The great jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard passed away December 29, 2008, aged 70.
Among the great trumpeters of the 1950s and 1960s (Freddie, Lee Morgan, Woody Shaw, Clifford Brown, and, of course, Miles Davis) he was the last one left.
I saw Freddie about three times. The most memorable: a good friend and I sat outside in a pouring rain on Johnson's Beach in Guerneville in a driving rain about twenty years or so ago to hear him play with Woody Shaw and Terrence Blanchard play together in an act billed "Trumpet Summit." It was unforgettable, and even worth returning to a hotel that turned out to have no hot water for showers.
Freddie blew out his lip in the mid-1990s through a combination of relentlessly hard blowing and similarly hard partying. He came back -- sort of -- but wasn't ever really the same.
An excellent interview/article from DownBeat magazine from the mid-1990s is here.
And Freddie with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers playing Moanin' is here (that's Bobby Timmons, who wrote the song, on piano, a very young Wayne Shorter on tenor, and Curtis Fuller on trombone).
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