RIP, Maynard Ferguson

Maynard Ferguson, hero to trumpet players everywhere, has passed away at the age of 78.

The cause was kidney and liver failure, said his personal manager, Steve Schankman.

Mr. Ferguson had a stratospheric style all his own. He possessed "a tremendous breadth of sound and an incomparable tone," said Lew Soloff, a prominent trumpeter who started out with Mr. Ferguson in the mid-1960's. The writer Frank Conroy once noted, "He soared above everything, past high C, into the next octave and a half, where his tone and timbre became unique" - sometimes reaching, as Mr. Schankman said, "notes so high that only dogs could hear them."

He pleased far more crowds than critics. John S. Wilson, reviewing Mr. Ferguson's big band at the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival for The New York Times, called it "screaming" and "strident." Yet that same year the readers of Down Beat magazine voted the band the world's second-best, outranked only by Count Basie's.

Today, record collectors pay hundreds of dollars for rare Fergusons. "Very few rock superstars can command that kind of prices for used CDs or records," said John Himes, who runs the Maynard Ferguson Album Emporium in Cypress, Calif.

I still have several of his albums on cassette tape. I'm gonna need to try and find some of them on CD now.

More from the Globe and Mail:

Ferguson moved to the U.S. at age 20, playing in big bands - including Jimmy Dorsey's - and performing solo in New York City cafes. He then joined Stan Kenton's orchestra, where his shrieking, upper-register trumpet formed the backbone of the group's extensive brass section.

In 1956 he formed the first of several 13-piece orchestras known for the crisp vigour of their horns. They helped launch the careers of such jazz notables as Chick Corea, Chuck Mangione, Bob James, Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul.

Zawinul later wrote the classic tune "Birdland", which was one of my favorite Ferguson pieces. (The Manhattan Transfer later added lyrics to it and made it one of their staples.)

I saw Ferguson on Staten Island in 1985, when he was touring with a fairly classic big band, and again in 1987 when he visited the Trinity campus with a smaller funk/fusion group behind him. The two shows were very different, but I enjoyed the hell out of each of them. We may never see his like again. Rest in peace, Maynard Ferguson.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on August 25, 2006 to Music | TrackBack