Our celebration of Jazz Appreciation Month 2024 honors musicians who were born in April while highlighting the contributions made to jazz by Duke Ellington. This week, let’s pay tribute to trombonist, composer, and arranger Locksley Wellington “Slide” Hampton, who was born on April 21, 1932, in Pennsylvania.
In case you missed it, check out our JAM kickoff and Duke Ellington retrospective here: Black Music Sunday: It’s Jazz Appreciation Month!
”Black Music Sunday” is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 200 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
It’s easy to associate trombones with the great Historically Black Colleges and Universities marching bands—which we covered here in 2021’s “Get ready for the battle of the ‘bones!” But the trombone has also had a long and honored history in the development of jazz.
Musician and jazz writer Steven Cerra takes a deep dive into that history for Jazz Profiles. He quotes Gunther Schuller’s essay, “The Trombone in Jazz,” originally published in 2000’s “The Oxford Companion to Jazz.”
Late nineteenth-century ragtime ensembles, the concert bands prevalent all over the United States and the Americas, and especially the brass and parade bands so popular in New Orleans around the turn of the century all featured the trombone in a variety of musical functions, ranging from soloistic to accompanimental, from individual to ensemble roles.Thus it cannot come as a surprise that in the earliest manifestation of jazz (i.e., the New Orleans collective ensemble style) the trombone was a preeminent, indispensable member of the so-called three-instrument front line: cornet (or trumpet), clarinet, and trombone.
With that in mind, let’s turn back to Slide Hampton. Jazz critic Martin Johnson wrote an extensive biography of Hampton for jazz station WBGO-FM when the trombonist joined the ancestors in November 2021.
He had 11 siblings, and his musician parents had each learn an instrument, creating a family combo that went on tour. He later recalled that through a content run by the Pittsburgh Courier, the Hampton family band’s first proper performance was at Carnegie Hall; they opened for vibraphonist Lionel Hampton (no relation).
As a child, Hampton excelled on the trombone even though he was given a left-handed instrument, and he was naturally a righty. He continued to play left-handed throughout his distinguished career — picking up his self-explanatory nickname, Slide, early on. After his family relocated to Indianapolis, Hampton attended Crispus Attucks High School, the same school as trombone greats David Baker and J. J. Johnson. His career hit the fast track almost as soon as he graduated. He played and arranged for Maynard Ferguson’s big band in the late 1950s, and caught a big break in ‘58 playing alongside trombone great Melba Liston on her lone solo album, Melba Liston and Her ‘Bones.
From there, Hampton worked with drummers Art Blakey, Max Roach and Mel Lewis; pianists Tadd Dameron and Barry Harris; and trumpeter Thad Jones, among many others. Speaking with David Brent Johnson of Indiana Public Media for a 2007 program called Slide at 75he said he’d been influenced in particular by the editions of Blakey’s Jazz Messengers with a three-horn front line. That blend led him to organize his horn lines in separate registers, creating the illusion of immensity. It is evident on “Newport,” a piece from an early Hampton recording, Two Sides of Slide.
All About Jazz continues Hampton’s story.
From 1964 to 1967, he served as music director for various orchestras and artists. Then, following a 1968 tour with Woody Herman, he elected to stay in Europe, performing with other expatriates such as Benny Bailey, Kenny Clarke, Kenny Drew, Art Farmer, and Dexter Gordon. Upon returning to the U.S. in 1977, he began a series of master classes at Harvard, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, De Paul University in Chicago, and Indiana University. During this period he formed the illustrious World of Trombones: an ensemble of nine trombones and a rhythm section.
Slide Hampton’s countless collaborations with the most prominent musicians of jazz were acknowledged by the 1998 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Arrangement with a Vocalist.
Hampton’s first Grammy was for his arrangement of Duke Ellington’s “Cotton Tail,” which Jazz vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater recorded on her tribute to Ella Fitzgerald, “Dear Ella,” in 1997.
Give it a listen:
Here’s another taste of Hampton playing Ellington, on his octet’s 1960 ”Sister Salvation” albumperforming Ellington’s “Just Squeeze Me (But Don’t Tease Me).”
Any trombonists or trombone aficionados must check out Hampton’s solo at Dizzy Gillespie’s 70th Birthday Celebration. The video below is cued to it.
And Hampton was given a birthday tribute of his own in 2017, when he turned 85.
