Benny Golson

Benny Golson was fourteen and should have been in school. He was at the Earle Theatre on Market Street in Philadelphia instead, watching Lionel Hampton's band, with five years of piano behind him and a plan to become a concert pianist that got some chuckles in the neighborhood. The curtain went up on bright lights and golden instruments, the microphone rose out of the floor, and Arnett Cobb played "Flyin' Home." "The piano paled that afternoon," Golson said sixty-five years later. His mother was a seamstress raising him alone, and not long after that she came home with a brand new Martin saxophone from Wurlitzer's, one block from the theater, bought a dollar down and a dollar forever.

In 1945 a friend told him a kid had moved into the projects who played alto like Johnny Hodges. The doorbell rang and John Coltrane was standing on the sidewalk biting the side of his thumb. Golson said play something, and Coltrane played "On the Sunny Side of the Street." They practiced in the Golson basement until the neighbors wanted to kill them both, and when a bandleader canceled them two hours before a job and they turned up to find the band playing without them, Golson's mother told the two teenagers not to worry, because one day they would be so good that nobody could afford them.

She was right, and it took about a decade. The first career has its own piece here, and three moments from it matter to this one. In 1951 he took a job with Bull Moose Jackson's rhythm and blues band and found Tadd Dameron at the piano, one of the finest writers in bebop playing the same commercial gig, and Dameron taught him to arrange. A few years later he ran into Coltrane on Columbia Avenue and handed him a tune called "Stablemates" because Miles Davis was short of material, which is how a Golson original ended up on Miles's first Prestige session with the new quintet in November 1955 and how his name got around as a composer. Then, in the summer of 1956, he joined Dizzy Gillespie's big band, and the news that Clifford Brown had been killed in a car crash reached him during a break at the Apollo. He wrote "I Remember Clifford" at a club at Hollywood and Western, in two weeks by the story he told most often, though in 1966 he said it had taken more than two months. The Jazz Messengers came in 1958, rebuilt around three Philadelphians, then the Jazztet with Art Farmer from 1959 and the Argo records.

The tell was already there, printed on one of his own jackets. Nat Hentoff's note to a 1961 session carried a line an interviewer would read back to him decades later: "At one time I didn't know whether I was coming or going." The two quartet dates from those months, Turning Point and Free, turned out to be the last records he would make as a solo saxophonist for nearly twenty years, a few cameos aside, and nobody in the room knew it. The Jazztet cut its final sides in the spring of 1962 with only Farmer and Golson left from the original six, and then it stopped. He called it a crossroads afterward, each man wanting to go a different way. He also said the jobs had fallen off. There was a young family at home, and the work that paid was in New York's commercial studios.

What he wanted was to write differently. The trumpeter Jimmy Owens had organized a composition class with Henry Brant, who was teaching at Bennington, and when the class collapsed after two sessions Golson kept going alone, Sunday mornings at Brant's house in Brooklyn. Brant opened vistas he had not known existed, pandiatonic things, and Golson saw the problem straight away: there was nowhere in New York to put any of it. Not in commercials, not in Count Basie style charts. The only town that would pay for that kind of writing was Hollywood, and Brant, who had orchestrated for Alex North on pictures, had trained him for exactly the work New York would not buy.

Europe came first. In July 1964 he conducted an international big band in Stockholm for Prestige, the record that became Stockholm Sojourn, and picked up orchestra dates in Stockholm and London for Jimmy Witherspoon and Jack McDuff. A German art film about Olympic skiers got a score recorded in London with Philharmonic players. Looking back in 2009 he called the film forgettable. In 1978, much closer to it, he said almost the opposite about what it did to him: "I went to Europe and did a German film and I was able to use the things they had taught me. That really frustrated me, because I came back and had no other reason to write like that. So I decided I wanted to come out here."

