[Fmpro] FW: Johnny Griffin 1928-2008

[Chris Alpiar]

*SIGH* Another legend passes
 
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Christopher Kennedy Alpiar <http://www.alpiar.com/> 
Cinematic Composer 
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/26/arts/music/26griffin.html


July 26, 2008

 


Johnny Griffin, Tenor Saxophonist, Dies at 80 



By
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/ben_ratliff/in
dex.html?inline=nyt-per> BEN RATLIFF



Johnny Griffin, a tenor saxophonist from Chicago whose speed, control and
harmonic acuity made him one of the most talented American jazz musicians of
his generation, yet who spent most of his career in Europe, died Friday at
his home in Availles-Limouzine, a village in France. He was 80 and had lived
there for 24 years. His death was confirmed by his wife, Miriam, who did not
give a cause. He played his last concert on Monday in Hyères.
  
Mr. Griffin’s modest height earned him the nickname the Little Giant; his
speed in bebop improvising marked him as the Fastest Gun in the West; a
group he led with his fellow saxophonist Eddie (Lockjaw) Davis was
informally called the Tough Tenor band, a designatio n that was eventually
applied to a whole school of hard-bop tenor players. And in general, Mr.
Griffin suffered from categorization. 
 
 In the early 1960s he became embittered by the critical acceptance of free
jazz; he stayed true to his identity as a bebopper. Feeling that the
American jazz marketplace had no use for him (at a time when he was also
having marital and tax troubles), he left for the Netherlands and from then
on was a celebrated jazz elder in Europe. 
“It’s not like I’m looking to prove anything anymore,” he said in a 1993
interview. “At this age, what can I prove? I’m concentrating more on the
beauty in the music, the humanity.”

 Indeed, Mr. Griffin’s work in the 1990s, with an American quartet that
stayed constant whenever he revisited his home country to perform or record,
had a new sound, mellower and sweeter than in his younger days.
Johnny Griffin was born in Chicago on April 24, 1928, and grew up on the
South Side. He attended DuSable High School, where he was taught by the
famed high school band instructor Capt. Walter Dyett, whose other students
included the singers Nat (King) Cole and Dinah Washington and the
saxophonists Gene Ammons and Von Freeman.

 Mr. Griffin’s career started in a hurry: at age 12, attending his grammar
school graduation dance at the Parkway Ballroom in Chicago, he saw Ammons
play in King Kolax’s big band and decided=2 0what his instrument would be.
By 14 he was playing alto saxophone in a variety of situations, including a
group called the Baby Band with schoolmates, and occasionally with the blues
guitarist and singer T-Bone Walker. At 18, three days after his high school
graduation, Mr. Griffin left Chicago to join
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/lionel_hampton
/index.html?inline=nyt-per> Lionel Hampton’s big band, where he switched
from alto to tenor. From then until 1951 he was based in New York City but
mostly on the road. 

 By 1947 he was touring with the rhythm-and-blues band of the trumpeter Joe
Morris, a fellow Chicagoan, with whom he made the first recordings for the
Atlantic label. He entered the Army in 1951; stationed in Hawaii, he played
in an Army band. 
Mr. Griffin was of an impressionable age when
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/charlie_parker
/index.html?inline=nyt-per> Charlie Parker and
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/dizzy_gillespi
e/index.html?inline=nyt-per> Dizzy Gillespie became a force in jazz. He
heard them both with Billy Eckstine’s band in 1945; having first
internalized the more balladlike saxophone sound earlier popularized by
Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster, he became entranced by the lightning-fast
phrasing of bebop, as the new music of Parker and Gillespie was known. In
general his style remained brisk but relaxed, his bebop playing salted with
blues tonality. 

 Beyond the 1960s his skill and his musical eccentricity continued to
deepen, and in later years he could play odd, asymmetrical phrases, bulging
with blues honking and then tapering off into state-of-the-art bebop, filled
with passing chords. 
In the late 1940s he befriended the pianists Elmo Hope,
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/bud_powell/ind
ex.html?inline=nyt-per> Bud Powell and
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/thelonious_mon
k/index.html?inline=nyt-per> Thelonious Monk; he called these friendships
his “postgraduate education.” After his Army service he went back to
Chicago, where he worked with Monk for the first time, a job that altered
his career. He became interested in Monk’s brightly melodic style of
composition, and he ended up as a regular member of Monk’s quartet in New
York in 1958. In 1967 he toured Europe with a Monk octet.
 
 Mr. Griffin joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers for a short stint in 1957.
The following year he began recording a series of albums as a leader for the
Riverside label. On “Way Out!,” 9 CThe Little Giant” and other Riverside
albums, his rampaging energy got its moment in the sun on tunes like
“Cherokee,” famous vehicles for testing a musician’s mettle.

 A few years later he hooked up with Eddie (Lockjaw) Davis, a more
blues-oriented tenor saxophonist, with whom he made a series of records that
act as barometers of taste: listeners tend to find them either thrilling or
filled with too many notes. The Griffin-Davis combination was a popular one,
and they would sporadically reunite through the ’70s and ’80s.

 Mr. Griffin left the United States in 1963, settling in Paris and recording
thereafter mostly for European labels — sometimes with other American
expatriates, like the drummer Kenny Clarke, and sometimes with European
rhythm sections. In 1973 he moved to Bergambacht, the Netherlands. He moved
to the Cote d’Azur with his second wife, Miriam, in 1980, and then in 1984
to Availles-Limouzine, near Poitiers, in midwestern France, where he lived
for the rest of his life. 
In addition to his wife’s Mr. Griffin’s survivors include four children: his
daughters Jo-Onna and Ingrid and a son, John Arnold Griffin, all of the New
York City area, and another daughter, Cynthia Griffin of Bordeaux, France. 
 
 Mr. Griffin stayed true to the small-group bebop ideal with his American
quartet, including the pianist Michael Weiss and the drummer Kenny
Washington. The record he made with this group for th e Antilles label in
1991, “The Cat,” was received warmly as a comeback. 
 
 Every April for many years, Mr. Griffin returned to Chicago to visit family
and play during his birthday week at the Jazz Showcase. During those visits
he usually also spent a week at the Village Vanguard in New York, before
returning home to his quiet house in the country. 

Musically yours, 
Dan Miller 
718.930.8229 
www.danmillerjazz.com <http://www.danmillerjazz.com/>  
www.myspace.com/danmillerjazz

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