Benny Golson, jazz saxophonist and composer of surpassing grace, dies at 95

Benny Golson, a preeminent tenor saxophonist who was also the composer of such elegant jazz standards as “I Remember Clifford,” “Along Came Betty” and “Whisper Not,” died Sept. 21 at his home in Manhattan. He was 95.

His daughter, Brielle Golson, confirmed the death but did not provide a specific cause.

Over a seven-decade career, Mr. Golson exhibited a combination of grace, warmth and technical virtuosity influenced in part by his Philadelphia childhood friend John Coltrane.

In 1959, Mr. Golson and trumpeter Art Farmer founded the Jazztet, one of the premier “hard bop” jazz groups of the era. He appeared in perhaps the most famous photograph of jazz musicians ever made, “A Great Day in Harlem,” taken by Art Kane in 1958, and was featured in an Oscar-nominated 1994 documentary about the photo, directed by Jean Bach. He was one of the last two surviving musicians among the 57 in the picture.

Mr. Golson was “without question jazz’s most significant living composer,” music journalist Marc Myers wrote in 2008. Mr. Golson began writing and arranging music in the 1940s, as a student at Howard University, and first attracted wide notice a decade later when other musicians started to record his compositions “Stablemates” and “Whisper Not.”

His best-known tune was “I Remember Clifford,” a tribute to trumpeter Clifford Brown, a friend and onetime bandmate who died, at 25, in a car accident in 1956. Mr. Golson, then on tour with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie’s band in California, spent two weeks crafting the poignant, slow-moving melody, which evokes both sadness and the buoyant tone of Brown’s trumpet.

Trumpeter Donald Byrd and Gillespie separately recorded the song the next year. Singer and composer Jon Hendricks later wrote lyrics to “I Remember Clifford,” which has been recorded by more than 300 musicians.

“I wanted every note to reflect Clifford Brown,” Mr. Golson said in 2008. “And I’ve always said I wished I had never written it, that he was still with us today.”

In 1958, Mr. Golson joined drummer Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, a group that embodied muscular, blues-driven hard bop.

Mr. Golson brought several fellow Philadelphia-bred musicians into the band, including trumpeter Lee Morgan, pianist Bobby Timmons and bassist Jymie Merritt, giving the Messengers a cohesive, dynamic sound. Mr. Golson also encouraged Timmons to write one of the ensemble’s most memorable songs, the gospel-drenched “Moanin’.”

Blakey gave Mr. Golson a bandstand lesson that he never forgot, playing loud rolls or shots on the drums during Mr. Golson’s sax solos.

“Finally, he hollered over at me, ‘Get up out of that hole!’ " Mr. Golson told Myers’s JazzWax blog. “I said to myself, ‘Man, I guess I am in a hole. Nobody can hear me.’ So I started playing harder and with more bite.”

Although Mr. Golson was with Blakey for only a year, in that time he composed several pieces that have become jazz classics, including the sinuous “Along Came Betty,” “Are You Real?” and the brisk “Blues March.”

“When I originally told Art about my idea for a march, he thought I was crazy,” Mr. Golson told the Wall Street Journal in 2012. “I told him, I was thinking of a dirty, funky, greasy march - like the ones played at football games by Black college marching bands.”

Blakey was still skeptical, but Mr. Golson persuaded him to try out the tune at Small’s Paradise, a crowded club in Harlem.

“Space was tight,” Mr. Golson recalled. “But as soon as the one-two beat began, everyone got up to dance anyway, knocking drinks off tables. Art looked over at me and said, ‘Well I’ll be damned.’ After that, Art and the Messengers played ‘Blues March’ all the time.”

By that time, Mr. Golson had a solo career underway, having released eight albums as a leader between 1957 and 1959. With Farmer, he launched the Jazztet, a group that also featured McCoy Tyner on piano and Curtis Fuller on trombone. Mr. Golson reprised earlier tunes and wrote new ones, such as “Killer Joe,” while recording with the Jazztet before he stepped away from the bandstand in 1962 to concentrate on writing.

While living in Los Angeles, he wrote for TV shows including “Mannix,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Room 222″ and “M.A.S.H.,” and he arranged music for singers as diverse as Peggy Lee, Lou Rawls and Dusty Springfield.

