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    Curtis Fowlkes, Avant-Jazz Pioneer of the 1980s, Dies at 73

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    A founder of the acclaimed Jazz Passengers, he was also a sought-after sideman who played trombone for both jazz and rock heavyweights.Curtis Fowlkes, a trombonist and vocalist who was best known as a founder of the Jazz Passengers, a playfully eclectic ensemble that emerged from the New York avant-jazz underground of the 1980s to achieve critical acclaim while collaborating with the likes of Elvis Costello, Debbie Harry and Jeff Buckley, died on Aug. 31 in Brooklyn. He was 73.His son, Saadiah, said he died in a hospital of congestive heart failure.Blending sly humor and artistic daring with soft-spoken dignity, Mr. Fowlkes was the “balancing magician” of the Jazz Passengers, Roy Nathanson, the band’s co-founder and saxophonist, said in a phone interview.The Jazz Passengers released 11 albums, starting with “Broken Night Red Light” in 1987, without ever achieving more than modest commercial success. But with a fan base largely consisting of cognoscenti and fellow musicians, the band’s reputation far outweighed its sales.Mr. Fowlkes’s supple trombone stylings also stood out in his work as a sought-after sideman for jazz notables like Henry Threadgill, Charlie Haden and Bill Frisell, as well as for rock stars like Lou Reed and Levon Helm.“He was equally at home with boppish fluency or a gutbucket blare, often incorporating the array of lip slurs, wobbles and pitch slides that can make a trombone evoke a human voice,” Nate Chinen, a former New York Times music critic, recently wrote for the Philadelphia-based public radio station WRTI.He also provided rich, nuanced vocals for the band, which made waves in 1994 with the album “In Love.” That album featured vocals by Jeff Buckley, the star-crossed sensation who was then just beginning his career (he would die young in 1997), as well as Mavis Staples and Ms. Harry, who became a regular member of the band.The Jazz Passengers in an undated photo. From left: Bill Ware, Sam Bardfeld, Mr. Fowlkes, E.J. Rodriguez, Ray Nathanson, Ben Perowsky and Brad Jones.Dana WareThe band’s 1996 album, “Individually Twisted,” included a duet with Ms. Harry and Mr. Costello on the jazz standard “Don’cha Go ‘Way Mad.”“Its pleasures are various and manifest,” the critic Robert Christgau wrote in a review, “and if they’re over the head of the average Costello completist, that’s because this pop move isn’t aimed at any kind of average.”The Jazz Passengers were part of a wave of musicians pushing the frontiers of jazz in the 1980s and ’90s that was centered in clubs like the Knitting Factory in downtown Manhattan and included the saxophonist John Zorn, the clarinetist Don Byron and the saxophonist John Lurie, who became a face of New York cool as an actor in films like Jim Jarmusch’s “Stranger Than Paradise” and “Down by Law.”Mr. Fowlkes and Mr. Nathanson, who met while playing in the pit orchestra of the Big Apple Circus in 1981, broke onto the scene in Mr. Lurie’s band the Lounge Lizards in the early 1980s before splitting off to pursue their own off-kilter musical vision.Blending post-bop jazz, performance art and old-time vaudeville slapstick, the Jazz Passengers were “a crew of jazz oddities,” as New York magazine once described them, specializing in “perky, irreverent, sometimes gorgeously cinematic music that somehow manages to orbit both Sun Ra and the Marx Brothers.”The live production “The Jazz Passengers in Egypt,” which premiered at the La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in the East Village in 1990, was equal parts jazz show, performance art piece and borscht-belt comedy routine, with a plot involving a dream sequence in ancient Egypt.“We were really goofballs,” Mr. Nathanson said. “We really wanted this band to be like Brooklyn guys on the street — funny, less cool — but also seriously connected to the language of jazz.”Curtis Mataw Fowlkes was born on March 19, 1950, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, along with his twin brother, James. His father, also named James, made machine parts for an aircraft manufacturer on Long Island; his mother, Rosa (Coor) Fowlkes, was a homemaker.In addition to his son, he is survived by his brother; a daughter, Elisheba Fowlkes; and three grandchildren. His marriage to Cynthia Lewis ended in divorce last year.Mr. Fowlkes grew up in a house filled with the jagged rhythms of his father’s bebop records. He chose trombone for his instrument in elementary school because he figured too many people would want to play his first choice, saxophone.“People didn’t even know what the trombone was,” he said in a 2011 interview with Kira Joy Williams, a Brooklyn-based artist and photographer. “I barely knew what it was. But I had made a statement that gave me some control.”As a student at Samuel J. Tilden High School, Mr. Fowlkes started to earn money with his music, playing trombone with local Latin, R&B, funk and reggae bands, and continued playing part time after graduation.“I was into my 20s and still playing music, but I was taking day jobs too,” he said in a 1988 video interview. “I worked construction jobs, and some of my friends would say, ‘Well, look, we want to do a certain style of music but we can’t make a living off of it, so we’re going to take jobs so we can do the music we like to do.’”“But now,” he added, “when I look back on it, I realized that you have to devote yourself to music.” More

