Slide Hampton
Encyclopedia
Locksley Wellington "Slide" Hampton (born April 21, 1932) is an American
jazz
trombonist, composer
and arranger.
He was a 1998 Grammy Award
winner for "Best Jazz Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s)", as arranger for "Cotton Tail
" performed by Dee Dee Bridgewater
. He was also a Grammy winner in 2005 for "Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album," The Way: Music of Slide Hampton, The Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, and received another nomination in 2006 for his arrangement of "Stardust" for the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band.
In 2005, the National Endowment for the Arts
honored Slide Hampton with its highest honor in jazz, the NEA Jazz Masters
Award. A master composer/arranger and uniquely gifted trombone player, Hampton's career is among the most distinguished in jazz.
. Laura and Clarke “Deacon” Hampton raised 12 children, taught them how to play musical instruments and set out with them as a family band. The family first came to Indianapolis
in 1938. The Hamptons were a very musical family in which mother, father, eight brothers, and four sisters all played instruments. Slide Hampton is one of the few left-handed trombone players. Although not naturally left-handed, as a child Hampton was given the trombone set up to play left-handed, or backwards; as no one ever dissuaded him, he continued to play this way.
At the age of 12, Slide played in his family's Indianapolis
jazz band, The Duke Hampton Band. By 1952, at the age of 20, he was performing at Carnegie Hall
with the Lionel Hampton
Band. He played with the Buddy Johnson
's R&B
band from 1955–1956, then became a member of the Maynard Ferguson
's band (1957–1959), where he played and arranged, providing excitement on such popular tunes as "The Fugue," "Three Little Foxes" and "Slides Derangement." In 1958, he recorded with trombone masters on the classic release of Melba Liston
, "Melba Liston and Her 'Bones". As his reputation grew, he soon began working with bands led by Art Blakey
, Tadd Dameron
in 1969, Barry Harris
, Thad Jones
, Mel Lewis
, and Max Roach
, contributing both original compositions and arrangements. In 1962, he formed the Slide Hampton Octet, with horn players Booker Little
, Freddie Hubbard
, and George Coleman
. The band toured the U.S. and Europe and recorded on several labels.
In 1968 he toured with Woody Herman
orchestra, settling in Europe where he remained until 1977. He taught at Harvard
, artist-in-residence in 1981, the University of Massachusetts, De Paul University in Chicago, and Indiana State University. During this period he led his own nine-trombone, three-rhythm band, World of Trombones, co-led Continuum (a quintet with Jimmy Heath
that plays the music of Tadd Dameron
), freelanced as both a writer and a player--. He also appeared on The Cosby Show
1986. The episode entitled "Play It Again, Russell", is a reference to "Play it again, Sam", a quote from Casablanca
(1942). Hampton also played the trombone in Diana Ross Live! The Lady Sings... Jazz & Blues: Stolen Moments (1992) DVD
.
In 2005 Hampton was honored at the jazz festival in Indianapolis
. There the Indianapolis Jazz Foundation inducted him into their Hall of Fame. On June 4, 2006, with manager/agent and business partner Tony Charles, Hampton promoted his first concert at The Tribecca PAC in New York
(a tribute to Antonio Carlos Jobim) and debuted the Hampton Ultra Big Band. The concert was the first of many planned for the near future.
Hampton is a resident of North New Jersey. He is the uncle of Chicago jazz trumpeter Pharez Whitted
.
2009 saw the completion of four new compositions entitled "A Tribute to African-American Greatness". The songs honored Nelson Mandela
, Oprah Winfrey
, Tiger Woods
, Venus Williams
, Serena Williams
and Barack Obama
. The songs contained accompanying lyrics written by Hampton and his song writing partner Tony Charles, arrangements honoring Thelonious Monk, Thad Jones, Eddie Harris, Dexter Gordon and Gil Evans round out the program. The album will be recorded in 2010. He recently completed two new Big Band arrangements - "In Case of Emergency" and "The Drum Song" (both Hampton originals). These two songs (and others) will be available exclusively to Universities and other educational institutions through Slide Hampton Musique Publishing.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
trombonist, composer
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
and arranger.
