Home » Jazz Musicians » Howard McGhee

Howard McGhee

McGhee was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but grew up in Detroit. He first learned to play the clarinet and tenor sax, then switched to trumpet. From 1936 to 1940 he travelled around playing in territory bands. In 1941 he led his own band at Detroit's Club Congo. After a short stint with Lionel Hampton he joined Andy Kirk, with whom he made his first recording, his own McGhee Special. During the AFM ban, he spent a year with Charlie Barnet, but returned to Kirk in 1943. In 1944, jobs in the bands of Georgie Auld and Count Basie were followed by his joining the Coleman Hawkin's quintet for half a year in Los Angeles. At that time, he started to play "modern": His earlier style which was based on the Louis Armstrong and Roy Eldridge schools was now showing the influence of Dizzy Gillespie. With Hawkins, he appeared in the movie The Crimson Canary playing "Hollywood Stampede". He recorded for Dial as a leader and with Charlie Parker. In 1946, he played with tenorist Teddy Edwards and pianist Dodo Marmarosa. McGhee left Los Angeles in 1947 and moved to New York, where he recorded with James Moody, Milt Jackson and Ray Brown for Dial and with Leo Parker for Savoy. After touring with Jazz At The Philharmonic (JATP), he took a band to the Paris Jazz Festival in 1948. The same year he recorded for Blue Note with Fats Navarro and in 1949 won the Down Beat poll. During most of the fifties McGhee was inactive due to drug problems. But he came back in the early sixties, playing with Duke Ellington and then as a leader of his own combo. In the late 60's and early 70's he led a big band in New York City, but was largely off records. He recorded again during 1976-79.


Tags

16
Album Review

Teddy Edwards / Howard McGhee: Together Again!!!!

Read "Together Again!!!!" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci


Howard McGhee was one of the cats present at the creation, when bop became a thing. His life embodied a classic redemption story, complete with death (metaphorically) by drugs, years in exile and finally, by dint of his own struggles and a timely gig with Woody Herman, resurrection. While he had been widely admired and respected in the late 1940s as a pioneering trumpeter, the unspoken judgment was that it was his misfortune to come to prominence when Dizzy Gillespie ...

8
Album Review

Howard McGhee: Maggie's Back In Town!!

Read "Maggie's Back In Town!!" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci


A picture (a video, in fact) is worth a thousand words. Consider one of Howard McGhee around 1966. It is at the Newport Jazz Festival, and an unlikely group of trumpeters is doing a bop tune at metronome-busting speed. The group includes Bobby Hackett and Ruby Braff (unlikely, no?). Hackett is delightedly laughing. Braff walks off into the wings sulking. Young Jimmy Owens has just upstaged Howard McGhee, to put it mildly. The guy selected to teach Owens a lesson ...

16
Album Review

Howard McGhee: Howard McGhee West Coast 1945-1947

Read "Howard McGhee West Coast 1945-1947" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci


Bebop trumpet pioneer Howard McGhee has undergone a lengthy process of rediscovery and reassessment since his death in 1987. A one-time Downbeat Poll Winner (1947), it's probably not much of an exaggeration to say he had been largely forgotten, even by trumpet players. Yet Gunther Schuller (1989) and Scott DeVeaux (1997) soon published searching and sophisticated analyses of his contribution and playing. More recently, trumpet player Brian Lynch offers a terrific appreciation of McGhee in his “Unsung Heros of Jazz ...

217
Album Review

Howard McGhee, The Kenny Drew Trio, The Tal Farlow Quartet: Howard McGhee and Howard McGheeVolume 2

Read "Howard McGhee and Howard McGheeVolume 2" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey


Who is Howard McGhee?. Howard McGhee (1918 - 1987) today might be considered a footnote (albeit a large one) in jazz. But, during the rise of Bebop in the mid '40s to '50s he was considered one of the most technically proficient and inventive trumpeters performing. Critic Scott Yanow defined McGhee as the “missing [influential] link" between Roy Eldridge and Theodore “Fats" Navarro, the latter going onto influence Clifford Brown, who in turn influenced many other trumpet players in the ...

Read more articles
1

Recording

Howard McGhee: West Coast, '45-'47

Howard McGhee: West Coast, '45-'47

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers

In early 1945, Coleman Hawkins asked trumpeter Howard McGhee if he wanted to join him for a month-long gig in jny: Los Angeles at club due to open. The offer came in jny: Buffalo, N.Y., where both musicians were playing and winter had set in hard, McGhee didn't need to be asked twice. Heading West on the road with Hawkins could only have an upside. In a quintet setting, McGhee would have solo time next to an established giant, which ...

Recording

Howard McGhee: Before the Storm

Howard McGhee: Before the Storm

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers

It's hard to know why so many jazz trumpeters wound up hooked on heroin in the late 1940s and early '50s. The list included Freddie Webster, Fats Navarro, Chet Baker and Miles Davis. The first died of an overdose, the second from tuberculosis and drugs, the third seemed to impale himself on his habit only to survive for decades in declining health, and the fourth managed to clean himself up and have a profound influence on jazz's direction multiple times. ...

Howard McGhee had the big, brassy tone and expansive melodic imagination of the great swing-era trumpeters. But his rhythmic fluidity and advanced harmonic thinking helped him become one of the first important big-band soloists to master be-bop's intricacies. (New York Times Obituary by Robert Palm

Photos

Music

Similar

Get more of a good thing!

Our weekly newsletter highlights our top stories, our special offers, and upcoming jazz events near you.