Here is an eclectic selection of jazz musicians born in April, prepared by Louise Levy and Phillip Cant..
Duke Jordan
April 1, 1922 – August 2006
“We didn’t come here to set any fashions in music. We merely came to bring a much-needed touch of home to some lads who have been here a couple of years.”
Duke Jordan was an A-list pianist who was there at the birth of bebop. He was part of Charlie Parker’s classic quintet in 1947. He was regarded as one of the great early bebop pianists, the sound that he helped to create in the postwar era was something new, and it remains a cornerstone of jazz.
Bubber Miley
April 3, 1903 – May 20, 1932
James Wesley “Bubber” Miley was an American early jazz trumpet and cornet player, specializing in the use of the plunger mute. His growling, drunken wah-wah sounding trumpet playing was largely responsible for Duke Ellington’s early success and was the most prominent voice in Duke’s bands throughout the years of 1926 to 1928. Miley was influenced by King Oliver, but developed his own distinctive style of playing with mutes and derbys. He co-wrote “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” and “Black and Tan Fantasy” with Duke Ellington.
Muddy Waters
April 4, 1913 – April 30, 1983
“If you got something you don’t want other people to know, keep it in your pocket.”
McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters was an American blues singer-songwriter and musician who was an important figure in the post-World War II blues scene, and is often cited as the “father of modern Chicago blues”. His style of playing has been described as “raining down Delta beatitude”. Muddy Waters’ music has influenced various American music genres, including rock and roll and subsequently rock. The British band The Rolling Stones named themselves after Muddy Waters’ 1950 song, “Rollin’ Stone”. Jimi Hendrix recalled that “I first heard him as a little boy and it scared me to death”. Eric Clapton was a big fan of Muddy Waters growing up and his band Cream covered “Rollin’ and Tumblin'” on their 1966 debut album Fresh Cream.
Stanley Turrentine
April 5, 1934 – September 12, 2000
“My music has been called rock, be-bop, rhythm and blues, jazz fusion…I just let others describe what my music is, if I hear something and I like it, I’ll play it. I just consider myself playing good music.”
Stanley Turrentine was an American jazz tenor saxophonist. He began his career playing R&B for Earl Bostic and later soul-jazz recording for the Blue Note label from 1960, touched on jazz fusion during a stint on CTI in the 1970s. He was described by critic Steve Huey as “renowned for his distinctively thick, rippling tone [and] earthy grounding in the blues.” Turrentine was married to organist Shirley Scott in the 1960s, with whom he frequently recorded, and was the younger brother of trumpeter Tommy Turrentine.”
Gerry Mulligan
April 6, 1927 – January 20, 1996
“So I played alto for quite a while until I saved up the money for the baritone.”
Gerry Mulligan was an American jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, composer and arranger. Though Mulligan is primarily known as one of the leading jazz baritone saxophonists – playing the instrument with a light and airy tone in the era of cool jazz – he was also a significant arranger, working with Claude Thornhill, Miles Davis, Stan Kenton, and others. Mulligan’s pianoless quartet of the early 1950s with trumpeter Chet Baker is still regarded as one of the best cool jazz groups. Mulligan was also a skilled pianist and played several other reed instruments. Several of his compositions, such as “Walkin’ Shoes” and “Five Brothers”, have become jazz standards.”
Billie Holiday
April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959
“Don’t threaten me with love, baby. Let’s just go walking in the rain. If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all. Sometimes it’s worse to win a fight than to lose.”
Billie Holiday was an American jazz musician and singer-songwriter with a career spanning nearly thirty years. Nicknamed “Lady Day” by her friend and music partner Lester Young, Holiday had a seminal influence on jazz music and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. Holiday was known for her vocal delivery and improvisation skills, which made up for her limited range and lack of formal music education. While there were other jazz singers with equal talent, Billie Holiday had a voice that captured the attention of her audience.
Carmen McRae
April 8, 1922 – November 10, 1994
“Blues is to jazz what yeast is to bread – without it, it’s flat.”
Carmen Mercedes McRae was an American jazz singer. She is considered one of the most influential jazz vocalists of the 20th century and is remembered for her behind-the-beat phrasing and ironic interpretation of lyrics. McRae was inspired by Billie Holiday, but she established her own voice. She recorded over sixty albums and performed worldwide.
Jakob Bro
April 11, 1978
Jakob Bro is a Danish guitarist and composer. Bro leads a trio with Joey Baron and Thomas Morgan. In the fall of 2016 the trio released the album Streams (ECM). Bro also works with Palle Mikkelborg and Bro/Knak, a collaboration with the Danish electronica producer Thomas Knak.
