Jazz Odyssey: A Retrospective of Photographs by Milt Hinton Milt Hinton - A Brief History |
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Milt Hinton, fondly called "The Judge," is regarded as the Dean of jazz bass players. He was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi in 1910, and at the age of eleven moved to Chicago with his family. His musical education began with private violin instruction, but while attending Chicago's Wendell Phillips High School and Crane Junior College, he learned to play bass horn, tuba, cello, and eventually bass violin. During the late 1920s and early 30s, Milt worked as a free lance musician in Chicago, performing with legendary jazz artists including Zutty Singleton, Jabbo Smith, Eddie South, Erskine Tate, and Art Tatum. In 1936, he joined Cab Calloway's band where he remained for fifteen years. During this time period he performed with renowned Calloway sidemen - Danny Barker, Chu Berry, Cozy Cole, Dizzy Gillespie, Illinois Jacquet, Jonah Jones, Ike Quebec, and Ben Webster. He was also featured on numerous recordings accompanying Chu Berry, Benny Carter, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday, Ethel Waters, and Teddy Wilson - to name just a few. Some of these sessions have become jazz classics. After leaving Calloway in the early 1950s, Milt began working as a studio freelancer in New York City. For two decades he played on thousands of jazz and popular records, hundreds of jingles and film soundtracks, and dozens of radio and television programs. In addition, he made concert and festival appearances around the world and toured extensively with Louis Armstrong, Pearl Bailey, and Bing Crosby. Milt has accompanied virtually every jazz and popular artist from Ellington, Basie, Goodman, Mingus, and Coltrane, to Streisand, Midler, Manilow, and McCartney. Several years ago Chiaroscuro released Old Man Time, a double cd featuring Milt along with friends including Cab Calloway, Dizzy Gillespie, and Joe Williams and Laughin' at Life, was released by Columbia Records in March 1995. A resident of Queens, New York City, for fifty years, Milt has become an active jazz educator. He has been a guest clinician at dozens of colleges and taught weekly jazz workshops at Hunter and Baruch Colleges in Manhattan. He has served as the Bass Chairman for the National Association of Jazz Educators, as a Panel Member for the National Endowment for the Arts/ and on the Board of the International Society of Bassists. A few of Milt's honors include membership in the Duke Ellington Fellowship at Yale University and the Newport Festival Hall of Fame. He has received honorary doctorates from William Paterson College, Skidmore College, Hamilton College, DePaul University, Trinity College, the Berklee College of Music, Fairfield University, and Baruch College of the City University of New York, won the "Eubie" award from the New York Chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the Living Treasure Award from the Smithsonian Institution, and he was the first recipient of the Three Keys Award in Bern, Switzerland. In 1993, Milt, along with Jon Hendricks and Joe Williams, was awarded the highly prestigious American Jazz Master Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and in 1996 he received a New York State Governor's Arts Award. In recent years, a different dimension of Milt's artistic ability has been recognized, namely his talent as a photographer. He began as a hobby, taking snapshots of his friends in the 1930s, and he has continued ever since. Over the years his collection has grown to more than 60,000 images. The work depicts an extensive range of jazz artists and popular performers in varied settings - "on the road," in recording studios, at parties, and at home - over a period of six decades. For the past fifteen years, Milt, his lifelong friend David G. Berger, a sociologist at Temple University, and paper conservator Holly Maxson, have been working on the photographic collection. In June 1981, Milt had his first one-person show in Philadelphia. The response was overwhelming. The critics recognized his work as unique because, taken as a whole, it portrays and documents significant musical eras from the perspective of an "insider". Subsequently, Milt has had individual shows across the country and in Belgium, France, Germany, Scotland, and Switzerland. In December 1985, he had a major exhibit, On The Road, at the Parsons School of Design in New York City and in April 1990, he and Jacob Lawrence exhibited jointly at The Aetna Foundation in Hartford. Milt's work has also appeared in numerous group shows, most notably A Century of Black Photographers: 1840-1960) a traveling exhibit organized by the Rhode Island School of Design. Subsequent exhibits include the Detroit Historical Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design. In the Spring of 1997, Milt had concurrent shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Milt's photographs have been published in Popular Photography, Downbeat, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, and Life Magazine, to name just a few. His photographs have also appeared in documentary films including The Long Night of Lady Day (Billie Holiday), The Brute and the Beautiful (Ben Webster), and Listen Up (Quincy Jones). A Great Day in Harlem, a 1994 documentary about Esquire's photographic shoot in 1958, features numerous photographs as well as a Hinton home movie. In 1988, Bass Line: The Stories and Photographs of Milt Hinton, by Milt Hinton and David G. Berger was published by Temple University Press. It contains nearly 180 photographs along with an extensive account of Milt's fascinating life in music. It was selected Book of the Year by JazzTimes. Aetna Casualty and Insurance Company's 1990 African American History Calendar featured numerous Hinton photographs and extensive autobiographical materials. In 1990, Milt's 80th year, WRTI-FM in Philadelphia produced a series consisting of twenty-eight short programs in which Milt chronicled his life. These were aired nationwide by more than one hundred fifty public radio stations. The series received a Gabriel Award as best national short feature in 1990. In the Fall of 1991, a second book, OverTime: The Jazz Photographs of Milt Hinton, by Milt Hinton, David G. Berger, and Holly Maxson, was published by Pomegranate ArtBooks. It contains 220 previously unpublished photographs taken from the Milton J. Hinton Photographic Collection. From 1989 to 1994 Pomegranate also published a Classic Jazz Calendar each year featuring Hinton photographs. A book of thirty postcards was released by Pomegranate in August 1997, and thirteen individual postcards have been published by Fotofolio. In 1996 the Discovery Channel On-line featured a World Wide Web biographical story on Milt drawing on his photographs and music. A ninety minute film documentary, Old Man Time: Milt Hinton's Jazz Life and Legacy will be completed in early 1998.
© 1997 Sidney Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College
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| Sandra Kraskin (gallery) | |