Valerie Wilmer's Down Beat feature that February, headlined "The Peripatetic Benny Golson," is the clearest photograph of the turn. He was thirty-seven and had just had his best financial year, and most of the royalties were coming from Europe, which he found a little distressing. Sixty percent of his recent American writing had been rock and roll. He was turning out three or four jazz pieces a year where he used to write fifty or sixty. He was not crossing the Atlantic out of necessity, he told her, but out of a desire for better things in his trade, because European producers took chances American businessmen would not. He still played now and then, and on the way home that December he had been talked into a short run at Ronnie Scott's, where Wilmer thought he played with consummate skill. Then she noted the detail that gives this piece its title: on his last trip over, he had brought only the mouthpiece. Asked whether he would forget his first love, he said that would be like asking whether he would remember his own name.

Fourteen months later he made his last American record on tenor for a decade, and it was an album of television jingles. Tune In, Turn On (To the Hippest Commercials of the Sixties) was cut for Verve in New York in April 1967 with Art Farmer in the band, and nothing on the sleeve reads like a farewell. Elliot Horne's note opens by betting the reader that the next person he hears humming "Music to Watch Girls By" has no idea he is spreading propaganda for Pepsi-Cola, works through the sponsors hiding behind the other cues, and signs off "This is Golson Country! Dig it." Verve printed no personnel at all, so the last American record to carry his tenor for ten years does not name the man playing it. AllMusic later called it the kind of release serious jazz listeners loathed.

Then Quincy Jones called.

Quincy Jones had been his roommate in the Gillespie band. He got to Hollywood first, with help from Henry Mancini, and then phoned to say Golson ought to come out too. Oliver Nelson had gone about a year before that. Golson called it Horace Greeley: go West, young man. He and his wife Bobbie scouted Los Angeles from the Beverly Hills Hotel and he played it safe about the whole thing, because he was established in New York and knew what he was giving up, but in 1967 they moved. By his own count there were then four Black composers writing for television in Hollywood: Benny Carter, Quincy Jones, Oliver Nelson, and him.

What did not make the trip was the reputation. He had written two tunes that were already standards, rebuilt the Jazz Messengers and led the Jazztet, and the town's response, as he remembered it in 2009, was "Who is Benny Golson? What has he done?"

Brant found him the first job, source music for Alex North's score to The Devil's Brigade at Goldwyn Studios: a gavotte, a Dixieland number, a George Shearing kind of thing. The second offer was bigger and he turned it down. Gordon Parks wanted Brant to orchestrate The Learning Tree, Brant recommended Golson, and Golson handed it to his friend Tom McIntosh instead, even though he needed the money. McIntosh understood why, and explained it in his own oral history years later: in Hollywood the first thing you do is the thing you become known for, and once you are known as an orchestrator you never get to be a composer. Golson had decided he was not going to be an orchestrator. The decision cost him about a year, and during it his nest egg dropped like an elevator out of control. His horns went to the pawn shop, and so did his camera and Bobbie's jewelry and her furs. He remembered thinking, so, this is how it ends.

Then the work started and did not stop for eight years. Universal put him on a new series with Robert Wagner, It Takes a Thief, where Dave Grusin had written the theme and scored the first episode and Golson picked it up from the second. Run for Your Life was in production at the same studio, and on one of those two shows, he could never remember which, he buried a disguised "Stablemates" in a cue and heard Tom Scott laughing in the saxophone section. Paramount had him on Mission: Impossible and Mannix. At Twentieth Century Fox he wrote to Jerry Goldsmith's theme on Room 222 for two or three years and to Johnny Mandel's on M*A*S*H for three, roughly 1973 to 1975, and got to know Alan Alda. The Fox cue sheets credit him with "Memories of Henry," the music under the closing montage of the 1975 episode in which Henry Blake's plane goes down over the Sea of Japan. The Partridge Family at Screen Gems was another credit. He was for hire on all of it, never on salary, and the studios kept the publishing.

