Daily Dose OF Jazz…

Jimmy Blanton was born on October 5, 1918 in Chattanooga, Tennessee and originally learned to play the violin but took up the bass while at Tennessee State University. During his matriculation in the mid-thirties he performed with the Tennessee State Collegians, and during the vacations with Fate Marable. Blanton left school to play full time in St. Louis with the Jeters-Pillars Orchestra. Making his first recordings with the orchestra, he then went on to join Duke Ellington’s band in 1939.

Though he stayed with Ellington for only two years, Blanton made an incalculable contribution in changing the way the double bass was used in jazz. Moving from quarter notes in ensemble or solos to soloing more in a ‘horn like’ fashion, Blanton began sliding into eighth and sixteenth-note runs, introducing melodic and harmonic ideas that were totally new to jazz bass playing.

His virtuosity put him in a different class from his predecessors, making him the first true master of the jazz bass and demonstrating the instrument’s unsuspected potential as a solo instrument. Such was his importance to Ellington’s band at the time, together with the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, that it became known as the Blanton-Webster band.

In 1941, Blanton was diagnosed with tuberculosis, cutting short his tenure with Ellington. However, he recorded a series of bass and piano duets with Ellington. Double bassist Jimmy Blanton, credited as the originator of pizzicato and bowed bass solos, died the following year on July 30, 1942 after retiring to a sanatorium in California at the age of 23.

Give A Gift Of Jazz – Share

More Posts: bass