Slide Hampton, renowned as a virtuoso jazz trombonist and as a Grammy Award-winning composer and musical arranger, died Nov. 18 at his home in Orange, N.J. He was 89.
Mr. Hampton spent his entire life in music, beginning as a singer and dancer with a family band that included his parents and most of his 11 brothers and sisters. He began playing the trombone at age 12.
Even though he was right-handed, he played the trombone left-handed because the first trombone he received as a child was configured that way. His sisters gave him the nickname of Slide.
“I was hearing music every day from the time that I was born,” he said in a 2007 interview with the National Endowment for the Arts, “so I knew right away that my life would be in music.”
The Hampton family band, which was based in Indianapolis, traveled throughout the Midwest and appeared at New York’s Carnegie Hall, Apollo Theater and Savoy Ballroom in the 1940s. Inspired by the bebop generation of jazz musicians, including trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and trombonist J.J. Johnson, who was also from Indianapolis, Mr. Hampton embarked on an independent musical career in his late teens.
Although he began playing the trombone begrudgingly — “I only did it because the band needed a trombone, and I was the youngest,” he said — Mr. Hampton was soon praised for his mellow tone and for his dexterity on the unwieldy instrument, which requires the use of a long metal slide to change notes.
“It has to use the beauty of its sound to make a point,” he told the New York Times in 1982. “Playing a trombone makes you realize that you’re going to have to depend on other people.”
Musicians recognized Mr. Hampton’s abilities as a trombonist, composer and arranger, and he worked for many notable bandleaders in the 1950s and early 1960s, including Lionel Hampton (no relation), Maynard Ferguson, Art Blakey, Max Roach and Gillespie. He also began to lead his own groups in clubs and recording studios.
Branching out from jazz, Mr. Hampton had a short stint as a musical director for Motown Records, working with Stevie Wonder and the Four Tops, and for rhythm-and-blues singer Lloyd Price.
In 1968, after touring Europe as a member of Woody Herman’s band, Mr. Hampton decided to stay. He lived in Paris for several years, working with European and expatriate American musicians and absorbing other styles of music, including Brazilian bossa nova and the classics.
“There is no way I’m going to tell you I don’t have a lot to learn from classical music,” he told the Houston Chronicle in 1992. “I listen to all the classical composers, from Bach and Beethoven to Stravinsky and Bartok. I’m looking ‘inside’ the music, to the musical and spiritual aspects.”
Mr. Hampton returned to the United States in 1977 with a renewed sense of purpose. He organized groups that emphasized the rich, brassy sound of the trombone, with as many as 14 trombones playing at a time. He developed a flair for performing and arranging Brazilian music.
He rejoined Gillespie’s band, serving as musical director, garnered critical acclaim for his own recordings and became widely lauded as one of the foremost trombonists of his time. Jazz critic Gary Giddins, writing in the Village Voice in 1990, called Mr. Hampton “perhaps the most underrated bebop virtuoso soloist alive.”
He practiced the trombone four to five hours a day, all the while continuing to write original compositions and musical arrangements.
“Arranging is a form of composition,” he said in the NEA interview. “That means that you are composing something to support the melody or make the melody more beautiful or make the melody more exciting.”
Mr. Hampton won his first Grammy for his arrangement of Duke Ellington’s “Cotton Tail” on singer Dee Dee Bridgewater’s 1997 album, “Dear Ella.” He won another Grammy, for best instrumental composition, for “Past Present & Future,” an original work featured on a 2004 recording by the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra.
“All my stuff is by inspiration, not by theory or even experience,” Mr. Hampton told Newark’s Star-Ledger newspaper in 2005. “I just write what I’m inspired to write, let it go wherever it goes.”
Locksley Wellington Hampton was born April 21, 1932, in Jeannette, Pa. He moved as a child to Indianapolis with his family.
In addition to the trombone, Mr. Hampton learned to play several other brass instruments and was a capable pianist. He grew up near another musical Indianapolis family: guitarist Wes Montgomery and his brothers Buddy (a pianist) and Monk (a bassist).
“We used to go to their house and listen to them rehearse all the time,” Mr. Hampton recalled.
He was in his early teens when his family band played at Carnegie Hall. With his older brothers, Mr. Hampton went to a jazz club, where he heard the extraordinary bebop pianist Bud Powell.
“I knew after I heard Bud that I had to try to get to live in New York as soon as I could,” he later said.
His first stop after leaving Indianapolis, though, was Houston, where he worked in a band and polished his skills as an orchestrator. While there, he joined a jump blues band led by pianist Buddy Johnson and made his way to New York.
He settled first in Brooklyn, where his home at 245 Carlton Ave. became a thriving scene of jam sessions that included such jazz stars as John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard and Eric Dolphy. Dolphy named one of his compositions “245” after Mr. Hampton’s house.
Over the years, Mr. Hampton taught at several colleges, including Harvard, the University of Massachusetts and DePaul University in Chicago. He became a mentor to countless younger musicians, especially trombonists. In 2005, he was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, the country’s highest official honor for jazz musicians.
His wife of more than 50 years, the former Althea Gardner, died in 2006. A son, Gregory Hampton, died in 2019. Survivors include three children, Lamont Hampton of Nashville, Locksley Hampton of Wilmington, N.C., and Jacquelyn Hampton of Atlanta; five grandchildren; and numerous great-grandchildren.
Mr. Hampton, who sometimes wrote jazz arrangements of classical compositions, believed that jazz required as much technical skill and refinement — but also called on its musicians for something deeper.
“We deal more with the expressive end of music,” he said. “And music without expression doesn’t mean anything. Just listen to Louis Armstrong. To be able to put that kind of life into the music should be the goal of any musician.”
