Lou Donaldson, saxophonist who helped shape jazz, dies at 98
"In a career dating to the 1940s, he played on acclaimed recordings and worked often with jazz organists.
Lou Donaldson, an alto saxophonist with a supple, earthy style who was a key figure in the development of three styles of jazz from the 1940s to the 1960s and sustained a career for almost seven decades, died Nov. 9 at a hospital in Daytona Beach, Florida. He was 98.
He recently had pneumonia, said his daughter, E. Carol Webster.
Mr. Donaldson emerged as a bebop protégé of alto saxophone master Charlie Parker and by the early 1950s was acknowledged as a leading proponent of the jazz idiom called hard bop, which blended bebop’s assertive rhythmic pulse with a strutting, blues-flavored harmonic approach.
During the late 1950s and 1960s, Mr. Donaldson became even better known for his “soul jazz” recordings, often with organists, creating a bluesy, danceable style of music that became popular on jukeboxes and in nightclubs. His 1967 recording “Alligator Boogaloo,” with organist Dr. Lonnie Smith and guitarist George Benson, was a minor hit.
Mr. Donaldson, a minister’s son from North Carolina, brought a gospel feel to his music, but he also had training as a classical clarinetist. He wrote his college thesis on the musical transition from swing to bebop, which he embodied in his playing.
“Donaldson was second to no alto when it came to a straight balance of bebop and soul,” critic Bob Blumenthal wrote in the liner notes for a 2002 collection of Mr. Donaldson’s early recordings.
After he settled in New York in 1950 — he lived first in Harlem and later the Bronx — Mr. Donaldson established himself as a fixture of the city’s thriving jazz scene. He became a part of the house band at Minton’s, a Harlem jazz club known as a cradle of bebop, and performed at dozens of other clubs. He was nicknamed Sweet Poppa Lou for his graceful touch in playing ballads.
He met virtually everyone in the jazz world of the time and was a sideman on notable early recordings by pianists Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell. In 1952, Mr. Donaldson made his first record for the storied Blue Note jazz label. A year later, he played alongside trumpeter Clifford Brown on the album “New Faces, New Sounds,” among the first and finest examples of hard bop.
“That was tough music early on because it was original and very few people could play like that,” Mr. Donaldson told the Wall Street Journal in 2010. “You needed a hard, gutty sound — a different swinging feel from anything else going on then.”
In 1954, Mr. Donaldson was part of an all-star session led by drummer Art Blakey, “A Night at Birdland,” originally released on three vinyl discs. The effort, hailed as one of the greatest live jazz recordings, launched the decades-long performing career of Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Along with Blakey and Mr. Donaldson, “A Night at Birdland” featured Brown on trumpet, Horace Silver on piano and Curley Russell on bass. The combined albums are considered a definitive statement of the hard-bop style.
Mr. Donaldson also led his own ensembles and in 1958 recorded “Blues Walk,” a mix of standards and original compositions, which he called his favorite album. At the same time, he began to work with jazz organists, notably Jimmy Smith, John Patton and Dr. Lonnie Smith (no relation to Jimmy Smith). It was a pairing particularly suited to Mr. Donaldson’s full sound and was especially popular in Black nightclubs.
Mr. Donaldson hauled a Hammond B3 organ in a trailer behind his station wagon as he and the other musicians drove from New York to California and back again, playing what he called “the circuit” of demanding and sometimes rough clubs in inner cities.
He believed that musical developments in the 1960s had made jazz too abstract and remote from its audience. For Mr. Donaldson, appearing in urban nightclubs was a way of retaining authenticity and a connection to his listeners. “To me, all jazz — even bebop — is still dance music,” he said.
One of the great raconteurs of jazz, Mr. Donaldson could be critical and outspoken when discussing the musical life. He was a clean-living musician — he did not smoke, drink or take drugs — at a time when substance abuse was rampant in jazz. (Parker, Mr. Donaldson’s friend and musical idol, died at 34 in 1955, after years of heroin addiction.)
Mr. Donaldson tried to avoid working with musicians he knew were addicts because they were unreliable on the bandstand and too often stole the band’s earnings to buy drugs.
“Junkies are hazardous people. Real hazardous,” Mr. Donaldson said in a 2012 interview for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program. “I remember one night I was coming up to 110th Street, Central Park, and I stopped at a light. [A musician] said: ‘Wait a minute. I got to get out, I got to get out.’ So I thought he was going out there to take a leak or something. So he comes back and opens the back door, and I hear this noise back there, cling-a-ling-a-ling. So I look back there. Four hubcaps. I said, ‘Man, are you crazy?! … You weren’t out there but a few seconds. Where did you get four hubcaps?’ You know what he had? He had a can opener …
“See, I got away from all of that by getting me a band with no junkies.”
Louis Andrew Donaldson was born Nov. 1, 1926, in Badin, North Carolina. His father was a minister, and his mother was an elementary school teacher who played and taught piano.
As a child, Mr. Donaldson resisted piano lessons and played baseball instead. He was exposed to gospel music in church and eventually took up the clarinet.
At what is now North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro, he played classical music, listened to touring jazz groups, and began to learn the solos of clarinet stars Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw.
Drafted into the Navy during World War II, Mr. Donaldson was assigned to a radar unit at Great Lakes Naval Training Station outside Chicago. Passing by a music room one day, he heard someone playing a squeaky clarinet. He poked his head in the door and told the instructor that he could do a better job and was given a sight-reading audition on the spot.
Asked if he could play the saxophone, Mr. Donaldson replied in the affirmative, even though he had never touched the instrument. Within two weeks, he had learned the rudiments of the alto saxophone and soon joined a Navy jazz band that included trumpeters Clark Terry and Wendell Culley, saxophonist Ernie Wilkins, and other noteworthy musicians.
He practiced constantly, listened to music on the radio and went to clubs in Chicago, where he heard the electrifying Parker for the first time. After the war, he returned to North Carolina A&T and graduated in 1948. He played semipro baseball for two years, then concentrated on music and moved to New York.
During a career that lasted into his early 90s, Mr. Donaldson recorded more than 70 albums and toured throughout North America, Europe and Japan. He was named a Jazz Master of the National Endowment for the Arts in 2013 and lived most recently in Ormond Beach, Florida.
His wife of 56 years and longtime manager, the former Maker Turner, died in 2006, and their daughter Lydia Tutt-Jones died in 1994. In addition to his daughter Carol, survivors include a sister and two grandchildren.
Mr. Donaldson was known for his old-fashioned musical tastes and his dismissive, even acerbic opinions of other musicians, including such acclaimed figures as saxophonists Ornette Coleman, Lee Konitz and John Coltrane, as well as trumpeter Wynton Marsalis.
He complained to the Winston-Salem Journal in 2001 that “there ain’t much of nothin’ happening there” with Marsalis, who has been a dominant force in jazz since the 1980s.
“One or two real notes, notes from the heart, that’s all he manages to play in a solo,” Mr. Donaldson said. “The rest of it, man, it ain’t nothing but a history lesson. So what do I need to hear that for? I was there. I am a history lesson.”
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