Jazz trombone player Slide Hampton came to public attention at the tail end of the jazz era. He formed his own octet in 1960. Shortly afterward, the recording industry and clubs lost interest in larger ensembles in general and wind instruments in particular. After a stay in Europe, Hampton returned and established a pathbreaking jazz trombone ensemble called World of Trombones.

It should not surprise anyone that Hampton found his own way out of the trombone’s eclipse. He’s about the only well-known trombonist who has played with the slide in his left  hand.

The public may not pay as much attention to jazz anymore, but Hampton’s talent, drive, and imaginative business sense have kept him at the forefront of it. He is one of the leading jazz trombonists of his generation.

Slide Hampton’s early years

Slide  Hampton was born as Locksley Wellington Hampton in Jeannette, Pennsylvania in 1932. He was the youngest of Clark Dehart Hampton’s twelve children.

Clark Hampton was born in slavery and taught himself to play saxophone and drums. He became proficient enough to become music teacher at a white school in Richmond, Virginia. But when he reprimanded the mayor’s son, he was run out of town. His wife played piano and harp. While still in Richmond, they formed a family band.

Jeannette was apparently the most nearly integrated town the Hamptons ever lived in. They shared a duplex with a white family. But the ambitious Hampton had dreams for his family that a small town couldn’t fulfill. He relocated to Middleton, Ohio for a while and moved to Indianapolis in 1938 to work with William Powell’s booking agency. Locksley was six at the time.

To make it in white society at the time, black musicians had to emulate the old minstrel shows. So the Hampton family band performed under the name of Hampton Pickaninnies and later the Hampton Cotton Pickers. It performed popular dance hall tunes, polkas, square dance music, and the blues at circuses, fairs, tent shows, and clubs. Young Locksley joined the band singing and dancing when he was five.

Locksley Hampton learns trombone, becomes Slide Hampton

When Locksley was twelve, Clark decided the family band needed a trombonist. He chose Locksley for the task. The boy didn’t especially like the trombone at first, but his father told him he was going to learn to play it. Of course, he soon enough learned to love it.  Clark and one of his older sons, also named Clark, taught the young boy not only the basics of playing the family’s arrangements on trombone but also circular breathing and multiphonics.

Someone in his family gave Locksley the nickname “Slide.” He doesn’t remember who it was.

Hampton later told Bob Bernotas how he learned to play trombone left-handed:

See, our training was coming from our father, and he hadn’t had any formal training, and my mother also, who had probably studied some on piano. My father was a natural player. He played saxophone and drums. As the kids were born, he would give them an instrument and teach them as much about it as he knew, and then you’d go out on your own and learn everything else. And so we were mostly all self-taught.

They gave me the trombone left-handed and I played it that way. It’s the only thing I do with my left hand. I did study with a few different teachers, but they never tried to influence me to play right-handed. In fact, in Indianapolis there was a music school called the MacArthur Conservatory. I went to that school and I think three of my other brothers went there. I had a good teacher and he never bothered about the fact that I was playing left-handed. He mainly tried to help me with my embouchure and things like that

Growing up black in Indianapolis

Indianapolis had a black population of about 45,000 out of 365,000 according to the 1930 census. At the time, the Ku Klux Klan dominated city and state government. They imposed strict segregation, but not the same kinds of restrictions on black advancement that Southern states did.

Black high school students attended Crispus Attucks High School, established in 1927 over the objections black community. Forced into unwelcome segregation, the school set out to excel in all subjects.

At first, the administration discouraged jazz, but students formed an extracurricular jazz band in 1940. The band director first disapproved of it, then tolerated it, then helped it some, and finally, when their piano player graduated, joined it.

Enough black families, including the Hamptons, wanted private music instruction for their children that Ruth McArthur, a black woman, founded the McArthur Conservatory in 1946. It had an interracial faculty and offered instruction in both classical music and jazz. Student groups performed all over town.

Apart from formal music education, Indianapolis offered many opportunities for musicians to gather informally to jam. And several families formed their own bands.

Therefore, many influential jazz musicians learned their craft in Indianapolis. The roster of famous jazz trombonists alone is impressive: J.J. Johnson, David Baker, and Slide Hampton.

Johnson had already left Indianapolis before Hampton learned trombone. He came to town occasionally, however, and participated in jam sessions. When the two first met, Johnson went to a club called the Red Keg. His friends wanted him to jam, but he didn’t have his trombone with him. Hampton had his but was too young to enter. Johnson borrowed Hampton’s trombone and Hampton listened through the big glass front.

Growing up in Indianapolis gave Slide a chance to listen to the top big bands as they came through town. Most of them featured excellent trombonists. Some, including those of Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey, had trombonist leaders.

The Hampton family band

Several black families in Indianapolis formed their own bands. The Hamptons arrived there with long experience. At first, they played from “double cued” school notebooks instead of standard musical notation. They only learned to read music when Clark decided he wanted to  include non-family members. From there, they quickly learned to write notation as well. Several of them, especially Slide, became skilled arrangers.

