Benny Golson

Benny Golson was born in Philadelphia on January 25, 1929, and died in Manhattan on September 21, 2024, at ninety-five. In between he had one of the longest careers in jazz, but the part worth understanding is how he spent the prime of it. He came to attention in the big bands of Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie in the 1950s, and even then the word on him was that he mattered more as a writer than as a player. That is an unusual reputation for a tenor man to carry, and Golson spent his life proving it was the right one.

The Philadelphia he grew up in was absurdly deep in talent. At Benjamin Franklin High School and around the city he was playing alongside John Coltrane, Red Garland, Jimmy and Percy Heath, Philly Joe Jones, and Red Rodney. The single most important influence on his writing came a little later, from Tadd Dameron, the great bebop arranger he met while both were working in Bull Moose Jackson's rhythm and blues band. Dameron wrote bop that breathed like ballads, with real melodies and worked-out harmony, and that is exactly the lane Golson made his own.

His tenor tone in those years was dry and slightly hoarse, closer to Don Byas and Lucky Thompson than to the smoother players, and he later took on some of what Coltrane was doing in the 1960s. He could blow. But put a Golson solo next to a Sonny Rollins solo from the same year and you hear the difference in priorities. Rollins is building something in the moment. Golson is thinking about the whole record: the intro, the voicing of the horns on the head, the way the bridge sets up the next soloist.

That is the frame for everything that follows. The famous solos in hard bop belong to Morgan, Mobley, Rollins, and the rest. The songs and the structures, a surprising number of them, belong to Benny Golson.

Most jazz standards are old pop songs and show tunes that musicians adopted over decades. Golson did something harder: he wrote brand-new pieces that other players picked up almost as soon as they appeared. By the end of the 1950s a working musician needed to know "Stablemates" (1955, recorded by Miles Davis on his first great quintet date), "Whisper Not" (1956), and a handful of others, all with Golson's name on them.

The one that travels furthest is "I Remember Clifford." Golson wrote it after the trumpeter Clifford Brown, a friend from the Tadd Dameron band, died in a car accident in June 1956 at twenty-five. Golson got the news while working with Hampton's band at the Apollo. What he wrote in response is a slow, aching melody that does the nearly impossible thing of sounding like grief without turning maudlin. It has been recorded by hundreds of musicians since, and it is the rare tribute tune that outlived the moment that produced it.

Then there is "Killer Joe," the easy strolling blues with the suspended bridge that everybody from college combos to Quincy Jones has played. Jones turned it into a crossover hit on his 1969 album Walking in Space, but it started life as the closing track on the first Jazztet record in 1960. "Along Came Betty" and "Blues March" both arrived in 1958 on an Art Blakey album we will get to in a second. The point is the density of it. Pick almost any year in the late 1950s and Golson has just added another tune to the permanent book.

By 1958 Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers had been through several lineups and needed rebuilding. Blakey brought in Golson as the band's musical director, and Golson did what he always did: he thought about the whole unit. He recruited a young Lee Morgan on trumpet, Bobby Timmons on piano, and Jymie Merritt on bass, and he wrote and arranged a book for them to play.

The result was Moanin', recorded in October 1958, one of the two or three records that define hard bop. Timmons wrote the gospel-soaked title track, but the rest of the program leans on Golson: "Along Came Betty," the parade-ground swing of "Blues March," and "Are You Real?" are all his. He gave the band shape, repertoire, and a sound, and then, characteristically, he left.

His actual tenure with Blakey was short. He was gone within a year to start his own group. But the edition he assembled set the pattern Blakey rode for the next three decades: a sharp young front line, a book of strong original tunes, and the Messengers as a kind of finishing school where the next generation got trained and then graduated. If you want to hear the Golson blueprint in its first and best form, put on Moanin' and listen to how composed it sounds. Every horn entrance is placed.

From 1959 to 1962 Golson co-led the Jazztet with the trumpeter Art Farmer. This was the band he had been moving toward his whole career: a three-horn sextet, trumpet plus tenor plus trombone, which gave him a full palette to arrange for. The group first played in public in November 1959, and in February 1960 it went into the studio.

The debut was Meet the Jazztet, recorded over three days at Nola Penthouse Studios in New York and released on the Chicago label Argo. The personnel is a hard bop dream team caught at the right moment: Farmer on trumpet, Golson on tenor, Curtis Fuller on trombone, a young McCoy Tyner on piano, Addison Farmer (Art's twin brother) on bass, and Lex Humphries on drums. Tyner was barely on record yet; within months he would join Coltrane's quartet and change jazz piano. Here he is the rhythm-section anchor in a working band.

The record itself is the Golson method in miniature. The tracks are short, partly because Argo wanted singles, but the compression suits him. "Killer Joe" closes the album and went on to sell over forty thousand copies as a single. The version of "I Remember Clifford" hands the melody to Farmer, who plays it as a feature, and it is arguably the definitive reading of the tune. Nothing is loose. Every arrangement has been thought through. If you only own one Golson-associated record, this is the one.

The Jazztet recorded a handful more albums, moving from Argo to Mercury before the group wound down in 1962. Golson then spent more than a decade in Hollywood writing for television, scoring episodes of Mission: Impossible, Mannix, M*A*S*H, and others, before returning to jazz in the mid-1970s. He and Farmer reunited the Jazztet in 1982. But the 1959 to 1962 run is the heart of it, and Meet the Jazztet is where it starts.

Argo was the jazz arm of Chess Records, the Chicago label better known for Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry. Meet the Jazztet came out in 1960 as Argo LP 664 in mono and LPS 664 in stereo. For collectors, that mono number is the one that matters. Hard bop sessions of this period were mixed with mono as the real format and stereo as an afterthought, and early stereo from 1960 can sound thin or hard-panned, with the horns shoved into one channel. The mono is where the band sounds like a band.

The tell of an original-era pressing is the deep groove. Older record presses left a ring pressed into the label, an indented circle a couple of inches out from the center hole, a fingerprint of the equipment in use around 1960. A first pressing of Meet the Jazztet shows that deep groove on the original black-and-silver Argo label. Later copies, pressed on newer equipment, lose it.

What complicates the chase is what happened to the label. In the mid-1960s Chess retired the Argo name and rebranded its jazz catalog as Cadet, partly to avoid confusion with a British label using the same name. So Jazztet titles turn up on later Cadet pressings, and then on a long line of reissues under various owners across the decades. Each generation is one more step removed from the original master tape, and the sound usually softens with each step. That is the ordinary story of a catalog that changes hands.

So why is the original so heavily hunted? Three reasons stack up. Argo never pressed jazz in the numbers Columbia did, so clean originals are simply scarce. The Jazztet's reputation has grown steadily, which pulls demand up. And there is no single famous mark to authenticate a copy the way Blue Note collectors look for the Plastylite "ear" stamp, so the deep groove, the label typography, and the matrix numbers in the deadwax become the things you check. That uncertainty is part of what makes finding a real, clean, deep-groove mono pressing feel like a score. The music was great on day one. The object got rare on its own schedule.