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      Grachan Moncur III, Trombonist Whose Star Shone Briefly, Dies at 85

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      He mixed free jazz and post-bop in notable 1960s and ’70s recordings. But he withdrew from the jazz scene, in part because of a dispute over publishing rights.Grachan Moncur III, a trombonist and composer who came to renown in the 1960s and early ’70s for his deft playing of a hybrid of post-bop and free jazz, but who later receded from the spotlight, died on June 3 — his 85th birthday — in a hospital in Newark.His son Kenya said the cause was cardiac arrest.“Whenever I have a conversation about what’s wrong with the jazz business, I always start out by saying, ‘Where is Grachan Moncur?’” the alto saxophonist Jackie McLean, one of Mr. Moncur’s most important collaborators, told The New York Times in 2003.Long before Mr. McLean asked that question, Mr. Moncur (pronounced mon-KUR) had started his jazz career as a teenager, jamming at the New York nightclub Birdland and sitting in with the drummer Art Blakey’s band, the Jazz Messengers. In 1959, he went on the road with Ray Charles.But after about two years, feeling a need to perform with a smaller ensemble based in New York City, he was recruited to join the Jazztet, a sextet formed by the trumpeter Art Farmer and the saxophonist Benny Golson. He played with that group until it disbanded in 1962, then took that summer off to study the challenging and unconventional music of Thelonious Monk. His goal was to learn how to write his own.“I just wanted to get the sound of his music inside of my body,” Mr. Moncur said in an interview with the website All About Jazz in 2003.On a night when he had written two compositions, he said, he got a call from Mr. McLean, whom he had known since Mr. Moncur was a teenager, asking him to join his ensemble for rehearsals and club dates in advance of recording an album for Blue Note Records.That album, “One Step Beyond,” and “Destination … Out!,”both released in 1963, were critically praised documents of a transitional period in jazz when musicians like Mr. McLean and Mr. Moncur were blending the harmonic advances of the bebop era with the more adventurous spirit of the avant-garde. They contained five of Mr. Moncur’s compositions, among them “Ghost Town,” which conjures up desolation in long passages where little is heard except reverberations on vibes and cymbals.Mr. Moncur then recorded two albums for Blue Note as a leader, “Evolution” (1963) and “Some Other Stuff” (1964), with stellar accompaniment. Both albums featured Bobby Hutcherson on vibraphone and Tony Williams on drums; “Evolution” also featured Lee Morgan on trumpet and Mr. McLean, while the “Some Other Stuff” lineup included Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone.Reviewing “Evolution” in The Pittsburgh Courier, the critic Phyl Garland praised Mr. Moncur’s technique and the album’s title number, which, she wrote, evoked images of “mankind emerging from one murky, primeval mire into another, undergoing one subtle change after another, as does the music.”What might have been a longer relationship with Blue Note ended after two albums in a dispute over publishing rights. In the end, he managed to retain his rights to the music from “Evolution,” but he sensed that he would not last long at the label.“They were very disappointed with that, and they kind of dropped me like a hot potato,” Mr. Moncur told All About Jazz. He believed he was blackballed over his position — a position he later came to regret. In retrospect, he said, he wished he had found a way to compromise with Alfred Lion, Blue Note’s founder.“I think my mind was really going to a revolutionary attitude more on the business trip than it was on a musical trip,” he said, “because I was kind of determined on trying to own my own music.”Grachan Moncur III was born on June 3, 1937, in Manhattan. His father, Grachan II, played bass with the Savoy Sultans, a swing ensemble, at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. His mother, Ella (Wright) Moncur, was a beautician whose clients — and friends — included the singer Sarah Vaughan.Although enamored of the trombone from age 5, Grachan nonetheless received a cello from his father. But the cello did not inspire him, so his father gave him a trombone. Lessons followed. He also had a role model for the trombone: his father, who played the instrument.