Ellington ‘Graduate’ to Play in S.D.

Jazz trombonist Buster Cooper, who earned his jazz Ph.D. with the great Big Bands, makes his first San Diego appearance in many years Friday and Saturday at the Horton Grand Hotel downtown.

Cooper, who has played with several top bands, including Duke Ellington’s and Lionel Hampton’s, will front a band with saxophonist Curtis Peagler, best known to San Diegans as a regular in Jeannie and Jimmy Cheatham’s Sweet Baby Blues Band.

Peagler is visible in town a few times a year with the Cheathams, but this is Cooper’s first visit since he doesn’t remember when.

“I was probably there with Duke, or with Gerald Wilson or Woody Herman,” says Cooper, who lives in Canyon Country, outside Los Angeles.

Cooper attended the “Institute of Ellington,” as he calls Ellington’s band, for almost 10 years during the 1960s. “It was just fantastic.”

He names earlier trombonists including J. J. Johnson as influences but counts Ellington as his main man.

What did he learn?

“Everything. How to be a person, life in general, believe me.”

Although Cooper has had a long, prestigious career in jazz, his bread and butter for many years were movies and television, plus an occasional odd job.

He played on sound tracks for movies, including “Splendor in the Grass” and “The Man Who Loved Women” and television programs such as “Moonlighting” and “Murder She Wrote.”

One of his biggest thrills was backing singer-dancer Josephine Baker in Paris for several months in 1959.

“She was fantastic,” Cooper recalls. “She took us out to her villa in the south of France, we stayed there a couple times. She had 10 kids she had adopted. Duke’s band came through Paris, and he wanted me to join then, but I was still under contract for Josephine.”

The movie and TV work has “petered out now, on account of synthesizers,” Cooper says. Where once he could count on four or five movie or TV studio dates a month, he is now lucky to get that many a year.

But he has found other ways to butter his bread. Mainly, he keeps busy touring overseas, where he says there is steady demand for seasoned jazz players, much more so than in the United States. This year alone, Cooper has toured Europe and Scandinavia, and even played a cruise to Istanbul.

Although Cooper has had a long, productive career in music, he hasn’t had much chance to pursue an individual artistic direction. It’s been “several years” since he recorded an album of his own, and, although he says he is “happy doing what I’m doing,” he also says he is working on a duo project with fellow trombonist Thurman Green.

Green and Cooper have a longstanding rapport. They were in Benny Carter’s and Gerald Wilson’s bands together. Now, Green is writing new music for the recording they hope to make together, and Cooper, who has written very little original jazz, is even coming up with a few new tunes of his own.

Cooper was born and raised in St. Peterburg, Fla., and started playing trombone at 16. As a teen-ager, he played in his cousin, George Cooper’s, band, which included Cannonball and Nat Adderley. He doesn’t remember why he chose to play the cumbersome trombone.

“I started on drums because George played drums, but I just gravitated toward the trombone,” he says.

“It is one of the most difficult instruments. It can sound bad so quick. In George’s band, I was like butter sticking in water. I wasn’t that good.”

A much-improved Cooper hit New York in 1950, when such “masters” as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were in their prime, playing the local clubs.

In 1951, Cooper joined Hampton’s band, and was pressed to improve quickly by hot shot band mates, including Quincy Jones, Clifford Brown and Art Farmer on trumpets, Jimmy Cleveland and Carl Fontana on trombones, Benny Golson on sax and Monk Montgomery, the brother of Wes, on bass.

Although the golden age of big bands is long gone, the format remains a favorite of Cooper’s. He still plays regularly with big bands led by Bill Berry and Frankie Capp (the Juggernauts) in Los Angeles.

In San Diego, where the two horn players will be backed by Daniel Jackson on piano, Marshall Hawkins on bass and Chuck McPherson on drums, Cooper says the material will consist of jazz standards, including several by Ellington. Music starts at 8:30 both nights.

Jazz pianist Bob Hamilton is leaving San Diego for New York this week, following his wife, Donna, who is already there on her new “dream” job in marketing.

Highlights of Hamilton’s six-year stay in San Diego included performances at Elario’s with James Moody, Frank Morgan, Lou Donaldson and Buddy De Franco, and an appearance on KPBS-TV’s (Channel 15) “Club Date” jazz program with De Franco.

“There’s not much going on around here, things have slowed down quite a bit,” Hamilton says. “It’s time to mosey on down the road.”

One of Hamilton’s final San Diego dates is tonight at Croce’s in the Gaslamp Quarter downtown, where he closes out a longstanding gig with a local quartet from 8:30 to 12:30.

RIFFS: The Art Blakey tribute led by saxophonist Javon Jackson at the Horton Grand Hotel last Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights drew capacity houses of 100-plus. . . .

San Diego flutist Holly Hofmann left last Friday for a two-week tour of New Zealand and Australia that includes dates in Sydney, Perth and Melbourne. . . .

Michael Wolff, the versatile keyboard player and band leader from Arsenio Hall’s late-night program, shares top billing with with Karla Bonoff and Kenny Rankin for a benefit concert at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach at 8 p.m. Sunday. Proceeds go to Casa de Amparo, a North County program that helps abused children.

CRITIC’S CHOICE

Linking Jazz and Classics

Links between jazz and classical music have been noted in numerous music books and articles, but opportunities to actually hear some of the parallels, back to back, are rare.

Cecil Lytle, provost of UC San Diego’s Third College and also a first-rate piano player equally at home in several genres of music, will focus on the work of three legendary composers--George Gershwin, Duke Ellington and Alexander Scriabin--at 7 p.m. Sunday in Academic Hall 102, at the new Cal State San Marcos campus.