The commercials paid better than any of it. He ran his own production company for jingles, and asked in 2009 whether that work was lucrative he said "Very. Very." He also called the agencies the most demanding clients he ever had, because they spent enormous time on the words and the composer's job was to translate their expressions into music. There was arranging for singers on top of it. Peggy Lee insisted on cutting a whole date live and paid for a remix out of her own pocket. Connie Francis stopped a take over his chord choices with the words "Hold it! Stop! What was that?" Nancy Wilson was easy to work with. Lou Rawls, Sammy Davis, Diana Ross and O. C. Smith came through the same years. At Universal the pace turned into a grind, and he described himself as a humpback in the back room from early morning until late at night, with someone always at the door asking whether Reel 3 was done.

The horn went into the closet on purpose, and his explanation for it never changed across forty years of interviews. He wanted to write dramatic music, comedy and drama and not just hip jazz things, and in that town the label stuck fast: once they called you a jazz guy, the assignments you could get narrowed. So he turned down every playing job that came in. "I'd turn them all down," he told KCRW in 1982. "And after a couple of years, I didn't get any more calls, and I died completely!" His count in 1983 was maybe three jobs in Los Angeles in fifteen years. He gave away his flute, his soprano and his clarinet, and sold most of the saxophones.

There was a second reason, and it is the more interesting one. He did not like the way he sounded. What he was playing was not reaching his heart, he had no idea what to do about it, and so putting the horn down was not hard. Obituaries have tended to hand the credit to Coltrane, whose wave was rolling over every tenor player alive, and Golson never did. He blamed his own ears. The earliest version of that answer is printed on a record jacket, in a June 1978 conversation with Leonard Feather closer to the events than anything he said later: "That style was me, but later on I got dissatisfied and reached a point where I didn't know how I wanted to sound. Boy, it's frustrating when you pick up the horn and you play and you don't like what you are hearing." No wave, no rival, no verdict from outside. A man who could not stand what he was hearing.

How long the silence lasted depends on which interview you read: seven, eight or nine, almost ten, and once, in the same 2009 conversation, both fifteen and eight. The paper trail narrows it. He was on a bandstand at Ronnie Scott's in December 1965, on tenor in a New York studio in April 1967, and by his own account he started coming back in 1975, so the case stayed shut from roughly 1967 to 1975. The earliest interview turns out to be the one that fits, because in 1978 he told Feather he had not touched the horn "for about eight or nine years," then said "eight years" again a paragraph later. Asked much later whether it had hurt to stop, he said no. He did not like the way he sounded, so it was easy.

Oliver Nelson died in October 1975 at forty-three, and Universal asked Golson to take over his show, The Six Million Dollar Man. He scored one episode, went home, and told Bobbie he had the feeling it was going to be the last thing he did. Part of that was the studio. Universal, he said later, were meat merchants who did not give a darn about the composers, and he believed the pace had killed his friend. He was disillusioned with the thing he had thought he would do for the rest of his life. The other part was simpler. After years away from it, he wanted to play again.

The calls had already started coming back from the East, and one promoter kept pleading with him: if you will just come and do this one concert. Golson told him it would take months to get in shape and was not worth it, and then did it anyway. He got in shape the only sensible way, in a little club that had opened in the Valley called the Times Restaurant, with Patrice Rushen on piano, Roy McCurdy on drums and Fred Tinsley of the Los Angeles Philharmonic on bass. It started to feel good. Then he played the concert back east, and the line he used about it afterward is the one that explains this whole chapter: "In '75 I started to come back, and it was like recovering from a stroke."

The date can be pinned down, and it matters, because it changes the order of the story. Leonard Feather was in the audience at the Pilgrimage Theater in Hollywood in May 1975 for what he called a coming-out party, and when the two men talked three years later Golson pointed straight at it: "You were there when I played the concert at the Pilgrimage. That was the first time." That is five months before Oliver Nelson died. The horn was already out of the closet when Universal called about the last episode. New York put on a Town Hall concert of his compositions the same year.

