Johnny Griffin has left us...

[Hardbopjazz]

In recent years he had been suffering from heart related issues.

I still don't want to think he is gone.

[ValerieB]

i am so grateful that i got to see him at the North Sea Festival just a year ago.

[Hardbopjazz]

I've just read that Johnny Griffin has past away this morning. Sad. Another great has gone.

Where was this published?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080725/ts_al...in_080725153525

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=206...E8&refer=us

Edited July 25, 2008 by Hardbopjazz

[AllenLowe]

damn -

[ghost of miles]

I'm going to reread Larry's piece on JG when I get home tonight and put on a few records--glad that others here had a chance to hear him in person, it must've been a thrill. Many thanks for all of the music, Mr. Griffin.

[sidewinder]

Shocking news. He was just in London a few weeks ago to promote the recent biography and do some book signings (he was also gigging at Ronnie Scotts that week I think). Now I'm kicking myself I didn't go. A wonderful player, I'm glad at least to have seen his concert a few years ago with George Coleman and it didn't disappoint. By all accounts, he seems to have had an idyllic last 20+ years living in a wonderful place with his wife in rural France so he had a great life. RIP Mr Griffin.

Edited July 25, 2008 by sidewinder

[AndrewHill]

This is really sad news. Another great gone.

[king ubu]

Very sad news! Or in one word: fuck!

Truly one of my biggest tenor heros - at least I caught the one chance I had to see him live here in Zurich (not a great night, he was high on booze I think). Anyway, he left us with so much wonderful music - his run of Riverside albums is fantastic! - and he seems indeed to have led a good life in Europe, and that's what counts in the end. Thanks for everything, I'll always cherish that huge sound and that unmistakeable swagger!

[Kevin Bresnahan]

Damn! Well, the JAMFs can't bother him any more.

RIP Johnny. You were one of the best.

[Hardbopjazz]

The cause of death was a heart attack.

[J.A.W.]

He was one of the best.

[samnat]

We'll miss him.

One of the few artists I really enjoy being a completist about in collecting his music--

because he never ever disappointed!

[Late]

It took me a while to appreciate The Little Giant, but once my ears chimed in with what he was doing, I was hooked. He was perhaps best known for his finger dexterity, but I love his playing most when he's at a medium tempo. One of the greatest tenor solos (for me) is his solo on "Blue Monk" from the Messengers/Monk album on Atlantic.

He made the world a better place with his music.

[catesta]

He was one of the best.

Yes, he was.

Never had the chance to see him perform live.

RIP

[Dan Gould]

This is tough for his legion of fans, it must be extra tough on Michael Weiss, since Griff not only helped raise his profile when he was younger but I'm sure helped him in ways musical and otherwise.

[rpklich]

I've was blessed to hear him many times. Until very recently he used to come to Chicago towards the end of April to play at the Jazz Showcase and celebrate his birthday. He'll be missed.

R.I.P. Johnny

[BruceH]

Damn.

A great, long life and wonderful career, but still....damn. RIP

[7/4]

this just in from the 7/4 jazz news wire:

July 26, 2008

Saxophonist Johnny Griffin Dies at 80

By BEN RATLIFF

Johnny Griffin, a jazz tenor-saxophonist from Chicago whose speed, control, and harmonic acuity made him one of the most talented musicians of his generation, and who abandoned his hopes for an American career when he moved to Europe in 1963, died Friday at his home in Mauprevoir, a village in France. He was 80 and had lived in Mauprevoir for 18 years.

His death was announced to Agence France-Presse by his agent, Helene Manfredi, who did not give a cause. He played his last concert Monday in Hyères.

His height — around five feet five — earned him the nickname “The Little Giant”; his speed in bebop improvising marked him as “The Fastest Gun in the West”; a group he led with Eddie Lockjaw Davis was informally called the “tough tenor” band, a designation that was eventually applied to a whole school of hard bop tenor players.

And in general, Mr. Griffin suffered from categorization. In the early 1960s, he became embittered by the acceptance of free jazz; he stayed true to his identity as a bebopper. When he felt the American jazz marketplace had no use for him (at a time he was also having marital and tax troubles) , he left for Holland.

At that point America lost one of its best musicians, even if his style fell out of sync with the times.

“It’s not like I’m looking to prove anything any more,” he said in a 1993 interview. “At this age, what can I prove? I’m concentrating more on the beauty in the music, the humanity.”

Indeed his work in the 1990s, with an American quartet that stayed constant whenever he revisited his home country to perform or record, had a new sound, mellower and sweeter than in his younger days.

Mr. Griffin grew up on the South Side of Chicago and attended DuSable High School, where he was taught by the high school band instructor Capt. Walter Dyett, who also taught the singers Nat (King) Cole and Dinah Washington and the saxophonists Gene Ammons and Von Freeman.

Mr. Griffin’s career started in a hurry: At the age of 12, attending his grammar school graduation dance at the Parkway ballroom, he saw Ammons play in King Kolax’s big band and decided what his instrument would be. By 14, he was playing alto saxophone in a variety of situations, including a group called the Baby Band with schoolmates, and occasionally with the guitarist T-Bone Walker.

