[Dixielandjazz] Joe Wilder Dies at 92 - LA Times

[Robert Ringwald]

Joe Wilder Dies at 92; Jazz Trumpeter Helped Break Racial Barriers
by Steve Chawkins
Los Angeles Times, May 17, 2014
When Joe Wilder was traveling with a band in 1949 and playing trumpet at a club in
Chicago, his solos were disrupted by college kids shouting racial slurs.
In his low-key style, the dapper Wilder put them in their place: "I know you probably
don't understand just how offensive this is," said Wilder, who was among the first
African Americans to serve in the U.S. Marines during World War II. "At some point,
you're going to say something like that in the wrong place, and you'll end up getting
yourselves hurt."
The show went on, uninterrupted.
Wilder, a consummate jazz musician who never saw himself as a civil rights activist
but who helped break color barriers in orchestras at Broadway shows and in network
studios, died May 9 in a New York City care facility. He was 92.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Elin Wilder-Melcher.
Equipped with a sly wit that showed up in his playing as well as in his chronic punning,
Wilder had a vast range of musical talents.
"I became his friend because I was completely infatuated with his music," Ed Berger,
author of "Softly, With Feeling," a Wilder biography released in April, told the
Los Angeles Times this week.
"He could play anything," Berger said, "but his true personality manifested itself
in lyrical ballads. He could phrase a melody in a very personal way and make it his
own while being true to the contours of the song."
Wilder toured with Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford and Benny Goodman.
He backed up Billie Holiday and traded riffs with Dizzy Gillespie. Classically trained,
he sat in with the New York Philharmonic. As an ABC studio musician in New York,
he was a constant presence on "The Dick Cavett Show." As a Broadway regular, he was
in the pit orchestra of the musical "42nd Street" for more than eight years.
The breadth of his gigs was breathtaking. He played in beer commercials and in the
orchestra at 22 Miss America pageants. His trumpet sounded in Army Staff Sgt. Barry
Sadler's Vietnam ode, "Ballad of the Green Berets," and he was part of the Coffee
Club Orchestra on Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion." In his later years,
he taught at the Juilliard School of Music.
A non-smoker and non-drinker, Wilder never made a public appearance without a jacket
and tie. While he spent years on the road with various bands, he was not known to
utter an obscenity. More than once, fellow musicians bet they could prompt one from
him. They lost.
Even confronting blatant discrimination as a black musician, Wilder remained, on
the surface, unflappable.
"Everything that Joe went through isn't readily apparent because he's always so dignified
and positive," trumpet virtuoso Wynton Marsalis wrote in a foreword to "Softly, With
Feeling."
On the road with the Hampton band in Iowa in 1946, Wilder and a fellow trumpeter
were refused service at a Chinese restaurant in Des Moines. They stayed for hours
and the following day did the same, striking a chord of passive resistance years
before the sit-ins that swept the South.
"We weren't part of any movement or anything," Wilder later recalled. "We were just
really hacked!"
When the legendary black dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson started telling degrading
stories about "darkies" at a theater in Boston, Wilder and other horn players drowned
him out with their instruments.
In Charleston, S.C., in 1948, Wilder saw bandleader Lucky Millinder stand up to a
sheriff who told him that his "mixed band" wasn't welcome. At Millinder's urging,
the sheriff polled each musician, including Wilder, asking: "Are you colored?"
All of them, black and white, picked up Millinder's cue and said yes. Trombone player
Porky Cohen, with his customary lisp, said: "Why, thertainly!"
The sheriff backed off and the show went on.
Born in Colwyn, Pa., on Feb. 22, 1922, Joseph Benjamin Wilder took music lessons
as a child and, at 10, became a regular on a Philadelphia broadcast called "The Parisian
Tailor's Colored Kiddies Radio Hour."
After financial need forced him out of a high school that specialized in music, he
did stints with various bands and in 1943 joined the Marines, playing in a military
band.
In 1950, Wilder became one of the few black musicians to play for Broadway shows
-- first for a revue called "Alive and Kicking" and then for "Guys and Dolls." Wilder
and another black musician couldn't travel to Washington, D.C., with "Guys and Dolls"
because of objections from local musicians who would have been playing there with
them.
Wilder studied classical technique at the Manhattan School of Music and received
a bachelor's degree in 1953.
In 1955, he was asked to be first trumpet for Cole Porter's new musical "Silk Stockings."
The show's producers felt obliged to ask Porter for his blessing.
Porter's response was straightforward: "Can the man play my music?"
>From 1957 to 1974, Wilder was an ABC staff musician, a plum position that had been
held by only a handful of African Americans.
Meanwhile, he played on dozens of albums, backing up performers such as Harry Belafonte,
Pearl Bailey and Tony Bennett. He made only a few of his own albums over the years,
including "The Pretty Sound of Joe Wilder" (1959) and "Among Friends" (2003).
At age 83, in 2006, Wilder got rave reviews for his first-ever New York bandleading
gig, fronting a quartet at the Village Vanguard.
In fact, Wilder, who was honored in 2008 by the National Endowment for the Arts,
was seldom reviewed negatively, either onstage or off, according to Ed Berger, his
biographer.
"In talking with Joe's musical peers, friends, employers and students, I can honestly
say that the most critical remark I could elicit was [pianist] Dick Hyman's comment:
"He always dressed a bit more formally than he needed to."
Wilder's survivors include Solveig, his wife of 56 years; daughters Elin Wilder-Melcher,
Solveig Wilder and Inga-Kerstin Wilder; son Joseph Wilder Jr.; and six grandchildren.
An earlier marriage ended in divorce.
-30


-Bob Ringwald K6YBV
www.ringwald.com
916/ 806-9551

“My luck is so bad that if I bought a cemetery, people would stop dying.” 
--Rodney Dangerfield