He was specific about what a stroke feels like when the instrument is a tenor saxophone. The horn sat in his hand like a piece of plumbing from under the kitchen sink. He had no muscles in his lips or his jaw, no embouchure, and no corn on the thumb where the weight of the horn rides, so playing was painful and it was tiring. Everything had gone, concept and chops together. He sounded so bad that he was embarrassed for his wife to hear him, and there were nights on the comeback when he felt like walking to the microphone and apologizing to the audience. He had been reaching for the same image for years. "It took me months just to get a sound again," he said in 1978. "The lips were like tomatoes, I had no control."

The first record back was not a jazz record, or not quite. Columbia signed him, and in 1977 the label put out Killer Joe, cut at A&M in Los Angeles and Sigma Sound in Philadelphia with Bobby Martin producing alongside Golson, who played soprano and keyboards on it. The title track got a new spoken introduction from Ted Lange, the bartender on The Love Boat, because Golson thought Lange had everything he himself lacked as a talker. Billboard's jazz chart had it at number 35 in June, in a week when Columbia held seven of the top ten jazz albums. A second album for the Japanese CBS/Sony arm, Are You Real, was cut at A&M that August, and I'm Always Dancin' to the Music followed in 1978.

He did not defend those records for long. "It was really fusion," he told KCRW in February 1982, and then called it what it was: pop rock, soprano saxophone, girls singing in the background, strings. "I tried and I died. It just wasn't coming from my heart." Columbia agreed, and said so when they let him go, which he delivered as a punch line with a laugh. He went back, in his words, to his first love. He never decried fusion afterward, just called it not his cup of tea, and when a six-hour radio broadcast was built around him in 1995 he chose none of his Hollywood music for it, on the grounds that it would be too boring. Episodic music, he called it. The truth was that he had the two horns sorted into two jobs while the Columbia records were still on the shelves. "I'm doing the commercial thing with the soprano," he said in 1978. "But I can't on tenor. When I pick up the tenor I play jazz. I can't explain it. I can't do anything else."

The rebuilding was slower than the records make it look. For the first few years he played only in the summer, festival time, maybe two months, and then put the horn back in the case and waited for the next summer. Around 1981 he decided to approach it seriously. By his own repeated estimate the comfort took ten years to come back, because he had to get his imagination oiled up again.

What came back was not the same player. His style had begun to change during the years he never touched the horn, as if the thinking had gone on without the practice. He could hear it himself, and ranked his own recent albums for an interviewer in 1982: the first one for a Japanese label sounded almost the way he used to, the second a little different, the third a marked difference. Critics heard it too. Scott Yanow wrote that his tone had hardened and now sounded closer to Archie Shepp than to Don Byas, who was his real idol. A Down Beat reviewer in 1984 picked out a slight quaver, an increased graininess, a burrowing lower register. Golson's own version was simpler. He took more chances now, and to move ahead you have to take chances.

What almost nobody noticed is that he had described the second sound before he lost the first one. Nat Hentoff, writing the liner note to Gone with Golson in 1960, found him caught between the lyrical Don Byas vein and the plunging Coltrane one, and printed what Golson said he wanted instead. "I want to get more excitement into my playing. The lyrical approach provides a certain kind of depth excitement, but I want to go higher in emotional pitch as well as deeper. I want, in short, to be able to build effective climaxes and still play subtly when I feel the need." That is the harder tone the critics heard in 1984, described twenty-four years early by a man who could not yet produce it. The silence did not change what he was after. It changed how long it took him to get there.

None of which is how a Golson record actually works in a room. Put one on when you want to calm down and it does the job: the sound is smooth, it settles the place, and the melodies underneath it are fantastic. The hardening is real, and it never cost him that.

