Clark Terry, 1920-2015

Trumpet great and irrepressible spirit Clark Terry died Saturday, at 94. Having grown up poor in 1920s St. Louis, he liked telling of his earliest attempts at making music—

"I coiled up an old garden hose into the shape of a trumpet ... and bound it in three places with wire to make it look like it had valves. ... And for the bell on the other end, I found a not-too-rusty kerosene funnel."

He played his first instrument after neighbors chipped in to buy him a pawnshop trumpet. From those beginnings, Terry went on to nearly seven decades as performer and music educator.

From Italian TV in 1958, members of the Ellington band's trumpet section perform "El Gato." (Left to right: Shorty Baker, Clark Terry, Cat Anderson, Ray Nance)—


London, 1967—


Leading a quintet in 2000—


Along with so many accomplishments as sideman and leader, Terry created a long-running sub-genre: the scat singing of his alter ego, "Mumbles."

Here he is in 1965, with the Oscar Peterson trio—


Scatting and mumbling, with Aretha and friends in 2001—


Like Dizzy Gillespie and Ray Nance, Terry found it natural to combine the highest levels of musicianship with entertaining showmanship. The humor of the Mumbles-Aretha dialog even seems to harken back to black vaudeville. It reminds me (a bit) of the "indefinite talk" routines credited to Mantan Moreland. Other comedians (including Moreland's one-time partner, Flournoy Miller) would perform it; Moreland was perhaps its originator, and certainly its brilliant master.

Not to digress too much, but—the Encyclopedia of Harlem Renaissance (K-Y) entry above suggests (on page 813) that after hundreds of low-budget films, radio work, and an occasional A-picture, Moreland "apparently ... was even considered as a replacement for Shemp Howard in the Three Stooges comedy team."

To think: what might have been... Certainly, an African-American Stooge would been used to set up the crude punchlines of the time. Yet there also could have been rich slapstick opportunities; it's easy to picture the diminutive Moreland dodging Stooge fights and emerging triumphant, as other heads knocked together.

But back to a different legacy: Clark Terry's frequent musical channeling of this sort of comic tradition. It's captured well in this version of "Never"—