Red Rodney; Leading Figure in Be-Bop Music

Red Rodney, a driving force in the be-bop movement that spread from New York’s Birdland through the rest of the country in the 1940s and ‘50s, died Friday.

Times jazz critic Leonard Feather said Rodney died of cancer in New York City. He was 66.

Rodney, the trumpeter who helped make the Charlie Parker Quintet a definitive unit in the early days of progressive jazz, had experienced health problems throughout his life.

Along with Parker, Dizzy Gillespie was an early influence on the young trumpeter from Philadelphia who was born Robert Chudnick.

Rodney--who was portrayed by Mike Zelnicker in “Bird,” a biographical film about Parker--began studying brass when he was in his teens.

He was working with a Philadelphia swing orchestra when he first heard the innovative Gillespie harmonies. Gillespie listened to him and took the 18-year-old to New York, where he met Parker. He said the first thing the troubled saxophonist did was borrow $10. Rodney also was allowed to sit in with the Parker group.

Rodney, who was to become a member of the elite Downbeat magazine Hall of Fame, joined the Gene Krupa band after learning that Parker and Gillespie were traveling to California, where Krupa would be performing. He returned to New York with Krupa, stayed a year, then began working clubs on 52nd Street.

He was performing with Woody Herman’s band in New York in 1949 when Miles Davis left Parker, and Rodney took his place as part of the fabled quintet.

Rodney--short, redheaded and Jewish--found that he had to pass himself off as a racial oddity to be accepted in a field dominated by blacks.

Parker, he recalled, would introduce him to audiences as “Albino Red.”

Rodney said Parker not only led him to the forefront of the bop movement but also “inspired” him to start using drugs so “maybe I could play that good,” as he told Feather in 1988.

He battled drugs for several years. By the 1970s he had put his destructive habits behind him and was touring Europe, playing regularly behind star acts in Las Vegas and recording with a group called Bebop Preservation Society. In the early 1980s he started working full time with his own jazz quintet and appeared at clubs throughout the country, including the Catalina Bar and Grill in Los Angeles.

In 1980 he teamed up with Ira Sullivan, who played reeds and brass, in what was then one of the most popular combos in jazz.

The Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music calls Rodney “one of the best be-bop trumpeters” of the period and “certainly one of the first white players to gain credibility and experience in the field.”

Rodney’s survivors include his wife, Helene.