Benny Golson

Benny Golson was born on January 25, 1929, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and grew up surrounded by music in one of the most fertile jazz cities in America. He attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he played with local jazz bands before leaving after three years to perform full time. His early professional years took him through the bands of Bull Moose Jackson, Tadd Dameron, Lionel Hampton, Earl Bostic, and Dizzy Gillespie before he joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in 1958, where his compositions "Along Came Betty," "Blues March," and "Are You Real" became instant standards.

In 1959 Golson co-founded the Jazztet with trumpeter Art Farmer, a group that became one of the most celebrated small ensembles of the early sixties. He was already one of the most recorded composers in jazz, with "I Remember Clifford," "Killer Joe," "Whisper Not," and "Stablemates" entering the permanent repertoire. By the mid-1960s he had moved to Hollywood to pursue studio arranging work, writing for television shows including Mission: Impossible, M*A*S*H, and The Partridge Family, as well as commercial jingles and film scores. He largely disappeared from the jazz scene for over a decade.

Golson returned to jazz playing and recording in the mid-1970s, with the first comeback records arriving in 1977. He went back to regular touring in 1982, when he and Farmer revived the Jazztet, recording prolifically for Japanese and European labels before settling into a late-career run on Arkadia, Concord, and HighNote that produced some of his finest work. He was one of only a handful of jazz musicians to be recognized equally as a performer, composer, and arranger. His tone on the tenor saxophone was unmistakable: warm, slightly grainy, with a vibrato that owed more to Ben Webster and Don Byas than to the Coltrane school that dominated his generation. He was inducted into the International Academy of Jazz Hall of Fame in 2009 and received a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Fellowship in 1996.

Golson died on September 21, 2024, in New York City, at the age of ninety-five. He had been active as a performer into his early nineties. His compositions remain among the most frequently performed in jazz, and his body of recorded work, spanning six decades and nearly fifty albums as a leader, stands as one of the most consistent discographies in the music's history.