“I have never, up until today, heard anybody with a sound like my father,” Mr. Moncur told All About Jazz. “He had a timbre that was very dark and clear. That sound, it just kind of stayed with me, and I always wanted to produce that same type of — project that same type of sound that my father had.”He graduated from the Laurinburg Institute, a historically Black prep school in North Carolina that Dizzy Gillespie had attended in the 1930s. Back in New York, he attended the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School, then kick-started his career in nightclubs before joining Ray Charles’s orchestra.In 1964, Mr. Moncur learned that the Actors Studio was looking to cast a musician for its Broadway production of James Baldwin’s civil rights drama “Blues for Mister Charlie.” Mr. Moncur played two roles, one of them a trombonist, and contributed a piece of music.He recorded “Some Other Stuff” three months after the play opened; two of the cuts on the album, “Gnostic” and “Nomadic,” were reflections on his breakup with a girlfriend and his departure from his $27-a-week apartment.“I was a nomad after losing my room, and I was a gnostic because I had to survive by my wits,” he told The Times.He continued to record, releasing two albums in 1969 on the French label BYG Actuel, “New Africa” and “Aco del de Madrugada” (“One Morning I Waked Up Very Early”), and another, “Echoes of Prayer,” with the Jazz Composers Orchestra, in 1974. But he was entering a long, relatively quiet period during which he made almost no records but ran jazz workshops in Harlem in a studio called Space Station; performed in Europe; and taught jazz at the Newark Community School of the Arts.In 1994, Mr. Moncur adapted his four-movement “New Africa” suite into a theatrical piece for the Alternative Museum in Manhattan. The poet Amiri Baraka, a friend, was the producer.In addition to his son Kenya, Mr. Moncur is survived by his wife, Tamam Tracy (Sims) Moncur; two other sons, Grachan IV and Adrien; his daughters, Ella and Vera Moncur; his twin brothers, Lofton and Lonnie; 10 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. His son Toih died in 2016, and his daughter Hilda died in 1992. He lived in Newark.In 2004, the composer and arranger Mark Masters brought together Mr. Moncur and seven other musicians to reprise, with new charts, eight of Mr. Moncur’s pieces for an album, “Exploration,” released on the Capri label.“As a composer, he was original and singular,” Mr. Masters said in a phone interview. “He wasn’t derivative of anyone. I see the Monk influence, but Monk wasn’t hovering over him. His music doesn’t sound like anyone else’s.” More

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      Slide Hampton, Celebrated Trombonist, Composer and Arranger, Dies at 89

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      He began playing professionally as a child, worked with some of jazz’s biggest names in the late 1950s, and remained a leading figure in the music for the next 60 years.Slide Hampton, a jazz trombonist, composer and arranger who arrived on the scene at the end of the bebop era and remained in demand for decades afterward, was found dead on Saturday at his home in Orange, N.J. He was 89.His grandson Richard Hampton confirmed the death.Mr. Hampton made his name in the late 1950s with bands led by Dizzy Gillespie, Maynard Ferguson and others. He was considered a triple threat — not just a virtuoso trombonist but also the creator of memorable compositions and arrangements.He won Grammy Awards for his arrangements in 1998 and in 2005, the same year the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master.During the 1980s, he led a band called the World of Trombones that consisted of up to nine trombones and a rhythm section. Big, brassy jazz was out of favor at the time, but by then he had become an elder statesman of jazz, and he was able to insist on bringing his full band into clubs more interested in small, intimate groups. Once in the door, he was almost always a hit.He was also a fixture on college campuses, teaching composition and theory to the next generation of jazz musicians and instilling in them a respect for jazz — and the trombone — that went well beyond the music.