Every instrument in jazz has its pioneers that brought the instrument into
vogue, or changed the perception of an instrument from just another rhythmic
instrument to a solo instrument in its own right. Lionel Hampton
(1908-2002) was that pioneer for the vibes: essentially, a upgraded xylophone
made of wooden keys instead of metal. Lionel Hampton was also known for
writing or popularizing some of the classic swing standards during the Swing
Era. Finally, and more on a social note, Lionel Hampton was somewhat the
Jackie Robinson of music. Before he played with Benny Goodman in 1936,
bands were shockingly all-black or all-white.
Hamp started out as a drummer, playing with the Chicago
Defender Newsboys' Band as a youth. Hampton also played on the West Coast
with such groups as Curtis Mosby's Blue Blowers, Reb Spikes, and Paul Howard's
Quality Serenaders, with whom he made his recording debut in 1929. He then
joined Les Hite's band, which for a period accompanied Louis Armstrong. At a
recording session in 1930, a vibraphone happened to be in the studio, and
Armstrong asked Hampton (who had practiced on one previously) if he could play a
little bit behind him and on "Memories of You" and "Shine."
That recording marked the beginning of Hamp's legend on the vibes.
After leaving Hite's band, Hampton formed his own band in
Los Angeles' Paradise Cafe. Then one fateful night in 1936, Benny Goodman
came into the club and discovered him. Soon, Hampton recorded with
Goodman, Teddy Wilson, and Gene Krupa as "The Benny Goodman
Quartet." Six weeks later he officially joined Goodman.
An exciting soloist whose enthusiasm even caused B.G. to
smile, Hampton became one of the stars of the Goodman band, appearing in films,
at the famous 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, and nightly on the radio. In
1937, he started recording regularly as a leader for Victor with specially
assembled all-star groups.
Hampton stayed with Goodman until 1940, sometimes
substituting on drums and taking vocals. In 1940, Lionel Hampton formed
his first big band, and in 1942 had a huge hit with "Flying Home,"
featuring a classic Illinois Jaquet tenor spot (one of the first R&B
solos). During the remainder of the decade, Hampton's extroverted
orchestra was a big favorite, leaning toward R&B, showing the influence of
bebop after 1944, and sometimes getting pretty exhibitionistic. His
sidemen included some jazz giants, including Jaquet, Dinah Washington (who
Hampton helped discover), Cat Anderson, Dexter Gordon, Milt Buckner, Earl Bostic,
Snooky Young, Charlie Mingus, Fats Navarro, Al Gray, and even Wes
Montgomery and Betty
Carter. Hampton's popularity allowed him to continue leading big bands off
and on into the mid-'90s, and the 1953 edition that visited Paris (with Clifford
Brown, Art
Farmer, Quincy
Jones, Jimmy
Cleveland, Gigi
Gryce, George
Wallington, and Annie
Ross) would be difficult to top, although fights over money and the right of
the sideman to record led to its breakup. Hampton appeared and recorded with
many all-star groups in the 1950s including reunions with Benny
Goodman, meetings with the
Oscar Peterson Trio, Stan
Getz, Buddy
DeFranco, and as part of a trio with Art
Tatum and Buddy
Rich. He also was featured in The Benny Goodman Story (1956).
Since the 1950s, Lionel Hampton has mostly repeated past triumphs, always
playing "Hamp's Boogie Woogie" (which features his very rapid
two-finger piano playing), "Hey Ba-Ba-Re-Bop," and "Flying
Home." However, his enthusiasm still causes excitement and he remains a
household name. Hampton has recorded through the years for nearly every label,
including two of his own (Glad Hamp and Who's Who). Despite strokes and the
ravages of age, Lionel Hampton remained a vital force into the 1990s. In January
2001, a vibraphone he had played for 15 years was put into the National Museum
of American History.
Before Lionel Hampton transformed the world of jazz in the 1930s, America's
black and white musicians rarely shared a stage and the vibraphone routinely was
dismissed as a tinny-sounding joke.
But Hampton's sensational success in the Benny Goodman Quartet in 1936 helped
smash the color barrier in American popular music and lifted the vibes to a
place of honor in small-group and big-band jazz.
Hampton died Saturday morning at age 94 in Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New
York, ending one of the more remarkable journeys in jazz history, a performance
career of nearly seven decades that began in Chicago and quickly brought him
international fame.
"When `Hamp' joined Goodman's small group, that was an important social
moment in America," said cultural historian Albert Murray, whose writings
have probed America's racial divide.
"For American audiences to see a white musician on the bandstand with a
black musician--that was a breakthrough in race relations."
Moreover, the unprecedented virtuosity that Hampton achieved on vibes--his
mallets flying so fast as to create a blur--not only elevated the stature of the
instrument but helped spur jazz to new, mainstream popularity in the 1930s and
'40s.
"He brought such joy and pleasure to his audience that no wonder everyone
wanted to hear this music," said alto saxophone pioneer Benny Carter, at 95
one of Hampton's few surviving peers.
"And he brought so much enthusiasm and drive to his instrument that I
wouldn't be surprised if he died with his mallets in his hands."