He was a 1998 Grammy Award
Grammy Awards of 1998
The 40th Grammy Awards were held on February 25, 1998. They recognized accomplishments by musicians from the previous year. Rock icon Bob Dylan, Alison Krauss, and R...
winner for "Best Jazz Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s)", as arranger for "Cotton Tail
Cotton Tail
"Cotton Tail" is a 1940 composition by Duke Ellington. It is based on the rhythm changes from George Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm". The first Ellington recording is notable for the driving tenor saxophone solo by Ben Webster. Originally an instrumental, "Cotton Tail" later had lyrics written for it by...
" performed by Dee Dee Bridgewater
Dee Dee Bridgewater
Dee Dee Bridgewater is an American Jazz singer. She is a three-time Grammy Award winning singer-songwriter, as well as a Tony Award - winning stage actress and host of National Public Radio's syndicated radio show JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater...
. He was also a Grammy winner in 2005 for "Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album," The Way: Music of Slide Hampton, The Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, and received another nomination in 2006 for his arrangement of "Stardust" for the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band.
In 2005, the National Endowment for the Arts
National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...
honored Slide Hampton with its highest honor in jazz, the NEA Jazz Masters
NEA Jazz Masters
The National Endowment for the Arts , every year honors up to seven jazz musicians with Jazz Master Awards. The National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Fellowships are the highest honors that the United States bestows upon jazz musicians...
Award. A master composer/arranger and uniquely gifted trombone player, Hampton's career is among the most distinguished in jazz.
Biography
Slide Hampton was born in Jeannette, PennsylvaniaJeannette, Pennsylvania
Jeannette is a city in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, United States. The population was 10,788 at the 2000 census.-Geography:Jeannette is located at ....
. Laura and Clarke “Deacon” Hampton raised 12 children, taught them how to play musical instruments and set out with them as a family band. The family first came to Indianapolis
Indianapolis, Indiana
Indianapolis is the capital of the U.S. state of Indiana, and the county seat of Marion County, Indiana. As of the 2010 United States Census, the city's population is 839,489. It is by far Indiana's largest city and, as of the 2010 U.S...
in 1938. The Hamptons were a very musical family in which mother, father, eight brothers, and four sisters all played instruments. Slide Hampton is one of the few left-handed trombone players. Although not naturally left-handed, as a child Hampton was given the trombone set up to play left-handed, or backwards; as no one ever dissuaded him, he continued to play this way.
At the age of 12, Slide played in his family's Indianapolis
Indianapolis, Indiana
Indianapolis is the capital of the U.S. state of Indiana, and the county seat of Marion County, Indiana. As of the 2010 United States Census, the city's population is 839,489. It is by far Indiana's largest city and, as of the 2010 U.S...
jazz band, The Duke Hampton Band. By 1952, at the age of 20, he was performing at Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....
with the Lionel Hampton
Lionel Hampton
Lionel Leo Hampton was an American jazz vibraphonist, pianist, percussionist, bandleader and actor. Like Red Norvo, he was one of the first jazz vibraphone players. Hampton ranks among the great names in jazz history, having worked with a who's who of jazz musicians, from Benny Goodman and Buddy...
Band. He played with the Buddy Johnson
Buddy Johnson
Not to be confused with Budd Johnson.Buddy Johnson was an American jazz and New York blues pianist and bandleader, active from the 1930s through the 1960s...
's R&B
Rhythm and blues
Rhythm and blues, often abbreviated to R&B, is a genre of popular African American music that originated in the 1940s. The term was originally used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predominantly to urban African Americans, at a time when "urbane, rocking, jazz based music with a...
band from 1955–1956, then became a member of the Maynard Ferguson
Maynard Ferguson
Maynard Ferguson was a Canadian jazz musician and bandleader. He came to prominence playing in Stan Kenton's orchestra, before forming his own band in 1957...
's band (1957–1959), where he played and arranged, providing excitement on such popular tunes as "The Fugue," "Three Little Foxes" and "Slides Derangement." In 1958, he recorded with trombone masters on the classic release of Melba Liston
Melba Liston
Melba Doretta Liston was an American jazz musician . Her collaborations with pianist/composer Randy Weston, beginning in the early 1960s, are widely acknowledged as jazz classics.-Life and career:Liston was born in Kansas City, Missouri...
