Benny Golson: Jazz Master Tribute (Part Two)

Jazz Grandmasters Ron Carter and Benny Golson for the Jazz Masters series produced by Greg and Jewel at Ginny’s Supper Club in 2013

On tenor sax, Golson was influenced by Coleman Hawkins, Don Byas and Lucky Thompson. His robust, harmonically-rich sound apparently appealed to the great drummer and band leader Art Blakey, who convinced Golson, by this time a New York resident, to go on the road with him in 1958. Golson became the musical director of The Jazz Messengers, contributing tunes such as "Blues March" and "Just By Myself." Golson also convinced pianist Bobby Timmons to write a bridge for a hip ditty that became "Moanin,'" which became a massive hit for the group.

Timmons returned the favor in an extra-musical way. The Jazz Messengers had a gig in the Spotlight Room in Northeast Washington, D.C. Timmons had met a woman, who wanted to bring a friend. So Timmons asked Golson if he would say that the friend was with him.

"So I went to the door, and she came in, but I really didn't pay attention because it was kind of dark. I went on about my business. When I got up on the bandstand, I happened to look down at her. I said, ‘Oh my goodness!’ My legs turned to rubber; I had to lean against the piano. I asked Bobby, 'Who's that over there?' He said, 'That's the girl you let in!'

"When I got off the bandstand I said: I've never seen anyone before like you. Could have your phone number? She said, 'Well if you want my phone number, you can look in the phone book.' I said to myself, ‘she thinks she's cute. I'm not going to bother with her.’ The next morning I was in the phone book! Then she invited me to her house, and I met her mother and others. She had friends who would say, ‘you're going to take up with a jazz musician? Most of those people are divorced, separated, and my wife Bobbie and I are still together after 50 years."

Bobbie, Benny, Jewel, and Greg at Ginny’s Supper Club in Harlem

However, there were tough times along the way. After his short but fruitful tenure with Blakey, he put together an ensemble, The Jazztet, with trumpeter Art Farmer and trombonist Curtis Fuller. He began studying with Henry Brant, who had orchestrated Spartacus and Cleopatra (with Elizabeth Taylor) and is a 20th-century pioneer of so-called spatial music. Several friends in Los Angeles—Quincy Jones, Oliver Nelson, and Leonard Feather—began imploring him to come west. In the mid-'60s he did and ended up penning themes and scores for M*A*S*H, Mission Impossible, Room 222, The Partridge Family, Mannix, and more. But not at first.

As a composer, Golson didn't want to be pigeonholed in Hollywood as a jazz guy or simply as an orchestrator, so he stopped playing the saxophone and even turned down an offer to orchestrate Gordon Parks' The Learning Tree. "My wife thought I was crazy," Golson says, but he wanted to compose not just orchestrate, which makes "a hero out of other people and my name would never be up there... I wrote the comedy things, over at Paramount. Wrote dramatic stuff, mood stuff, love themes with a big string section."

"But by then, man, my nest egg was going down like an elevator out of control. At that point, everything was in the pawnshop: my horn, cameras, Bobbie's jewelry and furs. It took me two years to get started. See, I had to pay rent. I had this house up on a hill, a pool; the whole back of the house was glass, upstairs and downstairs were beautiful. I was scared to death. But then I started to make the money. When things started to roll, it was okay."

After a decade or so he got tired of that scene and routine, so Golson came back north, picked up his horn, honed an oblique and rhythmically unorthodox style on tenor sax and began making gigs again. One such gig was quite special: a cameo performance and appearance in Steven Spielberg's 2004 feature film, The Terminal, starring Tom Hanks.

In August 2008 Golson introduced a new group, Benny Golson's New Jazztet at the New York club Smoke, and went into the recording studio directly thereafter to lay down a series of new tunes and arrangements. The New Jazztet featured Golson on tenor sax with Eddie Henderson (trumpet), Steve Davis (trombone), Buster Williams (bass), Carl Allen (drums), and Mike LeDonne (piano). In addition to composing a fresh arrangement of Sonny Rollins' "Airegin," Thelonious Monk’s “Epistrophy,” and his own "Come Back Jamaica," Golson tested out arrangements of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," a portion of an opera by Verdi, and even a song by DeBarge, an R&B group well known in the '80s. A special highlight for this writer was the version of Benny’s “Whisper Not” featuring the late great “beyond category” vocalist Al Jarreau. The recording was titled New Time, New ‘Tet.

Why would a senior giant of jazz saxophone and composition take such radically eclectic risks? "Creativity never retires,” he explains. “Anybody who's worth his or her salt never says: ‘I've done this and I've done that—now I'm finished.’ Music is open-ended; there is no end to it. Hank Jones put it this way: 'The horizon is always ahead.' That's right. It's perpetual. You want to go on, you don't want to stop."

Selected Discography

Art Farmer/Benny Golson/Jazztet, The Complete Argo/Mercury Sessions (Mosaic, 2005)

Benny Golson, Terminal 1 (Concord, 2004)

Benny Golson, One Day, Forever (Arkadia Jazz, 1996-2000)

Curtis Fuller, Bluesette, Pt. 2 (Savoy, 1993)

Jazztet, Moment to Moment (Soul Note, 1983)

Art Blakey, Moanin' (Blue Note, 1957)