[Dixielandjazz] Clark Terry R.I.P. -- Washington Post, February 22, 2015

[Robert Ringwald]

Clark Terry, Jazz Virtuoso with Basie, Ellington and ‘Tonight Show,’ Dies
by Adam Bernstein
Washington Post, February 22, 2015
Clark Terry, a trumpet and flugelhorn virtuoso who was an ebullient mainstay in the
Duke Ellington and “Tonight Show” big bands and who became a mentor to generations
of jazz players, including Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis, has died at 94.
His wife, Gwen, announced the death Feb. 21 on the musician’s Web site. No other
details were immediately available.
Mr. Terry was barely out of his teens when he came roaring out of St. Louis with
a reputation for technical refinement, melodic expressiveness and hard-swinging vitality.
Over the next six decades, he remained a vibrant fixture of entertainment and music
education despite increasing physical frailty, including diabetes and low vision.
In 2010, he won a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement.
As a band leader, studio musician and accompanist, Mr. Terry was in such constant
demand that he joked of needing a suitcase just to cart around his W-2 tax forms.
In addition to his membership in the “Tonight Show” band from 1960 to 1972 -- he
was the orchestra’s first black member -- he played with jazz powerhouses such as
Count Basie, Quincy Jones, Gerry Mulligan, Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk, Cecil
Taylor and Bob Brookmeyer.
After serving in a Navy band during World War II, Mr. Terry advanced through some
of the most popular orchestras of the era, including those of Lionel Hampton, Charlie
Barnet and Basie.
Working with Basie from 1948 to 1951 was a formative period in his career. He likened
it to a “prep school” in which he soaked in the band leader’s understated but compelling
swing style.
Ellington had a trumpet seat free in 1951 and poached Mr. Terry from Basie.
“The first time I ever heard about Clark Terry was when Charlie Barnet told me about
him,” Ellington wrote in his autobiography, “Music Is My Mistress.” “Charlie was
raving: ‘Clark Terry is the greatest trumpet player in the world. You wait and see.
Or better still, go get him for your band, but hurry, because soon everybody is going
to be trying to get him.’ I considered myself lucky indeed to get him in 1951.”
While with the Ellington organization -- one of the most inventive and acclaimed
bands in the country -- Mr. Terry was seeking ways to achieve a more intimate sound
on his horn. Mr. Terry turned his focus to the flugelhorn, a trumpetlike instrument
whose configuration permits a softer tone and had been used intermittently in jazz.
Mr. Terry’s warmly exquisite playing helped revive the flugelhorn as a respected
instrument in jazz. Mr. Terry was in the Ellington band during its spirited appearance
at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island and was a featured soloist in Ellington
recordings such as “Such Sweet Thunder.”
Mr. Terry had long blended craftsmanship and playfulness on trumpet and, in the early
1960s, he gained recognition for a comical scat-singing style. This audience-pleasing
gambit -- an improvisation of grunts in the form of a lewd street-corner conversation
-- initially was showcased on the 1964 album “The Oscar Peterson Trio Plus One.”
With compositions such as “Mumbles” and “Incoherent Blues,” Mr. Terry was aiming
for “a put-on of the old blues singers I heard as a boy in St. Louis,” he once told
The Washington Post. “There always would be some lines you couldn’t make out and
the singers would be making references to chicks and other people in the crowd.”
He said that during the recording session, Peterson almost fell off his piano bench
with laughter. “Mumbles” became Mr. Terry’s nickname and a staple of his repertoire.
Jazz scholar Dan Morgenstern said Mr. Terry “ranks with the great trumpet players
in jazz because he was such an original voice and because he was so adaptable --
in big bands and small groups. He was wonderful with singers. He was an all-around
musician. And he was an enthusiastic and inspiring leader. When he’d start a song,
he’d tell his band, ‘One, two, you know what to do.’”
Clark Terry was born Dec. 14, 1920, in St. Louis, the seventh of 11 children of a
laborer father.
In a city brimming with jazz sounds, Mr. Terry as a child fashioned a makeshift trumpet
using household parts, including a garden hose and lead piping. The contraption made
such an offensive noise that neighbors put together a collection to buy a real trumpet
from a pawnshop.
His first professional engagement was with a band called Dollar Bill and His Small
Change. “I missed out on part of my pay because the musicians got about 75 cents
a night and X number of steins of beer,” he told The Post. “I wasn’t drinking then.”
Mr. Terry kept up a tireless freelance career even while playing with Ellington.
He recorded two first-rate albums with Monk in the late 1950s, “Brilliant Corners”
and “In Orbit.” He left Ellington in 1959 to join NBC as a staff musician at a time
when the network was under pressure from the Urban League to hire minorities. Mr.
Terry soon became a member of the “Tonight Show” band.
Mr. Terry’s broad exposure and recognition from the TV work helped launch a new career
as a band leader and personality in his own right and led to his work in the 1970s
as a “jazz ambassador” for State Department-sponsored tours in the Middle East, Africa
and South Asia.
Mr. Terry had long been known for mentoring younger musicians and was cited as a
major influence in the jazz trumpet careers of Davis, Marsalis and Roy Hargrove.
Davis, who died in 1991, admired Mr. Terry’s “big, round, warm sound.” Every time
Davis bought a new trumpet, he gave it to Mr. Terry for refinement.
“Man, Clark had a way of twisting and lightening the spring action of the pumps of
the trumpet, just by adjusting the springs around, that would make your horn sound
altogether different,” Davis wrote in his 1990 memoir. “It made your horn sound like
magic, man.”
Mr. Terry, who frequently appeared at jazz clinics and music schools, said his work
in jazz education had been motivated by his experiences as a young musician. He had
worked with veterans who felt threatened by new talent and jealously guarded their
fingering techniques, deliberately giving bad advice to “whippersnappers” seeking
help.
His work as an encouraging and grueling mentor to a young pianist, Justin Kauflin,
was captured in an acclaimed 2014 documentary, “Keep on Keepin’ On.”
His marriages to Sissy Terry and Pauline Reddon ended in divorce. In 1992, he married
Gwendolyn Paris, who survives. A complete list of survivors could not be immediately
confirmed.
Mr. Terry said that for decades his greatest regret in music was lying to Basie when
he left for the Ellington band in 1951.
Ellington advised Mr. Terry to feign exhaustion and leave the band for an indefinite
period. Basie accommodated Mr. Terry but subtracted an earlier $15 raise from his
final paycheck.
Mr. Terry later confessed to Basie, who shrugged it off. “Why do you think I took
the raise back?” Basie replied.
-30-

-Bob Ringwald
Bob Ringwald Solo Piano, duo, Trio, Quartet
Fulton Street Jazz Band
916/ 806-9551
Amateur (ham) Radio station K 6 Y B V

I decided to change calling the bathroom the "John" and renamed it the "Jim." 
I feel so much better saying I went to the Jim this morning.