Illustration by Edward Kinsella III
Miles Davis
First, there was bebop Miles. Then cool-jazz Miles, hard-bop Miles, modal-jazz Miles, and finally electric, funky fusion Miles, in his wraparound sunglasses, sequined military-inspired costumes, and wide-brimmed hats. Through every new musical and personal transformation, his notes never wavered—literally. His first serious music teacher, Elwood Buchanan, smacked his hands when he heard his young trumpet pupil hit a vibrato note. “Stop shakin’ that note,” he commanded. “You’re going to shake enough when you get old!” And Davis never abandoned that clear, bright, well-rounded sound. You can hear it on 1959’s Kind of Blue (which went platinum for the fourth time in 2008), on 1970’s Bitches Brew, and on 1989’s Aura. When he left East St. Louis for New York in 1944, immediately after high-school graduation, he was already filled with the ideas and sounds that would make him one of the most influential jazz musicians of the 20th century.
Charles Creath
The opening strains of “Pleasure Mad” immediately conjure images of flappers with garter flasks and feather headdresses. Though Charlie Creath’s cornet sound is recognizably 1920s, it’s also, say musicians like Clark Terry, a terribly St. Louis sound: clear and bright, with bent notes evoking the human voice. That sound continued to influence St. Louis musicians for decades. Creath, like many young musicians of the time, came up through the Odd Fellows and Knights of Pythias bands (he also did a tour with the Ringling Bros. circus band), then graduated to professional gigs on the Streckfus riverboats. The steamers kept musicians to a strict diet of fox trots and popular dance music, so the actual jazz flowed in the cabarets and venues like the Turpin brothers’ Jazzland Café. It’s said that Creath’s greatest strength was actually as a blues player; he put out the first blues single featuring a male vocalist for the Okeh label, and he was the first black band booker in St. Louis.
Clark Terry
He’s worked with Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and The Quincy Jones Band, and he was the first African-American to play in NBC’s staff orchestra. He performed with Ellington during his career-reviving Newport Jazz Festival appearance; toured Europe many, many times; invented his own version of scat singing, “Mumbles”; played with the Oscar Peterson Trio; and introduced the flugelhorn into jazz. He appears on 905 separate recordings, played at New York’s Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and in 2010, at age 89, he received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, an honor he shares with trumpeters Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis—his mentee. Clark, like Creath, had that bright, open “St. Louis sound” that he’s credited with bringing into the larger musical collective.
George Hudson
Hudson moved to St. Louis from Kansas City to play lead trumpet for the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra in 1934, performing on four recordings for Decca before defecting to Dewey Jackson’s band in 1938. Hudson wanted to start his own orchestra, despite a warning from one of his musician friends, Earl “Bunky” Martin: “Dewey’s got the whole town sewn up.” The George Hudson Orchestra debuted in 1942 at Tune Town, with a lineup that included Singleton Palmer. (Later, Hudson would hire a young Clark Terry.) They were tight and played shows all over the country, including at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. By the mid-1940s, it was Hudson who had the town sewn up, including bumping out the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra as house band at the popular Club Plantation. Though Hudson was a great musician, his greatest influence might have been as educator at Lovejoy High School in Brooklyn, Ill.—baritone-saxophone player Hamiet Bluiett and trumpeter Prince Wells III are among his former students.
Willie Akins
He made it to New York. Young. After he graduated from Webster Groves High School in 1957, his dad, Willie Sr., drove him right back east. Akins took every gig offered to him, steeled himself against New York’s indifference (including Miles Davis’ gruff brushoff), avoided drugs and drinking, and spent his free time in clubs, listening to Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Rollins, and Charlie Parker. In 1968, just as Akins was making inroads into New York’s jazz scene, his father fell ill with lung cancer. Akins came home and stayed, even as Gaslight Square and all of the other jazz clubs he’d known as a young man began to shutter. And so, like many St. Louis musicians before him, he worked on creating his own scene. His weekly appearances at Spruill’s on tenor sax were legendary, and his list of protégés includes drummer Kim Thompson, who’s now playing for Beyoncé.
Bix Beiderbecke
Though he wasn’t here for long—he came to St. Louis to play an extended gig at the Arcadia Ballroom in 1926, at the invitation of bandleader Frank Trumbauer—historian George Lipsitz argues that Leon Bismarck Beiderbecke (pronounced by-der-beck) developed his cornet sound here. In addition to his exposure to superlative St. Louis jazz artists like clarinetist Pee Wee Russell, Beiderbecke soaked up the influences of the St. Louis Symphony and the city’s rich blues scene. He’d go on to be one of the most influential jazz soloists of that decade, along with Louis Armstrong, and invent a jazz-ballad style that presaged cool jazz.
The Black Artists Group
St. Louis’ Harlem Renaissance
In City of Gabriels, Dennis Owsley identifies two times when St. Louis produced astonishingly original music: during the ragtime era, and during the height of the Black Artists Group, from 1967 to 1973. Formed in response to the lack of opportunities in St. Louis for black artists, BAG was a multidisciplinary organization that had poets, actors, playwrights, dancers, musicians, and painters within its ranks; its multimedia productions were years ahead of their time. Many of the talented musicians associated with BAG—Hamiet Bluiett, Lester Bowie, Bakida E.J. Carroll, Julius Hemphill, and Oliver Lake—were also an integral part of New York City’s loft jazz movement in the 1970s, which is considered by some critics to be the last truly innovative period of American jazz. But BAG members made history in St. Louis, too: Julius Hemphill’s Dogon A.D., considered one of the most important jazz recordings of the late 20th century, was recorded in Hemphill’s Laclede Town apartment in 1972 and released on his own label, Mbari, later that year. Though it was rereleased on Freedom Records in 1977, it has been out of print—yet highly sought after—ever since. It was finally reissued last fall by International Phonograph, and in a review of the disc, NPR jazz critic Kevin Whitehead called Dogon A.D. “still a revelation 40 years on.”
Pick Five
Dennis Owsley
Host of KWMU-FM’s Jazz Unlimited; author of City of Gabriels
1. Clark Terry
He’s a renowned trumpeter, flugelhornist, and music educator.
2. Miles Davis
He changed the course of 20th-century music no less than five times.
3. Lester Bowie
Bowie was the most original trumpet player of his time and a leading composer and bandleader.
4. Frank Trumbauer
He was a major influence on an entire school of saxophone playing headed by Lester Young.
5. Jimmy Blanton
The musician changed the way string bass was played in jazz after Duke Ellington discovered him in 1939.
