Remembering Benny Golson։ He in movies, in everyday life and of course in the kingdom of Jazz։ Video, Photos

At the age of 95, musician, composer and arranger Benny Golson passed away two days ago in Philadelphia.

Benny Golson was a composer with an unmistakable mark, in particular for his typical harmonic progressions. The saxophonist is instead very varied in his choice of styles, ranging from ballads to hard bop, from funky rhythms to Caribbean sounds.

While he was in high school in Philadelphia he had the opportunity to play with promising young musicians, such as John Coltrane, Red Garland, Jimmy Heath, Percy Heath, Philly Joe Jones and Red Rodney.

After his studies, he played with Bull Moose Jackson’s rhythm and blues band; at that time the group’s pianist was Tadd Dameron who had a great influence on Benny Golson’s musical and compositional style. From 1953 to 1959 he performed with the groups of Tadd Dameron, Lionel Hampton, Jhonny Hodges, Earl Bostic, Dizzy Gillespie, and Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers.

Golson was particularly affected by the death, in a car accident, of the young trumpeter Clifford Brown. Following this he composed in his memory the touching standard “I Remember Clifford”.

I Remember Clifford was first recorded in January 1957 by Donald Byrd and Gigi Gryce on the LP Jazz Lab .

Although the song is a tribute to the lost friend, the piece does not express despair, the music is inspired by memory, rather than absence. Despite the sophisticated harmonic construction, the melody always sounds natural, the main theme seems to express a memory that is inside us and resurfaces when we least expect it

«I know he’ll never be forgotten
He was a king uncrowned
I know I’ll always remember
The warmth of his sound»

(Jon Hendricks, I Remember Clifford,1957)

«I know he’ll never be forgotten
He was a king uncrowned
I know I’ll always remember
The warmth of his sound»

In 1957 Jon Hendricks composed a text in which he expresses his admiration for the great talent of the trumpeter. The same year Dinah Washington recorded the song, in 1962 it was covered by Carmen McRae, in 1978 it was Sarah Vaughan’s turn, in 1985 by the vocal group The Manhattan Transfer and later by other vocalists.

From 1959 to 1962 Golson collaborated with Art Farmer; he then left jazz to concentrate on studying and composing for orchestras. During this period he composed music for the soundtracks of television shows such as Ironside, MASH, and The Six Million Dollar Man. In the 1970s Golson returned to jazz.

Referring to Golson’s uncommon compositional abilities, it has been said of him, “Benny doesn’t write songs, he writes standards.” Among the many songs he composed, which have had great notoriety, in addition to the aforementioned “I Remember Clifford”, we remember “Stable Mates”, “Blues March”, “Killer Joe”, “Whisper Not”, “Along Came Betty” and several others.

In 2004 Golson played himself in the film The Terminal by Steven Spielberg, in an important cameo during which he performed his Killer Joe.

In Steven Spielberg’s 2004 film “The Terminal”, Tom Hanks is Viktor Navorski, a citizen of an imaginary Eastern European nation who ends up a “prisoner”, for political-bureaucratic reasons, at John Fitzgerald Kennedy Airport in New York.

But what drove Viktor to make that trip? His father, a jazz enthusiast, one day finds a photograph in a Hungarian newspaper that immortalizes 57 musicians on the streets of Harlem and in the following forty years he commits himself to collecting the autographs of each of them. Only one, at the time of his death, is missing from the roll call, that of Benny Golson.

Viktor’s “mission” is precisely to recover that last signature to give substance to his father’s dream, only when he has completed it, after attending a concert by Benny Golson – who can really be seen playing a few notes of “Killer Joe” – will he finally be able to return “home”. That photograph, taken by Art Kane (1925-1995) is probably the most famous “shot” of the world of jazz. It was August 12, 1958 when the musicians gathered to pose for the magazine “Esquire”: from New Orleans to Chicago, from Swing to Bebop, all styles and generations were represented. From Luckey Roberts, a pianist from Harlem, 71 years old, to the young Sonny Rollins, who was 27. There should have been 58 of them, then Willie “The Lion” Smith, tired of waiting for that click, moved, thus giving up on entering history. “When I found out that there was going to be this big reunion,” Dizzy Gillespie, one of the fathers of Bebop, had the opportunity to say some time later, “I said to myself ‘Here’s the opportunity to see all these musicians without going to a funeral’”.

“There was an unusual shooting for a photograph for Esquire Magazine and they invited me to be part of it. I couldn’t believe it! Nobody really knew me that well at the beginning of my career. But there I was, on the scheduled date. When I arrived, all my heroes were there” – Benny Golson – photo Art Kane.

The story told by Spielberg in the film, whose hidden spring is his passion for jazz, brings together three elements – music, that music, cinema and photography – in a plot that is the paradigm of the influence that jazz was able to exercise on other artistic expressions.