Legendary jazz trumpeter and composer Clark Terry, who for more than seven decades performed with the audacity of a riverboat gambler to practiced perfection, died Saturday, February 21, 2015. He was 94.
He died at Jefferson Regional Medical Center in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where he had lived since 2006, following a long travail with diabetes that included amputation of his left leg in 2012.
“Our beloved Clark Terry has joined the big band in heaven where he’ll be singing and playing with the angels,” said his wife, Gwen Terry, in a Facebook post.
When he was 10, John, as his family called him, made his first trumpet out of remnants he found in a junkyard. He practiced outside his large family’s three-room flat in St. Louis.
“I could make noise,” he laughingly recalled. “The neighbors got sick of me playing that lousy-sounding thing so they chipped in and came up with $12.50 and bought me a horn from a pawn shop.” He would never be without a trumpet again.
By the time he was 30, Terry had been a star soloist with both the Count Basie and Duke Ellington bands. He would go on to lead his own big band, and he was the first African-American to play in The Tonight Show house band.
Terry also mastered the flugelhorn and became a prolific composer and recording artist. His virtuosity embraced a wide range of styles, from swing to bebop. His Grammy award-winning body of work included the theme song for the 1960s TV show, “The Flintstones.”
He got the trumpet bug watching a parade when he was 5. “I loved the trumpet because it was the loudest and led the melody,” Terry said in his recently published autobiography, “Clark.”
Terry was born in St. Louis on December 14, 1920, the seventh of Clark Virgil Terry and Mary Terry’s 11 children. His mother died when he was 6 or 7, and his father worked for Laclede Gas and Light Co. As a young child, he worked to help pay bills. He hauled ashes for the German families on the “white side” of his Carondelet neighborhood and delivered newspapers.
His father was adamantly opposed to his son playing the trumpet. He beat him when he found out that he had one; but Terry just hid his horn and kept on playing. A subsequent infraction got him put out of the house when he was 12. He was taken in by his sister Ada Lee and her husband Sy McField, who was a tuba player with a popular local band.
His brother-in-law agreed to give him lessons, and he was soon playing well enough to join the Tom Powell Post #77 Drum and Bugle Corps. When he reached Vashon High School, a shortage of trumpets forced him to take up the valve trombone. The school’s principal did not permit the playing of jazz, so Terry simply formed his own jazz quartet, the Vashon High Swingsters. He rehearsed with a rival school’s band to learn to read jazz charts.
Terry boxed well enough to consider it as a career, and he was offered two track scholarships to college. But two months short of graduating as salutatorian, he was expelled. It was discovered that he was a father-to-be. There was a shotgun wedding, and he and Mayola “Sissy” Robinson had a son, Hiawatha. They divorced in 1944.
Terry began supporting his new family with his horn. He played with Dollar Bill and His Small Change Band and with blues singer Ida Cox’s band, Darktown Scandals, and traveled with the Rueben and Cherry Carnival. During the carnival’s engagement in Mississippi, Terry was knocked unconscious by a white security cop for not answering him “Yes, sir.”
His career began to take off in 1940, when he was hired by pianist and bandleader Fate Marable. Marable came from the South, playing on Mississippi riverboats. Terry worked with Marable’s smaller, landlocked bands, until he enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1942. He played in the Navy band while stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Station near Chicago.
After his discharge, he returned to St. Louis and continued his musical apprenticeship with a number of small bands, including the George Hudson Orchestra. As part of Hudson’s band, Terry played with some of the hottest acts of the day, including the Mills Brothers, Peg Leg Bates, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn and Nat King Cole.
“We were swinging like there was no tomorrow, backing all those sizzling acts,” Terry said.
He later played with Lionel Hampton and saxophonist Charlie Barnet, a white bandleader who did live radio broadcasts. While working with Barnet, he recorded “Phalanges,” the first of his more than 200 compositions. The band performed before segregated audiences – and he had to live separately from his bandmates.
In 1948, he joined Count Basie’s band. Three years later, Duke Ellington stole him away. He played his first gig with Ellington on Armistice Day, 1951, at Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis and traveled the world with the hippest orchestra of the time.
“Count Basie was college, but Duke Ellington was graduate school,” he often said.
One night on stage at the Blue Note in Chicago, Terry decided to try out a gimmick he’d been practicing. He played his solo portion of “Perdido” with his horn upside down – and left-handed. It became a crowd-pleaser for Terry, along with his ability to play three horns at once.
He left Ellington’s band In 1959, joining the orchestra of his first student, Quincy Jones, to play Harold Arlen’s opera, “Free and Easy.” A year later, he joined NBC’s house band. He said civil rights organizations raising “sheer hell” got him there.
Terry showed his appreciation by performing benefit concerts for the NAACP, the Urban League and the Congress for Racial Equality. An annual CORE fundraiser was held at Jackie Robinson’s home in Connecticut; sometimes, Martin Luther King Jr. attended.
At NBC, he was initially assigned to The Arthur Murray Show and The Morning Show. Soon, he was on The Tonight Show. When bandleader Skitch Henderson left the show in 1967, it was widely rumored that Terry would replace him. The job went to Doc Severinsen. There was fear that a black person would ruin ratings in Southern markets.
While at NBC, Terry and his second wife, Pauline, bought their first home, a three-bedroom ranch in Bayside, New York, in an all-white neighborhood. A white friend, Jim Maxwell, posed as the prospective home-buyer.
When The Tonight Show moved to Los Angeles In 1972, he chose to stay in New York. It was time to become a bandleader. He led small groups and two big bands: the Big Bad Band and Clark Terry’s Young Titans.
From the 1970s through the 1990s, Terry performed at Carnegie Hall, Town Hall and Lincoln Center. He was featured with Skitch Henderson’s New York Pops Orchestra. He also became part Norman Granz’s traveling all-stars in Jazz at the Philharmonic. The U.S. Department of State made him a musical ambassador to the world.
In one of the longest careers in jazz, Terry played on more than 900 recordings, including with the London Symphony Orchestra, the Dutch Metropole Orchestra and the Chicago Jazz Orchestra.
He was one of the earliest active jazz musicians to take time off from performing to teach. He did so in part seeking redemption for having rebuffed an aspiring young jazz trumpeter from East St. Louis named Miles Davis. He taught at universities, conducted numerous clinics at summer youth camps and jazz festivals, including one that bears his name at Southeast Missouri State University.
His many honors included the 2010 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He was inducted into the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Hall of Fame in 1991 and the St. Louis Walk of Fame in 1996. In 1999, his wax likeness took up residence in the Griot Museum of Black History in St. Louis. He has performed at the White House eight times, was knighted in Germany and received the French Order of Arts and Letters. He received numerous honorary doctorates, the first from the University of New Hampshire in 1978.
He contributed his unique sound to several film scores, including “The Fabulous Baker Boys” and “The Wiz.” Terry is the subject of a 2014 documentary, “Keep on Keepin’ On.” It documents his mentorship of a 23-year-old blind piano prodigy, Justin Kauflin.
Terry will be buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Bronx, New York, alongside other jazz greats, including Duke Ellington and Miles Davis. Funeral services are pending.
Edited for length and reprinted with permission from news.stlpublicradio.org.