The Hamptons made their living touring throughout the Midwest. They played whatever anyone was willing to pay them to play. Their jazz repertoire came from the bands of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Stan Kenton. When Clark, Sr. died in 1951, the band continued to tour under the direction of his son Duke until 1954.

In 1952, the Pittsburgh Courier offered a band contest, with the prize of playing in Carnegie Hall with a well-known group. The Hamptons won and opened for Lionel Hampton.

At the time, Slide Hampton, his four sisters and five brothers, and some friends comprised a band of three trumpets, two trombones, four saxophones, and three rhythm players. One of Slide’s brothers took him to Birdland to hear Bud Powell’s trio. That experience made a greater impression on him than performing in Carnegie Hall.

The family returned to Indianapolis for a while, then went back to New York for engagements at the Apollo Theater and the Savoy Ballroom. At that time, Slide tried to persuade his family to stay in New York and take advantage of all its opportunities, but no one else wanted to.

Slide Hampton earns a nationwide reputation

Slide Hampton left his family’s band in 1953 and moved to Houston, Texas. Buddy Johnson’s band traveled through Houston. He heard Hampton playing trombone, hired him, and took him to New York.

It was the first well-known band Hampton played with. It also marked Hampton’s first attempts to write arrangements. He told Bob Bernotas that they weren’t really suited to the band, but Johnson was very supportive. The band even recorded one of them.

Hampton described Johnson as a “wonderful, happy kind of guy” who could have been more famous if he had wanted to be. He left Johnson’s band to join Lionel Hampton and described the experience as a misfortune. Lionel Hampton was an excellent musician, but an egomaniac who didn’t care about his band members as people. So Slide Hampton left to join Maynard Ferguson.

Ferguson, every bit as supportive as Johnson, gave Hampton the opportunity to hone his arranging skills. But at the same time, Hampton had the chance to work with Art Blakey’s band. Even though it had only three wind players, Blakey made it sound like a big band by the way he used so many wide intervals between instruments.

When Hampton formed his octet in about 1960, he used concepts he had learned from Blakey to make it sound like a bigger band. He later recalled that he spent more effort on making the band commercially successful than on developing the music and making the band the best it could be.

He had good reason to make those choices, though. The 60s weren’t kind to jazz. Record companies and clubs started to prefer smaller ensembles, even smaller than the octet. Hampton disbanded it in 1963.

The eclipse and return of jazz

When the Beatles came to the US, pop music left jazz and band music behind. Hampton served as music director for Motown, Stevie Wonder, and others, but in 1968, he went to Europe with Woody Herman. He found much more opportunity as a jazz trombonist in France than in the US and stayed there for eight years.

The establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts and jazz clubs becoming more successful again persuaded him to return to the States.

He found, however, that trumpets and saxophones had come back to acceptance, but hardly anyone used trombone. He told Bernotas that when he carried his trombone through airports, people had no idea what it was!

Instead of retreating to Europe, Hampton decided to defy trends and “give people a chance to get used to the sound of the trombone again.” In Europe, he had formed a trombone quartet, so he formed another in New York. He kept adding more until he had a group of nine jazz trombone players he called World of Trombones. He got an invitation from Max Gordon to play at the Village Vanguard for a week, but Gordon initially didn’t want all those trombones. Hampton insisted. After that, the group played some concerts with Bill Cosby.

Mostly, the group existed to give the general public a chance to hear trombones again. Most of the members had little experience playing trombone, but Janice Robinson on lead gave Hampton a chance to write some difficult arrangements. Rehearsing them enabled the rest of the ensemble to improve their skills. Their 1979 recording came about because someone who was starting a new record company invited them. Besides that one recording, World of Trombones played on the radio and in clubs.

Slide Hampton’s later career

Slide Hampton remains active both as trombonist and composer. His accomplishments include a return to big band jazz. He has won numerous awards. In 2005 alone, he won the Grammy for best large jazz ensemble album, induction into the Indianapolis Jazz Foundation Hall of Fame, and the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Award.

Jazz Monthly interviewed Hampton in 2007, shortly after the release of his CD “Slide Plays Jobim.” He said that at age 75, he was just starting to learn to make music. He celebrated that birthday playing celebrations at four different universities plus one in Indianapolis.

Sources:

Early musical development of selected African American jazz musicians in Indianapolis in the 1930s and 1940s / Lissa Fleming May, Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 27 no. 1 (October 2005): 21-32
An interview with Slide Hampton / Bob Bernotas, Online Trombone Journal. 1994, revised 2000
Jazz Monthly feature interview: Slide Hampton / Baldwin Smith, Jazz Monthly. May  2007
Slide Hampton / Pittsburgh Music History
Slide Hampton: trombonist, arranger, composer, educator / Interview by Molly Murphy, National Endowment for the Arts. January 13, 2007