To Hampton, making music was more an obsession than an occupation, and he was
notorious for spending every waking hour practicing his instrument, writing
scores and putting his musicians through relentless drill sessions. These
efforts made his own swing band, which he formed in 1940, one of the most
popular in the world, as well as a launching pad for such future giants of jazz
as Quincy Jones, Dexter Gordon, Illinois Jacquet, Joe Williams and Dinah
Washington.
"Music was our wife, and we loved her," Hampton said in a Tribune
interview in 1993, explaining his devotion to the art form. "And we stayed
with her, and we clothed her, and we put diamond rings on her hands.
"So I always figured I'd still be playing at this age," he added, at
age 84, on the eve of a show at the Norris Cultural Arts Center in St. Charles,
one of his last appearances in the Chicago area.
But Hampton's unmistakably sunny, optimistic approach to making music belied a
hard start in life. Although he did not have a copy of his birth certificate,
Hampton marked his birth date as April 20, 1908, and he considered Birmingham,
Ala., his hometown.
His father, the singer-pianist Charles Hampton, was declared missing in action
in World War I. So the family moved to Chicago in 1919, part of the Great
Migration of Southern blacks to the industrial North.
After learning the essentials of playing drums from a nun during a brief period
of study at Holy Rosary Academy near Kenosha, Wis., Hampton polished his
percussion skills upon returning to Chicago in the Chicago Defender's Newsboys
Band, under the direction of the revered educator Major N. Clark-Smith.
When he wasn't beating a bass drum or tapping a snare, Hampton listened to
records by Chicago jazz masters such as Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton,
playing along on xylophone.
"Chicago was jazzy, man, jazzy--they had all the great jazz men,"
Hampton recalled in the Tribune interview. "Louis Armstrong was playing at
the Royal Gardens down on 31st Street with Joe Oliver, and you had [reedist]
Jimmy Noone and Freddie Keppard, who was another great trumpet player.
"And you had the great entertainers--Alberta Hunter, she was the favorite
singer of Al Capone."
Having immersed himself in Chicago jazz during its first great flowering, in the
1920s, Hampton moved to Los Angeles and by 1930 was playing drums in a recording
session with Armstrong, who suggested that Hampton try a set of vibes parked in
a corner of the studio. The date yielded "Memories of You" and
"Shine," which rank as the first improvised jazz recordings on vibes
and document Hampton's already fluid style.
But it was Hampton's wife, Gladys, who saw the full potential of her husband's
new instrument.
"She had me buy a set of vibes and said, `Now you learn this instrument,'
and she used to tell me that all the time," Hampton recalled in a 1991
Tribune interview.
Hampton clearly took Gladys' advice, for in 1936, when he was fronting a band in
Los Angeles' Paradise nightclub, in walked Benny Goodman, the newly anointed
King of Swing, who liked what he heard and stepped onto the stage.
"One night I'm playing on the bandstand, and I heard this guy playing
clarinet," said Hampton in 1991. "And I'm thinking, `Boy, who's this?'
"And then I hear this drummer, and I'm thinking, `Bam. Tyree is really hot
tonight,'" added Hampton, referring to Tyree Glenn, his trombonist, who
filled in on drums when Hampton played vibes.
"So then I look around and there's Benny [Goodman] on clarinet, Gene [Krupa]
on drums and Teddy [Wilson] on piano. Now Teddy [who was black] really wasn't
publicly playing onstage with Benny yet at that time; he was just touring with
Benny and playing the intermission feature, so this was something really new and
hot."
That was apparent on Dec. 11, 1936, when Hampton helped Goodman's quartet at the
Pennsylvania Hotel, in New York, "The first time that black and white ever
played [on a major commercial booking]," Hampton said.
"That was a big deal at the time, because no blacks were integrated with
whites in anything--not in sports, basketball, football, nothing.
"But Benny put me [as well as Wilson] in there, and the audience just
applauded and applauded. I think that was the loudest applause any artists ever
got on the stage ever."
Yet it was just the beginning for Hampton, whose often-maniacal performance
style and lightning technique persuaded RCA to sign him as a headliner. The big
band Hampton created in 1940 reflected his showmanship and high craft, instantly
becoming one of the most brilliant in swing.
"The band was a big, knock-down, drag-out, fat-chewing band," said
92-year-old clarinetist-bandleader Artie Shaw. "It was bang, bang, bang--it
sure gave people what they wanted."
In 1942 it also gave the fledgling tenor saxophonist Jacquet the biggest hit of
his career, "Flying Home."
"I played the big solo, but one of the great bands of our time was behind
it," said Jacquet, 79.
"Plus Hamp was a showman. He wasn't just playing vibes, he was selling what
he was doing."
When the even more turbulent sounds of bebop started to eclipse dance-band music
in the mid-1940s, Hampton was one of the few swing musicians to embrace rather
than condemn it, recording "Hot Mallets" with bebop trumpeter Dizzy
Gillespie.
From that time through the early 1990s, Hampton toured the world with his big
band--the longest-running ensemble of its kind--earning a Kennedy Center Honor
in 1992 and a National Medal of the Arts in 1997.
Hampton used part of his fortune to build affordable housing in Harlem and to
encourage musical studies at a jazz festival that bears his name in Moscow,
Idaho. He made his last public appearance at the festival, this year.
His wife died in 1971; they had no children.
"The guy had a gift," Shaw said. "What Heifetz was to the violin,
Hampton was to the vibes."