Herbie Hancock
April 12, 1940
“Creativity and artistic endeavors have a mission that goes far beyond just making music for the sake of music.”
Herbie Hancock is an American pianist, keyboardist, bandleader, composer and actor. Hancock started his career with Donald Byrd. He shortly thereafter joined the Miles Davis Quintet, where he helped to redefine the role of a jazz rhythm section and was one of the primary architects of the post-bop sound. In the 1970s, Hancock experimented with jazz fusion, funk, and electro styles.
Teddy Charles
April 13, 1928 – April 16, 2012
“It’s the same in art, not just jazz. There’s no way you can fake it.”
Teddy Charles was an American jazz musician and composer whose instruments were the vibraphone, piano, and drums. He studied at the Juilliard School of Music as a percussionist. Later he began to record and made personal appearances as Teddy Cohen with bandsas a vibraphonist, writing, arranging, and producing records. In 1951 he changed his last name to Charles.
Marquis Hill
April 15, 1987
“Contemporary and classic jazz, hip-hop, R&B, Chicago house, neo-soul – to Hill, they’re all essential elements of the profound African-American creative heritage he’s a part of. “It all comes from the same tree,” he says. “They simply blossomed from different branches.”
Award-winning trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Marquis Hill is a highly skilled jazz musician with a bent toward soulful post-bop, hip-hop, R&B, soul, and blues. As evidenced by 2016’s The Way We Play, his is a beat-conscious music where the spirits of Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis inhabit the same sonic universe as Erykah Badu, Kendrick Lamar, Sly Stone, and even George Clinton.
Bessie Smith
April 15, 1894 – September 26, 1937
“It’s a long old road, but I know I’m gonna find the end.”
Bessie Smith was an African-American blues singer widely renowned during the Jazz Age. Nicknamed the “Empress of the Blues”, she was the most popular female blues singer of the 1930s. Inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, she is often regarded as one of the greatest singers of her era and was a major influence on fellow blues singers, as well as jazz vocalists.
Songs like “Jail House Blues”, “Work House Blues”, “Prison Blues”, “Sing Sing Prison Blues” and “Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair” dealt critically with social issues of the day such as chain gangs, the convict lease system and capital punishment. “Poor Man’s Blues” and “Washwoman’s Blues” are considered by scholars to be an early form of African-American protest music.
Esbjörn Svensson
April 16, 1964 – June 14, 2008
“He was following the music inside himself. His music inspired people in all corners of the world”
Esbjörn Svensson was a Swedish jazz pianist and founder of the jazz group Esbjörn Svensson Trio, commonly known as e.s.t. He was introduced to both classical music and jazz very early in life through his mother, a classical pianist, and his father, a jazz enthusiast, and first showed interest in classical music. In his teenage years, he developed an interest in rock music before going back to classical music, and finally making his way towards jazz. At the age of 16, Svensson went to a music college, where he took piano lessons. He later studied at the Royal College of Music, Stockholm, for four years. In 1990, Svensson established his own jazz combo and in 1993 released the debut album, When Everyone Has Gone. Svensson became one of Europe’s most successful jazz musicians at the turn of the 21st century before dying, at the age of 44, in a scuba diving accident.
Chris Barber
April 17, 1930 – March 2, 2021
“We play happy music, and we make people happy. That’s why they like us.”
Donald Christopher Barber OBE was an English jazz musician, best known as a bandleader and trombonist. He helped many musicians with their careers and had a UK top twenty trad jazz hit with “Petite Fleur” in 1959. These musicians included the blues singer Ottilie Patterson, who was at one time his wife, and Lonnie Donegan, whose appearances with Barber triggered the skiffle craze of the mid-1950s and who had his first transatlantic hit, “Rock Island Line”, while with Barber’s band. He provided an audience for Donegan and, later, Alexis Korner, and sponsored African-American blues musicians to visit Britain, making Barber a significant figure in launching the British rhythm and blues and “beat boom” of the 1960s.
Johnny St Cyr
April 17, 1890 – June 17, 1966
Johnny St. Cyr was an American jazz banjoist and guitarist. He was one of the original pioneers of jazz music, playing banjo and guitar in the bands of Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Johnny Dodds and Kid Ory, among others. He started the idea of banjo with Jazz, a combination whose impact changed the banjo world during the Jazz years, and continues to have a marked affect. He is best known for writing the songs “Messin’ Around”, “Buddy’s Habit”, “High Fever” and “Oriental Strut”, and for playing the banjo and/or guitar on the Louis Armstrong Hot Five and Hot Seven Sessions.
