Played With Disciplined Elegance : Jazz Great Teddy Wilson, Goodman Trio Star, Dies

Pianist Teddy Wilson, whose disciplined passion demonstrated that jazz could be both elegant and exciting, died Thursday after making masterfully swinging music for much of this century.

He was 73 and had been ill for some time following intestinal surgery, said Times jazz critic Leonard Feather. Wilson died in New Britain, Conn.

Although he spent most of his career as soloist or leader of his own small combos, Wilson probably will be best remembered for his four-year stint with the Benny Goodman Orchestra at the peak of the Swing Era of the 1930s.

Started in Trio

He played first in the Goodman trio, with Goodman on clarinet and Gene Krupa on drums, and later with the full band. The trio was later expanded to quartet and sextet, and featured such other jazz stars as Lionel Hampton on the vibraphone and Charley Christian on guitar. In joining Goodman, Wilson disproved the notion that the American public would not accept a black man playing alongside white musicians.

Equally adept in a big band’s rhythm section or as soloist, Wilson also was an outstanding accompanist to vocalists, most notably Billie Holiday and Mildred Bailey.

But he shone brightest in small ensembles led by Goodman or himself.

Jazz writer John McDonough once described Wilson as “the ultimate chamber music musician.”

Praise From Goodman

Goodman himself once said: “What I got out of playing with Teddy was something, in a jazz way, like what I got from playing Mozart in a string quartet.”

Wilson was born in Austin, Tex., on Nov. 24, 1912, the second son of James and Pearl Wilson, both teachers at Samuel Houston College.

The family moved to Alabama six years later, and the father became head of the English department and the mother the librarian of Tuskegee Institute, the pioneering school for blacks.

Wilson learned piano in grade school and played with a dance band in high school, where he also learned oboe, clarinet and violin. He went on to classical musical training for a year at Talladega College in Alabama.

Although Talladega gave him a lifelong love of classical music, jazz moved him even more deeply and in the summer of 1929 he moved to Detroit, where his trombonist brother Gus had already established himself. He began his professional career there as pianist with the Speed Webb band, moving on to Toledo, Ohio, and Chicago with the Milton Senior band.

Performed With Armstrong

In Chicago, he played with Louis Armstrong (1931-33,) making his recording debut with the legendary trumpeter. At Benny Carter’s urging, Wilson left Armstrong to perform with Carter’s Chocolate Dandies and later with the Willie Bryant Band in New York before joining the Goodman organization.

Carter on Thursday said of the old friend he had brought from Chicago to New York: “You can’t describe Teddy’s music . . . you had to hear it.”

In 1939, Wilson quit Goodman to form his own brief-lived orchestra. Despite Wilson’s crisp, sophisticated arrangements and the excellence of its players--trumpeter Roy Eldridge, tenor saxophonists Ben Webster and Chu Berry and clarinetist Buster Bailey among them--the band, for reasons undetermined, lasted only a year.

After the band’s breakup, Wilson led sextets in New York until 1944. He rejoined Goodman in 1945 for the Broadway Show “Seven Lively Arts,” and worked with the clarinetist frequently after that in special concerts, recordings and benefits.

Unique Approach

Inspired and influenced largely by Fats Waller, Earl Hines and Art Tatum, the young Wilson drew from and refined their differing techniques to create his own unique approach to jazz. Once he found himself musically--and that was at a very early age--he stuck with his own style with little change over the decades.

Wilson’s distinctive style brought order, logic and sophistication to jazz without any diminution of the music’s fiery inner spirit.

Critic Feather wrote that Wilson “achieved a neat, quietly swinging symmetry, mostly single-note lines, that was revolutionary in piano jazz and influenced countless musicians during the decade after his rise.”

Writer George Gelles noted that “Wilson is . . . no mere amalgam of other stylists but a primal (musical) force in his own right.” Among others, Wilson influenced such stellar jazz pianists as Jess Stacy, Billy Kyle, Nat (King) Cole, Mel Powell and Jimmy Rowles.

A Perfectionist

Wilson, like Goodman, was a perfectionist, often practicing nine hours a day. On the bandstand, he was all business--calm, serious and unsmiling, never showboating.

In his biographical sketch of Wilson, Gelles quoted Wilson on his solemn professional demeanor:

“Very often people ask me, ‘Why don’t you smile when you play?’ Now, there’s no way on Earth anybody can play the piano the way I do and smile. Once you smile, you’re dead. This is very serious stuff. It’s almost like life or death playing. But when it’s done properly, it does sound simple; sounds like anybody can do it.”

During the 1950s, Wilson toured, played club dates and festivals, taught both privately and at the Juilliard School, worked in radio and television. He also played himself in the film “The Benny Goodman Story.” That 1955 movie added impetus to his career and from the 1960s almost up to the time of his death he continued to tour throughout the world, performing with his trio or as a soloist. His most recent visit to the West Coast was in 1983, when he did a series of one-nighters in Northern California. Often he was accompanied by his sons, Theodore Jr., a bassist, and Steven, a drummer.

Well-Known Recordings

Wilson was one of the most-recorded jazzmen of his time. Some of his better-known records include “As Long as I Live,” with Goodman; his solo versions of “Liza,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and “These Foolish Things,” “Someday Sweetheart” with the Goodman Trio, and “If Dreams Come True” with his own sextet.

In 1983, he was asked by the New York Times how he answered critics who claimed that he always sounded the same:

“I’ve made a deliberate effort not to change my foundation. . . . Basically I found something I could believe in years ago and I still believe in it. . . . What I do for money is exactly what I do for my own pleasure.”