Pit Stop for the Traveling Jazzman : Bassist Hinton, on a Roll at 81, Says Young Players Need to Keep the Music Alive

Milt Hinton likes to quip that he’s “the oldest bass player standing.”

While no doubt you could find an active bassist a few years older than Hinton, who’s 81, you won’t find one who can match his combination of celebrity and longevity.

Hinton, a native of Vicksburg, Miss., who was raised in Chicago, has worked and recorded with many of the greats of jazz, including Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Pee Wee Russell, Art Tatum, Dizzy Gillespie and Branford Marsalis.

The man who bears several nicknames, mostly notably “The Judge,” became a professional in 1929. He worked with violinist Eddie South in 1931 and joined Calloway in 1936 for what became a 15-year hitch. That was followed by stints with Basie, Armstrong and 40 years as a staff and free-lance musician in the New York studios. As a jazzman, Hinton still works more than 200 dates a year.

“There’s hardly a weekend when I’m home,” says the bassist who appears Friday in the Hyatt Newporter hotel’s summer jazz series. There, Hinton will be part of an all-star mainstream ensemble that also features pianist Jimmy Rowles, guitarist John Collins and drummer Jake Hanna.

Hinton, also a photojournalist whose first book, “Bass Lines,” was published in 1988, most often appears in either stellar name groups--he toured Europe recently with Benny Carter and recorded in April with Terry Gibbs, Buddy DeFranco and Herb Ellis--or at jazz parties.

The latter events are patterned after the ones promoter Dick Gibson first staged in Colorado Springs, Colo., in 1963. The annual parties usually attract upwards of 30 jazz players who achieved notoriety in the Swing Era, or early in the subsequent modern era. They gather for a few days at a single location--most often a hotel in such locales as San Diego, Odessa, Tex., and Sarasota, Fla.--and play jam-session style.

“The people who attend are usually over 40, and they remember people like me from when they were in college, so they want to hear our music,” Hinton said during a telephone interview from his home in St. Alban’s, N.Y., on Long Island. “To keep the music alive, our responsibility is to get them to listen to younger players.”

While there seem to be plenty of younger (under 40) white players at the jazz parties, Hinton sees a dearth of young black musicians who play swing.

“I’m not happy about this,” says Hinton. “I’d like to see more.

“Oh, there are some like Branford Marsalis and trumpeter Terence Blanchard, for whom I played on the soundtrack of Spike Lee’s ‘Jungle Fever,’ ” Hinton said.

But there are not enough to serve as role models as when he was growing up, Hinton says. “Then I could go see (Duke Ellington’s bassist) Wellman Braude for 50 cents,” he said. “I saw these stars making a nice living and imagined I could do the same. Today, young black players don’t have these places to go to. Nightclubs cost too much.”

Hinton cites other problems: He says established white musicians don’t take developing black players under their wing; the decline of the big bands (during the Swing Era there were many all-black bands that provided steady employment opportunities), and the advent of television, which allows fans to see an act in their living room, instead going to a club.

“Put things like this together and it makes a mountain,” he says.

Still, Hinton won’t grouse too loud, or too long. Of his own experience in music, he said: “I love it. . . . Music is the only thing I know.”

Originally a violinist, Hinton switched to bass after the 1927 release of Al Jolson’s “The Jazz Singer,” the first feature film with sound. “There had been all kinds of work playing (live in the movie theater) for silent films, especially on violin, and when that picture came out, it all ended.”

Ironically, his first big-league job was with another violinist: Eddie South, who was renowned for his mixture of classics with jazz-oriented material. Then came 15 years with Calloway, whom Hinton calls his “musical father.”

“Not so much for the music, as for the discipline, the way he demanded we be on time, be well dressed, and so on,” Hinton said.

In Calloway’s band, Hinton became friends with Dizzy Gillespie, and when the trumpeter was conducting some of the first be-bop jam sessions at Minton’s Uptown House in Harlem in the early ‘40s, Hinton--whom Gillespie had taught modern chord progressions--often was the bass player.

It was an evolutionary period for him. “Be-bop made me stand here and survive,” he says. “It taught me that each generation has to do its own thing and do it better than what came before. It taught me to keep my ears open, and to listen to what others are doing.”

After Calloway dissolved his band in 1951, Hinton found himself in New York and without work. But a chance meeting with Jackie Gleason, whom he’d known earlier, landed the bassist a spot on one of the comedian-composer’s mood-music albums. “And because I could read music, could play more than jazz and had a pretty good instrument, I began to get work in the studios,” he said.

During the next four decades, Hinton, who studied with New York Philharmonic principal bassist Fred Zimmerman, recorded with everyone from singer Barbra Streisand and conductor Andre Kostelanetz to jazzmen Coleman Hawkins and Branford Marsalis. Hinton played on Marsalis’s “Trio Jeepy” album in 1989.

“That record was like a rebirth,” says Hinton, whose latest solo release is “Old Man Time” for Chiaroscuro Records. “I feel eternally grateful that Branford asked me to do that. Young players all over the world know me now, and I get more compliments on that than anything I ever did with Cab Calloway.”

Asked what keeps him in such excellent health and attitude, Hinton said his 51-year marriage to his wife, Mona, is a big factor. As is being temperate. “I don’t smoke, drink only a little and I exercise--working in my garden, growing tomatoes and zucchini,” he says.

“I try to live a decent life. But you’ve got to have good genes,” he laughs. “That helps.”

* Bassist Milt Hinton, pianist Jimmy Rowles, guitarist John Collins and drummer Jake Hanna play Friday at 7:30 p.m. at the Hyatt Newporter hotel, 1107 Jamboree Road, Newport Beach. Tickets: $7. Information: (714) 729-1234.