# Jazz legend and composer of surpassing grace Benny Golson dies at 95 – Videos, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2024/09/23/jazz-legend-and-composer-of-surpassing-grace-benny-golson-dies-at-95-videos-photos/
- Published: 2024-09-23T07:27:01+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**In a seven-decade career, he composed such jazz standards as “I Remember Clifford,”“
Along Came Betty” and “Whisper Not.”**

Benny Golson, a preeminent tenor saxophonist who was also the composer of such elegant
jazz standards as “I Remember Clifford,” “Along Came Betty” and “Whisper Not,” died
Sept. 21 at his home in Manhattan. He was 95. His daughter, Brielle Golson, confirmed
the death but did not provide a specific cause.

![During his prolific career, saxophonist Benny Golson made key connections | KNKX
Public Radio](https://i0.wp.com/npr.brightspotcdn.com/0b/36/0f78490b4434adf01cb4f20d6c84/
bennygolsonstudiosessionphoto.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

Over a seven-decade career, Mr. Golson exhibited a combination of grace, warmth 
and technical virtuosity influenced in part by his Philadelphia childhood friend
John Coltrane.

In 1959, Mr. Golson and trumpeter Art Farmer founded the Jazztet, one of the premier“
hard bop” jazz groups of the era. He appeared in perhaps the most famous photograph
of jazz musicians ever made, “A Great Day in Harlem,” taken by Art Kane in 1958,
and was featured in an Oscar-nominated 1994 documentary about the photo, directed
by Jean Bach. He was one of the last two surviving musicians among the 57 in the
picture.

Mr. Golson was “without question jazz’s most significant living composer,” music
journalist Marc Myers wrote in 2008. Mr. Golson began writing and arranging music
in the 1940s, as a student at Howard University, and first attracted wide notice
a decade later when other musicians started to record his compositions [“Stablemates”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn3L6ikBK9A)
and “Whisper Not.”

His best-known tune was [“I Remember Clifford,”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrnDO71Kw5E)
a tribute to trumpeter Clifford Brown, a friend and onetime bandmate who died, at
25, in a car accident in 1956. Mr. Golson, then on tour with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie’s
band in California, spent two weeks crafting the poignant, slow-moving melody, which
evokes both sadness and the buoyant tone of Brown’s trumpet.

Trumpeter [Donald Byrd](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_XDEStRF88) and [Gillespie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTe1GV5ENO4)
separately recorded the song the next year. Singer and composer Jon Hendricks later
wrote lyrics to “I Remember Clifford,” which has been recorded by more than 300 
musicians.

“I wanted every note to reflect Clifford Brown,” Mr. Golson said in 2008. “And I’ve
always said I wished I had never written it, that he was still with us today.”

In 1958, Mr. Golson joined drummer Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, a group that embodied
muscular, blues-driven hard bop.

Mr. Golson brought several fellow Philadelphia-bred musicians into the band, including
trumpeter Lee Morgan, pianist Bobby Timmons and bassist Jymie Merritt, giving the
Messengers a cohesive, dynamic sound. Mr. Golson also encouraged Timmons to write
one of the ensemble’s most memorable songs, the gospel-drenched “[Moanin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKOoxgI_xfQ)’.”

Mr. Golson at the Bohemian Caverns in Washington in 2013.

Blakey gave Mr. Golson a bandstand lesson that he never forgot, playing loud rolls
or shots on the drums during Mr. Golson’s sax solos.

“Finally, he hollered over at me, ‘Get up out of that hole!’ ” Mr. Golson told Myers’s
JazzWax blog. “I said to myself, ‘Man, I guess I am in a hole. Nobody can hear me.’
So I started playing harder and with more bite.”

“When I originally told Art about my idea for a march, he thought I was crazy,” 
Mr. Golson told the Wall Street Journal in 2012. “I told him, I was thinking of 
a dirty, funky, greasy march — like the ones played at football games by Black college
marching bands.”

Blakey was still skeptical, but Mr. Golson persuaded him to try out the tune at 
Small’s Paradise, a crowded club in Harlem.