“Playing a trombone makes you realize that you’re going to have to depend on other people,” Mr. Hampton told The New York Times in 1982. “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 in concert at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center in Manhattan in 2006.Rahav Segev for The New York TimesLocksley Wellington Hampton was born on April 21, 1932, in Jeannette, Pa., about 30 miles east of Pittsburgh. He was the youngest of 12 children, and his parents, Clarke and Laura (Buford) Hampton, recruited most of them to be in the family band they led — Locksley joined as a singer and dancer when he was just 6.In 1938 the family moved to Indianapolis in search of more work. The city had a thriving jazz scene, and they were soon touring the Midwest.They never lacked for gigs, but they did lack a trombone player, a deficit the elder Mr. Hampton remedied by handing the instrument to his youngest son when he was 12 and teaching him to play it. He took to the instrument — no easy task for a child — and it didn’t take long for him to earn the nickname Slide.He studied at a local conservatory, but most of his musical education came through his family and other musicians. He was particularly taken by J.J. Johnson, the leading trombonist of the sophisticated school of jazz known as bebop, who lived in Indianapolis. Mr. Hampton later recalled that one evening he was standing outside a club with his instrument, too young to enter, when Mr. Johnson walked by. He was supposed to play that night, but he didn’t have his trombone. Mr. Hampton gave him his own.Mr. Hampton later adapted several of Mr. Johnson’s compositions. He kept one of them, “Lament,” in his repertoire for decades.After his father died in 1951, the family band was led by Locksley’s brother Duke. In 1952 the band won a contest to play at Carnegie Hall, opening for Lionel Hampton (no relation).While in New York, Mr. Hampton and one of his brothers went to Birdland, the fabled jazz club, where they saw the bebop pianist Bud Powell play. That experience, he later said, left a much greater impression on him than performing at Carnegie.Mr. Hampton married Althea Gardner in 1948; they divorced in 1997. He is survived by his brother Maceo; his children, Jacquelyn, Lamont and Locksley Jr.; five grandchildren; and 13 great-grandchildren. His son Gregory died before him.The Hampton family band later returned to New York to play at the Apollo Theater, and Slide urged them to relocate to the city. When they demurred, he made his own plans.A friend recommended a once-a-week gig in Houston, and Mr. Hampton jumped at the chance. It paid well enough that he could use the rest of the week to study and compose.In 1955 the rhythm-and-blues pianist Buddy Johnson recruited him for his band, and he relocated to New York. A year later he moved to Lionel Hampton’s band, and a year after that he joined Maynard Ferguson’s. He composed some of the Ferguson band’s better-known pieces, including “The Fugue” and “Three Little Foxes.”Mr. Hampton found himself in high demand and struck out on his own in 1962 as the leader of the Slide Hampton Octet. Though that band lasted just a year and he later said he did a poor job as its leader, it greatly increased his visibility.As a leader, Mr. Hampton was humble. He often took a seat in the audience after playing a solo so as not to upstage other band members when their turns came. Once, when a television crew showed up to film the band, he cut his solo short to make sure everyone got a turn on camera.In the early 1960s he bought a brownstone in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, which quickly became a hot spot for jam sessions and a crash pad for some of the country’s top musicians. The saxophonists Wayne Shorter and Eric Dolphy and the guitarist Wes Montgomery all lived there for a time.After his octet broke up, Mr. Hampton worked as a musical director for Motown Records, collaborating on productions for Stevie Wonder, the Four Tops and others. There he encountered firsthand the rising popularity of pop and R&B and concluded that jazz was being boxed out of the American music scene. After touring Europe in 1968 with Woody Herman, he settled in Paris, where he found not just a thriving jazz audience, but public subsidies that supported the music.“The conditions and the respect for the artist in Europe were so incredible that I was overwhelmed,” Mr. Hampton told The Times in 1982. “They saw jazz as an art form in Europe long before they did here.”He returned to America in 1977, initially to write arrangements for the saxophonist Dexter Gordon, who himself had recently returned from Europe. By then the place of jazz had changed — major labels were becoming interested, government grants were becoming available and colleges were adding jazz to the curriculum.Mr. Hampton was once more in demand as a musician — and now also as an educator. Over the next decades he taught at Harvard, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, DePaul University in Chicago, and elsewhere. And he continued to play at New York venues into the 2010s.When asked what explained his success over such a long career, Mr. Hampton insisted that it wasn’t just talent, but also practice — he practiced four to five hours a day, and would do even more if he had the time.“Everything that’s really of quality requires a lot of work,” he said in a 2007 interview with the National Endowment for the Arts. “Things that come easy don’t have the highest level of quality connected to them.” More