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Swing-Era Dossier

Lionel Hampton

1908 – 2002

Born

April 20, 1908, Louisville, Kentucky. Full name Lionel Leo Hampton. Father Charles (singer/pianist) went missing in WWI; raised by his mother and grandparents, Birmingham AL then Chicago (~1919) in the Great Migration. (Birth year disputed — 1909/1913/1914 also published; he had no birth certificate. 1908 is the date in his own autobiography Hamp and the modern consensus.)

Died

August 31, 2002, Mount Sinai Hospital, Manhattan, age 94. Congestive heart failure following a series of strokes. (Age 94 corroborates the 1908 birth.)

Instruments

Vibraphone (primary — its jazz pioneer). Started on drums as a boy (taught by a Dominican nun; played in the Chicago Defender Newsboys' Band). Also a distinctive two-finger "mallet-style" piano — index fingers struck the keys like vibe mallets while another pianist covered the left hand.

Nicknames

  • "Hamp" — plain shorthand for his surname; the one people who knew him actually used (he titled his own tunes with it: "Hamp's Boogie Woogie").
  • "King of the Vibes" — press/critical billing for pioneering the instrument; fine as a tagline, not an intimate nickname.

Bands / years

  • 1927–early '30s — Los Angeles, drums: recording debut with Paul Howard's Quality Serenaders; then Les Hite's band at Sebastian's Cotton Club.
  • Oct 16, 1930 — first vibraphone recording: Louis Armstrong (fronting the Hite band) spotted a vibraphone in the studio and put Hampton on "Memories of You."
  • 1936 — discovered in LA by Benny Goodman (John Hammond brought him to hear Hampton lead his own band).
  • 1936–1940 — Benny Goodman Quartet: Goodman, Teddy Wilson, Gene Krupa, Hampton — among the first prominent racially integrated jazz groups before paying audiences.
  • 1940 — leaves Goodman (amicably) to form his own big band.
  • May 26, 1942 — records "Flying Home" (Decca) — his breakthrough.

Active

~1927–2002 (a ~75-year career; performed into his 90s, played the Smithsonian in 2001).

Signature tunes

"Flying Home" (1942), "Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop" (1946), "Hamp's Boogie Woogie" (1944), "Midnight Sun," "Red Top" (1947).

Famous compositions

  • "Flying Home" — credited to Benny Goodman AND Lionel Hampton (music); lyrics later by Sid Robin. The "whistled it to calm his nerves before his first plane flight" origin is legend (his own retellings conflict). Charlie Christian played the famous electric-guitar solo on the 1939 Goodman Sextet cut but is not a credited writer. The much-copied tenor solo on the 1942 big-band hit is Illinois Jacquet (age 19) — a "honking" repeated-note solo that became a foundation of R&B.
  • "Midnight Sun" — his most enduring standard; co-written with Sonny Burke, lyrics later by Johnny Mercer.
  • "Red Top" — co-written with Ben Kynard; first popularized by Gene Ammons (1947).
  • "Hamp's Boogie Woogie" — co-written with Milt Buckner.
  • "Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop" — credited Hampton/Curley Hamner, but substantially a rewrite of Helen Humes' 1945 "Be-Baba-Leba."

Interesting facts

  • His big band was a star incubator: Illinois Jacquet, Dexter Gordon (joined at 17), Charles Mingus, Wes Montgomery, Quincy Jones, Clifford Brown, Dinah Washington (launched as his singer, 1943), and Betty Carter (the band tagged her "Betty Bebop," which she hated).
  • "Flying Home" caused near-riots — at the 1950 Cavalcade of Jazz (~14,000) the crowd "went berserk," throwing cushions and swarming the field; called the closest thing to a riot in the show's history.
  • Wife Gladys Hampton ran the business (married 1936): "Lionel ran the music and Gladys ran the business." She raised the money to start his band and managed it until her death in 1971.
  • Lifelong staunch Republican — RNC delegate, Eisenhower goodwill ambassador, worked for Nixon/Ford/Reagan — but in 1996 he endorsed Clinton/Gore, saying the GOP had left moderates like him.
  • Built low-income housing — the Lionel Hampton Development Corp. raised the Lionel Hampton Houses and Gladys Hampton Houses in Harlem (1960s).
  • Two-finger piano — played a keyboard with his index fingers like vibe mallets ("Hamp's Boogie Woogie").
  • The University of Idaho named its jazz festival (1985) and its music school (1987) for him — the first university music school named for a jazz musician.
  • 1997 apartment fire — a tipped halogen lamp gutted his NYC apartment, destroying his awards, albums, and arrangements; carried out uninjured at ~88. Two days later he accepted the National Medal of Arts in a borrowed suit because everything had burned.
  • Honors: Papal Medal from Pope Paul VI (1968 — a medal, not a knighthood), NEA Jazz Master (1988), Kennedy Center Honoree (1992), National Medal of Arts (1996).

Sources

Clips