, "Melba Liston and Her 'Bones". As his reputation grew, he soon began working with bands led by Art Blakey
Art Blakey
Arthur "Art" Blakey , known later as Abdullah Ibn Buhaina, was an American Grammy Award-winning jazz drummer and bandleader. He was a member of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community....
, Tadd Dameron
Tadd Dameron
Tadley Ewing Peake "Tadd" Dameron was an American jazz composer, arranger and pianist. Saxophonist Dexter Gordon called Dameron the "romanticist" of the bop movement, while reviewer Scott Yanow writes that Dameron was the "definitive arranger/composer of the bop era".-Biography:Born in Cleveland,...
in 1969, Barry Harris
Barry Harris
Barry Doyle Harris is an American bebop jazz pianist and educator.-Biography:Harris left Detroit for New York City in 1960...
, Thad Jones
Thad Jones
Thaddeus Joseph Jones was an American jazz trumpeter, composer, and bandleader.-Biography:Thad Jones was born in Pontiac, Michigan to a musical family of ten . Thad Jones was a self taught musician, performing professionally by the age of sixteen...
, Mel Lewis
Mel Lewis
Mel Lewis was an American drummer, jazz musician and band leader. He was born Melvin Sokoloff in Buffalo, New York to Russian immigrant parents....
, and Max Roach
Max Roach
Maxwell Lemuel "Max" Roach was an American jazz percussionist, drummer, and composer.A pioneer of bebop, Roach went on to work in many other styles of music, and is generally considered alongside the most important drummers in history...
, contributing both original compositions and arrangements. In 1962, he formed the Slide Hampton Octet, with horn players Booker Little
Booker Little
Booker Little, Jr was an American jazz trumpeter and composer.-Biography:Despite his premature death from kidney failure at the age of 23, Little made an important contribution to jazz. Stylistically, his sound is rooted in the playing of Clifford Brown, featuring crisp articulation, a burnished...
, Freddie Hubbard
Freddie Hubbard
Frederick Dewayne "Freddie" Hubbard was an American jazz trumpeter. He was known primarily for playing in the bebop, hard bop and post bop styles from the early 1960s and on...
, and George Coleman
George Coleman
George Edward Coleman is an American hard bop saxophonist, bandleader, and composer, known chiefly for his work with Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock in the 1960s.-Biography:...
. The band toured the U.S. and Europe and recorded on several labels.
In 1968 he toured with Woody Herman
Woody Herman
Woodrow Charles Herman , known as Woody Herman, was an American jazz clarinetist, alto and soprano saxophonist, singer, and big band leader. Leading various groups called "The Herd," Herman was one of the most popular of the 1930s and '40s bandleaders...
orchestra, settling in Europe where he remained until 1977. He taught at Harvard
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, artist-in-residence in 1981, the University of Massachusetts, De Paul University in Chicago, and Indiana State University. During this period he led his own nine-trombone, three-rhythm band, World of Trombones, co-led Continuum (a quintet with Jimmy Heath
Jimmy Heath
James Edward Heath , nicknamed Little Bird, is an American jazz saxophonist, composer and arranger. He is the brother of bassist Percy Heath and drummer Albert Heath.-Biography:...
that plays the music of Tadd Dameron
Tadd Dameron
Tadley Ewing Peake "Tadd" Dameron was an American jazz composer, arranger and pianist. Saxophonist Dexter Gordon called Dameron the "romanticist" of the bop movement, while reviewer Scott Yanow writes that Dameron was the "definitive arranger/composer of the bop era".-Biography:Born in Cleveland,...
), freelanced as both a writer and a player--. He also appeared on The Cosby Show
The Cosby Show
The Cosby Show is an American television situation comedy starring Bill Cosby, which aired for eight seasons on NBC from September 20, 1984 until April 30, 1992...