At 18, three days after his high school graduation, Mr. Griffin left Chicago to join Lionel Hampton’s big band, switching to tenor saxophone. From then until 1951, he was mostly on the road, though based in New York City. By 1947 he was touring with Joe Morris, a fellow Chicagoan who ran a rhythm-and-blues band, and with Morris he made his first recordings for the Atlantic record label. He entered the army in 1951, was stationed in Hawaii, and played in an army band.

Mr. Griffin was of an impressionable age when Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie became a force in jazz. He heard both with the Billy Eckstine band in 1945; having first internalized the more ballad-like saxophone sound earlier popularized by Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster, he was now entranced by the lightning-fast phrasing of the new music, bebop. In general, his style remained brisk but relaxed, his bebop playing salted with blues tonality.

Beyond the 1960s, his skill and his musical eccentricity continued to deepen, and in later years he could play odd, asymmetrical phrases, bulging with blues honking and then tapering off into state-of-the-art bebop, filled with passing chords.

Starting in the late 1940s, he befriended the pianists Elmo Hope, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, and he called these friendships his “postgraduate education.” After his army service, he went back to Chicago and started playing with Monk, a move that altered his career. He became interested in Monk’s brightly melodic style of composition, and he ended up as a regular member of Monk’s quartet back in New York in the late ‘50s; later, in 1967, he played with Monk’s touring eight- and nine-person groups.

In 1957, Mr. Griffin joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers for a short stint, and in 1958 started making his own records for the Riverside label. On a series of recordings, including “Way Out” and “The Little Giant,” his rampaging energy got its moment in the sun: on tunes like “Cherokee,” famous vehicles to test a musician’s mettle, he was simply blazing.

A few years later he hooked up with Eddie Lockjaw Davis, a more blues-oriented tenor saxophonist, and made a series of records that act as barometers of taste: listeners tend to either find them thrilling or filled with too many notes, especially on Monk tunes. The matchup with Davis was a popular one, and they would sporadically reunite through the ‘70s and ‘80s.

In 1963 he left the United States, eventually settling in Paris and recording thereafter mostly for European labels — sometimes with other American expatriates like Kenny Clarke, sometimes with European rhythm sections. In 1973 he moved to Bergambacht, in the Netherlands; in the early 80s he moved to Poitiers, in southwestern France.

With his American quartet — including the pianist Michael Weiss and the drummer Kenny Washington — he stayed true to the bebop small-group ideal, and the 1991 record he made with the group for the Antilles label, called “The Cat,” was received warmly as a comeback.

Every April he returned to Chicago to visit family and play during his birthday week at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago, and usually spent a week at the Village Vanguard in New York before returning home to his quiet countryside chateau.

[JSngry]

...I'm here because I did something wrong on my planet. I'm not really from this planet. I did something wrong on my planet and they sent me here to pay my dues. I figure pretty soon my dues should be paid, and they're going to call me home so I can rest in piece. - Johnny Griffin to Art Taylor in Notes and Tones

Johnny Griffin was walking, breathing, living proof that no matter how much ugly, nasty, supremely fucked up bullshit there is in this life, that there was always that much more beauty and joy to be had if you could/would just let yourself believe and go ahead on, take the leap of faith, and simply go there.

I'm always talking about using my horn like a machine gun, but not to kill anybody. I want to shoot them with notes of love. I want them to laugh. I want to give them something positive. - Ibid

Johnny Griffin's was the energy of the truth, and you can not kill the truth.

I absolutely refuse to believe that as indomitable a spirit as Johnny Griffin's has "died", has been extinguished. To do so violates everything in which I believe, much less the basic law of the universe that energy can be neither created nor destroyed.

What I will believe, and sadly but ultimately acceptingly, is that the cat finally got called back home for another gig and had no choice but to take it. That, I can and will believe.

Anything/everything else is a lie.

[jazzypaul]

I saw him a couple of times at the Jazz Showcase when it was on Grand Ave. Johnny was such a bad ass. I mean, so thorougly and completely. Others will probably tell me I'm wrong, but I think you can really hear how much DEPTH he really had on the couple of live sides he did with Monk. Dude had speed, humor, technique, everything that a well rounded musician should have.

Listening to Misterioso now.

I'm gonna miss him.

[ghost of miles]

I saw him a couple of times at the Jazz Showcase when it was on Grand Ave. Johnny was such a bad ass. I mean, so thorougly and completely. Others will probably tell me I'm wrong, but I think you can really hear how much DEPTH he really had on the couple of live sides he did with Monk. Dude had speed, humor, technique, everything that a well rounded musician should have.

Listening to Misterioso now.

I'm gonna miss him.

Those Monk sides were my introduction to him, about 12 years ago--agree completely with you. JG had to be a badass to hold down a gig with Monk.

[tkeith]

JG at Regattabar:

"That was called JAMF's Blues, JAMF's Blues... you know what a JAMF is? It's a Jive-Ass Motherfucker... look like we got some in the house tonight."

For that alone, a special spot in my heart.

[stevebop]

I'll be featuring Johnny's music tonight, as a leader and as a sideman, on my radio program, "Jazz from Studio Four" from 8p-midnight, on WGBH, 89.7FM, Boston

Tune in or log on!

PS I was at The RegattaBar (In Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA)that night. I just got off the phone with pianist Michael Weiss who ws on that gig!

[mjzee]

Very sad. RIP, Mr. Griffin.

[ep1str0phy]

RIP, J. Griff.