Louis Burke; Trumpeter Led Big Band

Louis Burke, a trumpeter who organized his own big band in South Los Angeles after retiring from an aircraft assembly job, has died. He was 71.

Burke died Monday at Good Samaritan Hospital after a heart attack, his wife, Mildred, said Friday.

Trombonist Oz Duke said that Burke’s band attracted both Anglo and black musicians and that Burke liked to quote the comment of jazz great Duke Ellington: “Music has no color.”

The 18-piece group practiced weekly for 15 years at the South Park recreation hall on 51st Street. The band performed at such places as the Biltmore and Bonaventure hotels, the Wilshire Country Club and the Playboy Club. It also played smaller engagements at venues such as Geraldine’s, a restaurant and lounge in Inglewood.

“My father thought it was a disgrace to want to be a musician,” Burke told The Times. “He wanted me to be a barber.”

The son of sharecroppers, Burke had little education and taught himself music after he left home. He always dreamed of joining a jazz band, and when he retired early because of a disability, he decided to start his own.

The band included people from many walks of life as well as races: a taxi driver and an eye doctor on trumpet; a school bus driving instructor on saxophone; Duke, a Santa Monica writer, on trombone, and a pianist who arrived in a Bentley.

“South Park is a real jungle,” he told The Times after a rehearsal in 1989. “I wasn’t sure at first that musicians would go there to rehearse. But it is like Birdland (a famed New York club) when we’re there.”

In addition to his wife, Burke is survived by a son, Larry, and a stepdaughter, Wevon Hayden.

Services are scheduled at 2 p.m. today at the Victory Baptist Church, 4802 S. McKinley Ave.