1986. The episode entitled "Play It Again, Russell", is a reference to "Play it again, Sam", a quote from Casablanca
Casablanca (film)
Casablanca is a 1942 American romantic drama film directed by Michael Curtiz, starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid, and featuring Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Dooley Wilson. Set during World War II, it focuses on a man torn between, in...
(1942). Hampton also played the trombone in Diana Ross Live! The Lady Sings... Jazz & Blues: Stolen Moments (1992) DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
.
In 2005 Hampton was honored at the jazz festival in Indianapolis
Indianapolis, Indiana
Indianapolis is the capital of the U.S. state of Indiana, and the county seat of Marion County, Indiana. As of the 2010 United States Census, the city's population is 839,489. It is by far Indiana's largest city and, as of the 2010 U.S...
. There the Indianapolis Jazz Foundation inducted him into their Hall of Fame. On June 4, 2006, with manager/agent and business partner Tony Charles, Hampton promoted his first concert at The Tribecca PAC in New York
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
(a tribute to Antonio Carlos Jobim) and debuted the Hampton Ultra Big Band. The concert was the first of many planned for the near future.
Hampton is a resident of North New Jersey. He is the uncle of Chicago jazz trumpeter Pharez Whitted
Pharez Whitted
-Biography:Since 1982, Whitted has performed throughout the United States and overseas, including gigs at the 1988 Presidential Inauguration, The Arsenio Hall Show, The Billboard Music Awards, Carnegie Hall, and the MoTown Music Showcase....
.
2009 saw the completion of four new compositions entitled "A Tribute to African-American Greatness". The songs honored Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela served as President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999, and was the first South African president to be elected in a fully representative democratic election. Before his presidency, Mandela was an anti-apartheid activist, and the leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing...
, Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer and philanthropist. Winfrey is best known for her self-titled, multi-award-winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011...
, Tiger Woods
Tiger Woods
Eldrick Tont "Tiger" Woods is an American professional golfer whose achievements to date rank him among the most successful golfers of all time. Formerly the World No...
, Venus Williams
Venus Williams
Venus Ebony Starr Williams is an American professional tennis player who is a former World No. 1 and is ranked World No. 101 as of 10 October 2011 in singles and World No. 20 in doubles as of 2011. She has been ranked World No. 1 in singles by the Women's Tennis Association on three separate...
, Serena Williams
Serena Williams
Serena Jameka Williams is an American professional tennis player and a former world no. 1. The Women's Tennis Association has ranked her world no. 1 in singles on five separate occasions. She became the world no. 1 for the first time on July 8, 2002 and regained this ranking for the fifth time on...
and Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...
. The songs contained accompanying lyrics written by Hampton and his song writing partner Tony Charles, arrangements honoring Thelonious Monk, Thad Jones, Eddie Harris, Dexter Gordon and Gil Evans round out the program. The album will be recorded in 2010. He recently completed two new Big Band arrangements - "In Case of Emergency" and "The Drum Song" (both Hampton originals). These two songs (and others) will be available exclusively to Universities and other educational institutions through Slide Hampton Musique Publishing.
Discography
| Year | Title | Label |
|---|---|---|
| 2003 | Spirit of the Horn | MCG Jazz |
| 2002 | Jazz Matinee | Hanssler |
| 2002 | Slide Plays Jobim | |
| 1999 | Inclusion | Sound Hills |
| 1993 | Dedicated to Diz | Telarc |
| 1982 | Roots | Criss Cross |
| 1979 | World of Trombones | West 54 Records |
| 1962 | Explosion! The Sound of Slide Hampton | Atlantic |
| 1962 | Jazz in Paris: Exodus | Verve Records Verve Records Verve Records is an American jazz record label now owned by Universal Music Group. It was founded by Norman Granz in 1956, absorbing the catalogues of his earlier labels, Clef Records and Norgran Records , and material which had been licensed to Mercury previously.-Jazz and folk origins:The Verve... |
| 1962 | Drum Suite | Epic |
| 1961 | Two Sides of Slide Hampton | Charlie Parker |
| 1960 | Sister Salvation | Atlantic |
| 1959 | Slide Hampton and His Horn of Plenty | Strand |