Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Jimmy Hamilton was born on May 25, 1917 in Dillon, South Carolina but grew up in Philadelphia. He learned to play piano and brass instruments and by the thirties he was playing the latter in local bands. He switched to clarinet and saxophone and by 1939 was playing with Lucky Millinder, Jimmy Mundy and Bill Doggett, then going to work for Teddy Wilson in 1940.
After a two-year stay with Wilson he played with Eddie Heywood and Yank Porter before replacing Barney Bigard in Duke Ellington’s orchestra in 1943. Over the next twenty-five years with Ellington his sound on saxophone had an R&B style while his clarinet was more precise, correct and fluent and it was during this time that he wrote some of his own material.
Leaving the Ellington orchestra, Hamilton played and arranged on a freelance basis, before spending the 1970s and 1980s in the Virgin Islands teaching music, occasionally returning to the U.S. for performances with John Carter’s Clarinet Summit. He retired from teaching but continued to perform with his own groups from 1989 to 1990.
The clarinetist, saxophonist, arranger, composer and music educator Jimmy Hamilton died in St. Croix, Virgin Islands at the age of seventy-seven on September 20, 1994.