Mr. Golson studied classical composers - “I’ve always loved melody. My heroes are Puccini, Brahms, Chopin and Duke Ellington” - and stopped playing the saxophone for 12 years. When he picked up the instrument again in the mid-1970s, Mr. Golson found that he could no longer play.

“My fingers were those of a dead man; my lips were like ripe tomatoes,” he told the music magazine Crescendo International. “It was quite a physical struggle. I had no muscles in my lips or jaws. ... I sounded so bad.”

He launched a slow comeback and, in 1982, reunited with Farmer for a new version of the Jazztet. He returned to form on tenor saxophone, developing a muted, almost purring tone that was instantly recognizable, and he had a strong second act, writing new tunes and performing into his 90s.

Bennie Golson was born Jan. 25, 1929, in Philadelphia. He was a toddler when his father left the family, and he was raised by his mother, who worked as a seamstress and had boarders living at the house.

Several uncles and aunts were musical, and young Bennie - who later legally changed the spelling of his name to Benny - began taking piano lessons at 9. When he was 14, he saw Lionel Hampton’s band, featuring Arnett Cobb on tenor saxophone, at Philadelphia’s Earle Theater.

“That day my life changed,” Mr. Golson told the Newark Star-Ledger in 2004. “I told Arnett that years later, and he had tears in his eyes. I guess it was the sound of the horn, the bright lights glittering on this piece of gold plumbing, the reaction of the audience going wild. I just got caught up in that. I loved it, and I told my mother I wanted to play the saxophone.”

Despite her meager income, Mr. Golson’s mother came home one day with a new tenor saxophone for her son. As he became more skilled, he met a slightly older budding saxophone player - Coltrane - who visited the Golson home to practice and listen to records. Both were strongly influenced by the bebop revolution of the 1940s, led by Gillespie and alto saxophonist Charlie Parker.

Mr. Golson and Coltrane were in their teens when they joined a local dance band, but after showing up for a gig, they discovered they had been replaced. They went back to Mr. Golson’s house, disconsolate.

“My mother looked at us,” Mr. Golson said in a 2009 interview for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Project. “I guess she felt sorry for us. She came in, and she put her arms around both of us and squeezed us. I’ll never forget it. She said, ‘Don’t worry, baby. One day you’ll be so good, the both of you, they won’t be able to afford you.’ "

Coltrane, who died in 1967, went on to become one of the most influential tenor saxophonists in jazz history. Mr. Golson, meanwhile, enrolled at Howard University, which at the time taught only classical music. He sneaked off campus at night to play in jazz clubs along Washington’s U Street corridor and had to climb over a wall to return to his dormitory.

Disputes with his conservative music teachers led Mr. Golson to leave Howard without a degree. (He was later awarded an honorary doctorate by the university.) While playing with ensembles in Philadelphia and Atlantic City, he was mentored by jazz composer Tadd Dameron, then worked his way up to big bands fronted by vibraphonist Hampton, saxophonist Earl Bostic and then Gillespie.

In 1996, Mr. Golson was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, the country’s highest honor for jazz musicians. He published an autobiography, written with Jim Merod, in 2016.

An early marriage, to Seville Golson, ended in divorce, and three sons from that marriage, Odis, Reggie and Robert, predeceased him. Mr. Golson married Bobbie Hurd in 1959. In addition to his wife and their daughter, Brielle, survivors include grandchildren.

Mr. Golson’s presence in the “Great Day in Harlem” photograph led to a speaking role in the 2004 Steven Spielberg film “The Terminal.” Tom Hanks plays an Eastern European stuck at JFK International Airport for months while hoping to complete his father’s quest: getting the autographs of all 57 musicians in the “Great Day in Harlem” photo. The only signature missing is Mr. Golson’s.

Of all the renowned musicians in the photograph - Gillespie, Blakey, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Charles Mingus - Mr. Golson and Sonny Rollins were the last survivors.

“Even now at 90, I don’t know everything there is to know,” Mr. Golson told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2019. “So when I teach master classes, sometimes the teacher learns from the kids. That’s the way it is. That’s the way it should be. Like Sonny Rollins said to me once: ‘There’s no end to this music.’”

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Michael J. West contributed to this report.