In Memoriam: Lou Donaldson, 1926-2024

By John McDonough I Nov. 12, 2024

Lou Donaldson was one of the originators of the hard bop movement in jazz back in the 1950s.
(Photo: Michael Jackson)

Alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson, the final surviving member of the original Art Blakey quintet that in 1954 introduced “hard bop” into the growing jazz lineage of classification, died on Nov. 9 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, eight days after his 98^th birthday.

He had planned to attend a 98^th birthday celebration at Dizzy’s Club in New York, but cancelled due to an onset of pneumonia shortly before, presumably the cause of his death. He had continued to perform as recently as 2017, when he officially announced his retirement. Since then, his appearances have been confined to occasional salutes and celebrations of his long career.

Born in Badin, North Carolina, on Nov. 1, 1926 — when Louis Armstrong was recording his Hot Fives in Chicago — Donaldson grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and began studying clarinet in his mid-teens when the careers of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw were at their peaks. He continued his studies at the state Agricultural and Technical University in Greensboro, Tennessee, and by 1945 was good enough to join the Navy band at Great Lake Naval Training base near Chicago.

With the U.S. military segregated then, his section colleagues included Clark Terry, Willie Smith and Ernie Wilkins. It was in the Chicago area where he first heard the music of Charlie Parker. He promptly set aside the clarinet and focused on alto saxophone.

After the war, he studied further at the Darrow Institute of Music near Albany, New York, then moved to New York City by 1949. Donaldson worked with Hot Lips Page, and sat in with Charlie Parker and Sonny Stitt. Donaldson first recorded in 1950 with Charlie Singleton, who led a small band that also included, during this period, other younger players such as Jackie McLean, J.J. Johnson, Cecil Payne and Oscar Pettiford. Donaldson was falling into the key relationships that would influence the foundations of his playing.

Then destiny took over. Blue Note Records, which had been founded in 1939 as a home for traditional jazz through much of the ’40s, began turning its attention to the modernity that was shaping the post-war jazz scene. It began by releasing a few Theloneous Monk singles late in 1947. By 1950, the LP had arrived and Blue Note was gathering a repertory company of young players who would define the next decade and beyond. None was a star yet, so they rotated freely on each other’s sessions, not always knowing under whose name it would finally appear. One might be a sideman one day, a leader another, then a sideman again. It made no difference because they were all part of the same musical zeitgeist.

By 1952 Donaldson had been invited into this anointed circle by Blue Note founder Alfred Lion, who had heard him at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. That spring he participated in sessions with Monk, Max Roach, Milt Jackson, Kenny Clarke and others. Finally in June he recorded for the first time with Horace Silver. The album came out that year as New Faces, New Sounds: Lou Donaldson Quintet/Quartet and was the first to be issued under Donaldson’s name. In November he recorded with Art Taylor, Gene Ramey and Silver again as the Lou Donaldson Quartet. That session, along with two 1954 sessions came out as Lou Donaldson’s Quartet/Quintet/Sextet in 1957. Others sessions soon followed. Donaldson’s Blue Note profile was rising quickly. He and Silver, and now Art Blakey recorded together for the first time, again as the Lou Donaldson Quartet. Together they would find something they might have missed individually – a way to bridge the brainy experimental elements of bebop with the emotional fundamentalism that had made jazz entertaining and popular. Soon it would acquire a brand name — “hard bop.”

In February 1954 Blue Note set a live date at New York’s Birdland with Donaldson, Silver, Blakey and Clifford Brown. Four sets would be taped in one night that would bridge that gap – “an innovative way of keeping things simple,” in the words of critic Gene Seymour.

The music would hit the market that fall as a single 10-inch LP: A Night at Birdland with the Art Blakey Quartet, Vol. 1. In September DownBeat’s Nat Hentoff gave it four stars, but concentrated his commentary more on the trees than the forest. “Donaldson plays with more incisiveness than on any of his previous records,” he wrote. “… Lou’s authority indicates a young artist of increasing importance.” Volume 2 followed in December.

But something new had materialized, something simple yet forceful. For Hentoff and others, however, it was still too early and unformed to articulate. A few months later Blakey and Silver joined with Kenny Dorham and Hank Mobley in a cooperative to record formally as the Jazz Messengers, a name that Blakey had used in the ’40s, though the LP came out under Silver’s name. There would be many Jazz Messengers to come, but none with Donaldson. The brand would become Blakey’s, but the line between bop and hard bop would always have a certain float.

Meanwhile, Donaldson, like the others, would find his own career path. By 1958, he reached 14 in the DownBeat Readers Poll, but would be constantly eclipsed by the stardom of Paul Desmond and Johnny Hodges. From 1952 to 1963 he would remain part of the expanding Blue Note family and record often with Silver and Blakey in addition to Gene Ammons and especially organist Jimmy Smith between 1957-63. In 1958, he cut “The Sermon” with Smith, Blakey, Lee Morgan and Kenny Burrell, and saw it become a rare Blue Note hit for Smith.

The associations with Smith and organist Jack McDuff grew his reach into a more funky rhythm & blues audience, so much so that in 1964 he left Blue Note for Chess Records in Chicago and its associated labels Argo and Cadet. The commercial pressures there may not have been to his liking. Some critics say his playing lost some its edge during the Chess years.

In 1967, he returned to Blue Note, whose stable now included another generation rising stars with whom Donaldson perhaps felt more at home: Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Pepper Adams, Blue Mitchell and others. He scored an unexpected success under his own name almost immediately with “Ode to Billy Joe” with Mitchell and Lonnie Smith. He toured Europe often during the 1980s, returning in 1985 to participate in the Town Hall celebration of the Blue Note label, One Night With Blue Note, in which he reunited with Jimmy Smith. Among the happiest of his last records are two from 1999 recorded aboard a Caribbean jazz cruise by Chiaroscuro, one with Arturo Sandoval and Nicholas Payton. And Mosaic Records assembled an epic Donaldson collection in the early 2000s, The Complete Blue Note Sessions (1957–1960).

Donaldson composed two songs that have found a place in the jazz repertoire, “Blues Walk” (also his theme song) and “Alligator Bogaloo.” Among the awards he collected was an honorary doctorate from his alma mater in Greensboro, Tennessee, in 1983; and a Jazz Master Award in 2012 from the National Endowment for the Arts.

His last DownBeat interview was published in the March 2014 issue, a conversation about becoming an NEA Jazz Master conducted by critic Willard Jenkins. That interview can be read HERE. DB