“Space was tight,” Mr. Golson recalled. “But as soon as the one-two beat began, 
everyone got up to dance anyway, knocking drinks off tables. Art looked over at 
me and said, ‘Well I’ll be damned.’ After that, Art and the Messengers played ‘Blues
March’ all the time.”

By that time, Mr. Golson had a solo career underway, having released eight albums
as a leader between 1957 and 1959. With Farmer, he launched the Jazztet, a group
that also featured McCoy Tyner on piano and Curtis Fuller on trombone. Mr. Golson
reprised earlier tunes and wrote new ones, such as “Killer Joe,” while recording
with the Jazztet before he stepped away from the bandstand in 1962 to concentrate
on writing.

While living in Los Angeles, he wrote for TV shows including “Mannix,” “Mission:
Impossible,” “Room 222” and “M.A.S.H.,” and he arranged music for singers as diverse
as Peggy Lee, Lou Rawls and Dusty Springfield.

Mr. Golson studied classical composers — “I’ve always loved melody. My heroes are
Puccini, Brahms, Chopin and Duke Ellington” — and stopped playing the saxophone 
for 12 years. When he picked up the instrument again in the mid-1970s, Mr. Golson
found that he could no longer play.

He launched a slow comeback and, in 1982, reunited with Farmer for a new version
of the Jazztet. He returned to form on tenor saxophone, developing a muted, almost
purring tone that was instantly recognizable, and he had a strong second act, writing
new tunes and performing into his 90s.

Bennie Golson was born Jan. 25, 1929, in Philadelphia. He was a toddler when his
father left the family, and he was raised by his mother, who worked as a seamstress
and had boarders living at the house.

Several uncles and aunts were musical, and young Bennie — who later legally changed
the spelling of his name to Benny — began taking piano lessons at 9. When he was
14, he saw Lionel Hampton’s band, featuring Arnett Cobb on tenor saxophone, at Philadelphia’s
Earle Theater.

Despite her meager income, Mr. Golson’s mother came home one day with a new tenor
saxophone for her son. As he became more skilled, he met a slightly older budding
saxophone player — Coltrane — who visited the Golson home to practice and listen
to records. Both were strongly influenced by the bebop revolution of the 1940s, 
led by Gillespie and alto saxophonist Charlie Parker.

Mr. Golson and Coltrane were in their teens when they joined a local dance band,
but after showing up for a gig, they discovered they had been replaced. They went
back to Mr. Golson’s house, disconsolate.

Coltrane, who died in 1967, went on to become one of the most influential tenor 
saxophonists in jazz history. Mr. Golson, meanwhile, enrolled at Howard University,
which at the time taught only classical music. He sneaked off campus at night to
play in jazz clubs along Washington’s U Street corridor and had to climb over a 
wall to return to his dormitory.

Disputes with his conservative music teachers led Mr. Golson to leave Howard without
a degree. (He was later awarded an honorary doctorate by the university.) While 
playing with ensembles in Philadelphia and Atlantic City, he was mentored by jazz
composer Tadd Dameron, then worked his way up to big bands fronted by vibraphonist
Hampton, saxophonist Earl Bostic and then Gillespie.

An early marriage, to Seville Golson, ended in divorce, and three sons from that
marriage, Odis, Reggie and Robert, predeceased him. Mr. Golson married Bobbie Hurd
in 1959. In addition to his wife and their daughter, Brielle, survivors include 
grandchildren.

Mr. Golson’s presence in the “Great Day in Harlem” photograph led to a speaking 
role in the 2004 Steven Spielberg film “The Terminal.” Tom Hanks plays an Eastern
European stuck at JFK International Airport for months while hoping to complete 
his father’s quest: getting the autographs of all 57 musicians in the “Great Day
in Harlem” photo. The only signature missing is Mr. Golson’s.

Of all the renowned musicians in the photograph — Gillespie, Blakey, Count Basie,
Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Charles Mingus —
Mr. Golson and Sonny Rollins were the last survivors.

“Even now at 90, I don’t know everything there is to know,” Mr. Golson told the 
Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2019. “So when I teach master classes, sometimes the
teacher learns from the kids. That’s the way it is. That’s the way it should be.
Like Sonny Rollins said to me once: ‘There’s no end to this music.’”

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