The work, when it came back, came from abroad, and so the records did too. "Most of the things I've done have been out of the country," he said in 1982, "either in Japan or in Europe. Recordings likewise." By then he had made four albums for Japanese labels. The first was California Message, cut in Los Angeles on October 20 to 22, 1980, for Baystate, with Curtis Fuller beside him, and One More Mem'ry followed in 1981 with the same front line. He was clear about who they were for. They were not made for American consumption, they were made for Japan, and he wished the Americans would catch up: his tunes did very well in Japan, very well in Europe, and third in the United States.

He had known that audience since a tour in 1965, when fans waited at every venue with pencils and pads. Japanese jazz listeners were fans to the hilt, he said; they could recite who was in Benny Goodman's band in 1937.

The Jazztet came back almost by accident. A promoter in England named Alexander Zivkovic wanted a quintet with Golson and J.J. Johnson for the European festivals, and Johnson declined, afraid of missing a film job in Los Angeles. Golson, not thinking seriously, said the only thing that would tempt him was putting the Jazztet together again, and Zivkovic answered, sensational idea. Then the Japanese got wind of it. In September 1981 Golson and Art Farmer were in Japan as the two horns behind Nancy Wilson, the promoters there heard about the plan, and the reunion happened on their terms. "The Japanese are so astute in business that they grabbed hold of the idea," Golson said, "and we actually performed and recorded there as the Jazztet before we got here." The first reunion album, Voices All, was recorded for East World in Tokyo in April 1982 and came out in Japan in 1983.

Only after the Japanese dates did the band open in New York, where John S. Wilson gave it a terrific review in the Times and the audience stood as if the group had just finished Hamlet. At Fat Tuesday's they broke the attendance record, and Freddie Hubbard complained that it had been his.

He refused to reuse the old arrangements. After twenty years there was almost nothing there when he and Farmer first rehearsed, and he would not have dared bring back the 1960 book anyway, because things change. So he rewrote the band from the inside: the heavy three-part harmony of the Argo years went to two parts, trumpet and tenor doubling, with the harmony springing out of the trombone underneath. The front line was deliberately the original three, Farmer on flugelhorn, Fuller and Golson, with Albert "Tootie" Heath, a drummer from the first era, behind them. It was never meant to be permanent. A couple of times a year, he said in 1983, usually tours outside the United States, because he still had work waiting in Los Angeles. It made Moment to Moment for Soul Note in Italy and Nostalgia for Baystate, then two for Contemporary, and it kept reuniting through the nineties until a last session in 1996, which is on One Day, Forever. Farmer died in 1999.

Between those dates he made the two memorial records. Time Speaks, cut at Van Gelder's on December 7 and 8, 1982, was for the memory of Clifford Brown, and it put Freddie Hubbard and Woody Shaw on the same record for the first time, with Kenny Barron, Cecil McBee and Ben Riley. A year later, on December 20 and 21, 1983, at Vanguard Studios in New York, he made This Is for You, John with Pharoah Sanders on the second tenor, Cedar Walton, Ron Carter and Jack DeJohnette.

Choosing Sanders was his idea, and the reasoning was the point of the record. Pharoah was the one who came closest to what Coltrane was about, he said, the way he could play one note, like John, and lay you out. Two witnesses, in other words: Golson had known Coltrane at sixteen, on the sidewalk with his thumb in his mouth, and Sanders had known him at the end. For the imitators in between he had no patience at all. There were so many saxophones trying to sound like Coltrane, he said, that the personality got submerged and lost, and there was only one John Coltrane. The Japanese run closed with Stardust for Denon in June 1987, Hubbard again, and by then the sound the critics had noticed in 1984 was simply his sound.

The second career turned out to be longer than the first. Domingo, recorded in Paris in 1991 with Fuller, is where Yanow located the finished late sound: quite a bit harder than before, at times fairly close to Shepp, and swinging as hard as ever. I Remember Miles came out in Japan first, in 1993, and in 1996 the tenor summit Tenor Legacy put him beside Branford Marsalis, James Carter and Harold Ashby. Up Jumped Benny and Remembering Clifford followed.

