A Notable Force in West Coast Jazz Is Sitting on Top of World

“It looks like I wanted it to look. I wanted to get to where I accomplished a little something.”

With those words, Gerald Wilson understatedly assesses his extraordinary career in music.

For more than 50 years, Wilson has been consistently in the top rank as a jazz composer and arranger, as an orchestrator of music for records and television, and occasionally as a trumpeter.

In jazz, Wilson, 72, has performed with, as well as composed and arranged for, Jimmy Lunceford, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, among many others. He has also led his own orchestra since 1944.

Gerald Wilson’s Orchestra of the ‘90s--its present name--was part of the lineup at the recent debut of “Jazz at the Music Center” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and appears Monday at the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel as part of the “Best of the Big Bands ‘91” series.

Over the years, Wilson has written arrangements for more than 50 recordings by such artists as Ray Charles, Nancy Wilson, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Harry Belafonte, Sam Cooke, Billie Holiday and Al Hirt.

He wrote music and acted in the CBS series “The Lineup” in the ‘60s and was musical director of “The Redd Foxx Show” in the ‘70s.

He also composed an orchestral work, “Debut: 52172,” that had its premiere in 1972 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with Zubin Mehta conducting. Two years prior, the Latin/rock band El Chicano’s version of Wilson’s “Viva Tirado” hit No. 28 on the Billboard Pop charts. That same tune--renamed “La Raza”--has recently been recorded by rapper Kid Frost.

Wilson’s contributions to American music were honored last year when he received an American Jazz Master Fellowship, awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts. The awards panel--which since 1982 has honored such jazz giants as Thelonious Monk, Gillespie, Fitzgerald, Benny Carter, Art Blakey and Basie--cited Wilson for “outstanding musical talent, consistency of performance as a bandleader and studio recording artist, broad capabilities in composing and arranging, and as a notable force in jazz on the West Coast.”

All of this adds up to, well, a big little something.

“Now I’m sitting on top of the world. That’s how I feel,” he says--and he’s far from finished. Wilson is at work on music for a new album--his most recent was 1989’s “Jenna” (Discovery).

“I write just about every day. That’s my business,” the basically self-taught musician says, adding that his influences range from classicists such as Stravinsky, De Falla and Ravel to jazzmen Ellington, Billy Strayhorn and Tadd Dameron.

Wilson has long favored large ensembles. “Me, I’m an orchestral man,” he says. “I like small groups, but my ear gets tired soon of listening to the trumpet and the tenor sax. There’s just so much harmony they can play, but they won’t get into it like an orchestra.”

Of all his accomplishments, Wilson, a native of Shelby, Miss., is most proud of his work with the various incarnations of his orchestra, for which he has written and recorded more than 150 compositions.

Since 1961, when he began his current series of orchestral recordings with “You Better Believe It!” for the Pacific Jazz label (he’s made 14, including “Jenna”), Wilson has been a mainstay in the Los Angeles jazz arena.

Invariably, he offers a rich, vital sound that balances darkly voiced reed passages with gleaming brass writing.

“You can always tell a Gerald Wilson arrangement,” says bandleader Terry Gibbs, who fronted an all-star Los Angeles band in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. “He has his own style.”

“Where does (my sound) come from?” Wilson asks rhetorically. “I think things like that are God-given. I invented it and it’s just the way I hear it. I had already made up my mind before I joined Jimmy Lunceford that there had to be something new in harmony.”

Wilson joined Lunceford, one of the most exciting of the jazz big bands, in 1939, playing trumpet and eventually composing and arranging. His “Yard Dog Mazurka” became a fixture in the band’s book. For Wilson, it was a glorious orchestra.

“We had hits on the jukebox and we could play like hell,” he recalls with a big smile. “It was a monster band. It was the avant-garde band of its time.”

Settling in Los Angeles soon after leaving Lunceford in 1942, Wilson worked with Benny Carter and Les Hite, then formed his own orchestra. It made close to 100 sides for the Excelsior and Black and White labels, and toured the United States. In the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, Wilson worked with Basie, Ellington and Gillespie.

In 1991, Wilson has had only a handful of engagements. Still, he’s basically satisfied and sees the present era as a good one for his chosen art form.

“I’m working almost as much as I’d like. I sure don’t want to go on the road six nights a week,” he says. “And, yes, I think the time’s right for orchestral music again. It’s good to look up and see a whole bunch of guys playing good music, good jazz.”