Jazz trombonist Dion Tucker’s “The Chops Shop” YouTube channel is a great place for horn players to visit. Hampton is one of Tucker’s musical hero-mentors, and Tucker shares insights into Hampton’s music and a collection of photographs he took of Hampton in this 17-minute video:
Hampton was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2005. This wide-ranging interview with him, conducted by Molly Murphy for the NEA in 2007, is worth a full read:
Q: When you were developing your sound, what did you want to sound like? How has that evolved over the years?
Slide Hampton: When I was coming up, the big bands were very popular. We were going to as many of those big band performances that came to Indianapolis as possible. A lot of music came through Indianapolis and played at all the different venues there — Tommy Dorsey came, Glen Miller came, Count Basie, Billy Eckstine, Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton. So I was hearing a lot of great trombone players because there were many, many trombone players that were very popular at that time. Trombone became sort of an unpopular instrument later. But at that time, some of the most important bands were led by trombone players.
Q: What do you mean it became unpopular later?
Slide Hampton: In the ’60s they didn’t use trombones in recordings because it was pop music. Most recordings didn’t use the trombone. They might use the trumpet, they often used the saxophone. But the trombone was very seldom used. What was happening was this. In the big band period, of course, you had anywhere from 12 to 17 musicians playing. And when the bookers started to find out that they could book groups that were smaller, and the transportation, hotels, and everything else would cost less, they started using fewer musicians — because they could. And that’s what happened and it started to get to the place that sometimes you didn’t have all the instruments that were usually in the big bands.
(…)
Q: I would imagine you listened to other trombonists when you were developing your sound, I know you certainly came into contact with J.J. Johnson. Was he one of your influences?
Slide Hampton: J.J. was born in Indianapolis and raised there. I was born in Jeannette, Pennsylvania, but raised in Indianapolis. So J.J. was a big influence to us.
Q: But he had already left by the time that you got there.
Slide Hampton: He was on the road, but he was coming back from time to time. I actually heard him play in Indianapolis with the groups that he was playing with when he was staying there. He was a big influence on us, but so was Trummy Young. And, of course, we were hearing Tommy Dorsey and Jack Teagarden and a lot of great trombone players. There were a great number of good trombone players. Another of my big influences was Curtis Fuller. Curtis was one of the musicians that played really well at a very young age. There are some musicians who learn much quicker than everybody else. Curtis was one of them. Lee Morgan was one of them. These guys played at the age that most guys are not really able to be a professional musician, as far as improvisation is concerned. There were just certain people that were able to play at a young age, really play the compositions and understand the harmony, know the compositions, and able to interpret the concept of improvisation with those compositions.
I had no idea what a “bevy of bones” would sound like, until I heard Hampton’s album featuring nine of them! Hampton’s World of Trombones group was reviewed in The New York Times in 1982, by John S. Wilson.
THE glories of the trombone are being extolled and demonstrated this weekend at Seventh Avenue South by Slide Hampton, a left-handed trombonist, who is leading a group called the World of Trombones, an ensemble of nine trombones backed by a four-man rhythm section.
”The trombone,” Mr. Hampton was saying with emphasis at the end of a rehearsal the other day, ”contributes more than most other instruments to the growth of a human being. A trombonist doesn’t have the possibility of using the strength of his instrument to make his point. There is no high trombone shock, like a high trumpet shock. It has to use the beauty of its sound to make a point.
”Playing a trombone makes you realize that you’re going to have to depend on other people,” Mr. Hampton went on. ”If you’re going to need help, you can’t abuse other people. That’s why there’s a real sense of fellowship among trombonists.”
Mr. Hampton’s fellowship is made up of Bennie Powell, Gregory Royal, Robin Eubanks, Clifton Anderson, Bob Trowers, Conrad Herwig and Mr. Hampton on tenor trombones and Doug Purviance and Garfield Fobb playing bass trombone.
Here’s “’Round Midnight” from the “World of Trombones” album.
In 2003, more than two decades after “World of Trombones,” Hampton released another trombone feast. Jack Bowers reviewed “Spirit of the Horn” for All That Jazz.
This is wall-to-wall ‘bones, as Slide leads a dozen of the country’s finest through their paces and welcomes guest soloist Bill Watrous on Ray Noble’s “Cherokee,” Billy Strayhorn’s “A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing” and his own “Blues for Eric.”
I’ll close with “Blues for Eric” from that album.
Please join me in the comments for even more from Slide Hampton, and more bones!
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