The honors arrived in the same stretch, a Guggenheim in 1994 and an NEA Jazz Masters fellowship in 1996, which he said helped him honor the best in himself. The one that stopped him came from Howard University. In 1947 Howard had told him to put the saxophone away and threatened to expel anyone caught playing jazz on the premises. In 1996 it created the Benny Golson Jazz Master Award. He could not believe it.

He had always been the youngest man in the room who could not believe his luck. In the summer of 1958, twenty-nine years old and new in town, he stood on a stoop on East 126th Street for Art Kane's Esquire photograph with fifty-six other musicians. By 2009 he could count six of them still alive. When he died there was one, Sonny Rollins.

That photograph is also how most people who have never heard a note of his music know his name. Steven Spielberg built the last act of The Terminal around it in 2004: Tom Hanks's character carries a Planters peanut can of autographs his late father collected from everyone in the picture except Benny Golson, and the film ends in a hotel lounge with Golson's band playing "Killer Joe" and Golson signing. Golson had no idea what was happening when an assistant said Steven wanted to speak to him, and then Spielberg came over, knelt on one knee and talked about his mother's delicatessen. He found out later that Spielberg used to come and hear him play as a college student. After the scene he told Hanks he sounded just like Dracula. He put the band from the film, Eddie Henderson, Mike LeDonne, Buster Williams and Carl Allen, on Terminal 1 for Concord the same year. Down Beat's obituary put it plainly: for all his success, the general public knew him best for the movie.

He never chose between the two trades. In 1983 he said it was as though he had two wives and he loved them both, and by 2012 the line had sharpened into "I'm a musical bigamist. I like them both. I'm married to them both." The difference, as he described it, was that writing was waiting in the maternity room and playing was spontaneous, there and then gone. The writing kept paying either way. By 2024 Tom Lord's discography counted 466 recorded versions of "I Remember Clifford" and 368 of "Whisper Not." One tune on that list is "Reggie of Chester," named for his son, born in 1949, who was making his own name as a drummer around Los Angeles by the time the family had been there a decade. Golson never tired of playing the old ones. They were the songs that gave him his reputation and he owed them his best, and he minded it no more than he minded signing autographs. It was a privilege.

He turned eighty at the Kennedy Center in January 2009, with Ron Carter, Fuller, Cedar Walton and Al Jarreau on stage and a video greeting from Hanks and Spielberg, and marked the birthday with New Time, New 'Tet, which went as far afield as Chopin and Verdi. The memoir took another seven years. Whisper Not, written with Jim Merod and published by Temple University Press in 2016, is episodic rather than chronological and opens with Coltrane, which the London Jazz News reviewer thought was its best-written section. On the Hollywood years it remembers the pawned instruments and the furs. On the comeback it uses a word no interviewer ever got out of him: returning from the tyranny of creative loss, he wrote, was a musical resurrection. He was eighty-seven when Horizon Ahead came out the same year, and still leading bands. In January 2020, a week shy of ninety-one, he was on a Midwest run with the pianist Emmet Cohen when a snowstorm canceled Iowa, and he offered to drive the eight hours himself. This is your band, he told Cohen, and I'm with you guys. The pandemic ended the touring two months later.

Benny Golson died at home in Manhattan on September 21, 2024, at ninety-five, after a short illness. Weeks earlier he had watched a two-hour rough cut of the documentary his manager Jason Franklin had been making and said it was the story of his life. Eddie Henderson said he could play one note and you knew it was Benny Golson. Terell Stafford said anyone who wants to know the tenor saxophone should start by transcribing him. Christian McBride remembered that the gentleman could turn into a fire-breathing North Philly dragon. The sound all three of them are describing is the second one, the harder one that came out of the closet in 1975, and it is on every record from California Message onward. He had sold most of his instruments during the Hollywood years and kept a couple. "I'm glad I didn't sell them all."