Mike Armando
April 19, 1951
Jazz/blues guitarist Mike Armando was born and grew up in Brooklyn & Woodhaven Queens, NY. He attended Franklin K. Lane High School. In the early years, Mike joined the U.S. Navy during the Viet Nam War. He served his country for 4 years and still performed when he had time. Times were tough but he still kept playing his music.
Lionel Hampton
April 20, 1908 – August 31, 2002
“Playing is my way of thinking, talking, communicating.“
“Every day I look forward to getting with my instruments, trying new things.”
Lionel Leo Hampton was an American jazz vibraphonist, percussionist, and bandleader. He worked with jazz musicians from Teddy Wilson, Benny Goodman, and Buddy Rich, to Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, and Quincy Jones. In 1992, he was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, and he was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1996. During the 1920s, while still a teenager, Hampton took xylophone lessons from Jimmy Bertrand and began to play drums.
Slide Hampton
April 21, 1932
“You can have great musicians, but they don’t necessarily play together.”
Slide Hampton was an American jazz trombonist, composer and arranger. A master composer, arranger and uniquely gifted trombone player, Hampton’s career is among the most distinguished in jazz. Slide Hampton’s distinguished career spans decades in the evolution of jazz. At the age of 12 he was already touring the Midwest with the Indianapolis-based Hampton Band, led by his father and comprising other members of his musical family. By 1952, at the age of 20, he was performing at Carnegie Hall with the Lionel Hampton Band.
Charles Mingus
April 22, 1922 – January 5, 1979
“Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”
Charles Mingus was an American jazz double bassist, pianist, composer and bandleader. A major proponent of collective improvisation, he is considered to be one of the greatest jazz musicians and composers in history, with a career spanning three decades and collaborations with other jazz legends such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Dannie Richmond, and Herbie Hancock.
Ella Fitzgerald
April 25, 1917 – June 15, 1996
“It isn’t where you came from; it’s where you’re going that counts.”
Ella Fitzgerald was an American jazz singer, sometimes referred to as the First Lady of Song, Queen of Jazz, and Lady Ella. She was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing, timing, intonation, and a “horn-like” improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing.
Jimmy Giuffre
April 26, 1921 – April 24, 2008
“Well, it goes with my personality, I’m sure. I won’t accept the thing that I am an introverted personality, which some have tried to make me out. I have gone through periods, and I won’t say that I have shaken them off completely, but I have gone through periods where I was quiet: I like the pastoral, the country; I like Debussy and Delius – I like peaceful moods.”
Jimmy Giuffre was an American jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, composer, and arranger. He is notable for his development of forms of jazz which allowed for free interplay between the musicians, anticipating forms of free improvisation.
Lionel Loueke
April 27, 1973
“He studied music at home and listened, enjoying the sounds of the American master players. With that came more revelations. It didn’t intimidate Loueke. It made him more hungry to learn.”
Lionel Loueke is a guitarist and vocalist born in Benin. He moved to Ivory Coast in 1990 to study at the National Institute of Art. The American School of Music in Paris from 1994 to 1998, Berklee College of Music from 1999 to 2001, and the Thelonious Monk Institute from 2001 to 2003.
Blossom Dearie
April 28, 1926 – February 7, 2009
“A lot of musicians say that they couldn’t play and sing at the same time—and singers say that they couldn’t sing and play at the same time. Well, with me it’s all just one and the same thing. I don’t like to do either one separately.”
Blossom Dearie was an American jazz singer and pianist. She had a recognizably light and girlish voice. Dearie performed regular engagements in London and New York City over many years and collaborated with many musicians, including Johnny Mercer, Miles Davis, Jack Segal.
Duke Ellington
April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974
“There are 2 rules in life:
Number 1- Never quit
Number 2- Never forget rule number 1.”
Duke Ellington was an American composer, pianist, and leader of a jazz orchestra, which he led from 1923 until his death over a career spanning more than six decades. Ellington was based in New York City from the mid-1920s onward and gained a national profile through his orchestra’s appearances at the Cotton Club in Harlem. In the 1930s, his orchestra toured in Europe.”
Percy Heath
April 30, 1923 – April 28, 2005
” Jazz is letting everybody do his or her thing with the music.”
Percy Heath was an American jazz bassist, brother of saxophonist Jimmy Heath and drummer Albert Heath, with whom he formed the Heath Brothers in 1975. Heath played with the Modern Jazz Quartet throughout their long history and also worked with Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Wes Montgomery, and Thelonious Monk.