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Jymie Merritt was born James Raleigh Merritt on May 3, 1926 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His mother was a choral director, voice and piano teacher and his father a businessman and author. After serving in the U.S. Army during WWII from 1944 to 1946 he returned home to work for a short time in his father’s real estate business. After a brief flirtation with the clarinet he was inspired by a Duke Ellington recording featuring bassist Jimmy Blanton. Encouraged by his mother he studied with Philadelphia Orchestra double bassist Carl Torello and at the Ornstein School of Music

Over the course of his career Merritt has worked in jazz, R&B and blues.  In the early 1950s he toured with rock and roll pioneers Bullmoose Jackson and Chris Powell moving on to work with legendary bluesman B.B. King from 1955 to 1957. In 1957 he moved to Manhattan to work with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers featuring  his friend Benny Golson, as well as Bobby Timmons and Lee Morgan. He touring and recording with Blakey extended until 1962, when an unknown ailment forced him to stop touring.

By 1964 Merritt was back, working with the trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker and is featured prominently in Baker’s unfinished autobiography published under the title As Though I Had Wings: The Lost Memoir. From 1965 to 1968 he worked with drummer, composer and activist Max Roach, not only in the rhythm section but as a composer, recording his Downbeat Magazine Critic Poll for Best Jazz Composer “Nommo” on Roach’s critically acclaimed 1966 Atlantic album The Drum Also Waltzes. He left in the late 1960s to work with Dizzy Gillespie and appear with him on the Dick Cavett Show.

One of Jymie most productive showcases as a composer was his reuniting recording of trumpeter Lee Morgan’s 1970 Blue Note release Live at the Lighthouse featuring his composition Absolutions that has become a jazz classic. In 1962 he formed and fronted the Forerunners with Odean Pope, Kenny Lowe, Donald Bailey and September Wrice and they evolved into a music cooperative exploring his system of chord inversions, harmonics, and unique approaches to composition and rehearsals, producing a lexicon of its own known as the Forerunner system or concept.

This group performed regularly in and around Philadelphia for five years, until he joined Roach’s band. Pope would also join Roach’s band, playing with him into the 1970s. Forerunner was on and off periodically from the 1960s through the 1980s, depending on what band Merritt was playing with at the time as well as how his health was. Of the second incarnation in 1982 saxophonist Bobby Zankel, Alan Nelson, Odean Pope, Julian Pressley, Colmore Duncan and Warren McLendon. Approaching his 90th birthday Merritt continues to rehearse and perform with the current incarnation of The Forerunners, many of whom have been with the ensemble from its inception.

In 2013, along with bassist Reggie Workman, he received the Clef Club of Philadelphia’s Living Legend Jazz Award as well as the Jazz Heritage Award and the Don Redman Heritage Award. Double-bassist electric-bass pioneer, bandleader and composer Jymie Merritt, who mainly performed as a sideman with Art Blakey, Sonny Clark, Curtis Fuller, Benny Golson, Lee Morgan and Jimmy Witherspoon, passed away on April 10, 2020 of liver cancer in Philadelphia, aged 93.

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