., and he fell in love with the  
weather and the scene,” said his wife, whom he met at a jazz festival  
and married in 1994. Mr. Shank was married twice previously; he was  
once divorced and once widowed. In addition to his wife, he is  
survived by a brother, Ted, of Dayton.

In the 1980s Mr. Shank eventually set aside the flute to concentrate  
on the saxophone, and in the last two decades of his career, his  
playing became less cool and far more aggressive, closer in sound to  
his contemporary and friend Phil Woods than to Lester Young or Gerry  
Mulligan.

In Port Townsend, Wash., where he lived before moving to Tucson for  
health reasons several years ago, he ran a summer jazz workshop. And  
he was a devotee of jazz history; he donated his own archives,  
including original charts, to the Los Angeles Jazz Institute in Long  
Beach.

Mr. Shank had two other passions besides jazz, his wife said, sailboat  
racing and his three dogs: Andante, Allegro and Rubato. But music was  
paramount. On the day before he died, he was in a San Diego recording  
studio as a musician for hire.

“He knew it was his last shot,” his wife said. “The doctors told him  
if he went he would die. And he went.”