Andy Kirk Jr.

[ghost of miles]

I've always been intrigued by the story of Andy Kirk Jr. (yes, son of the bandleader) and in recent days, revisiting A.B. Spellman's piece on Jackie McLean and Ben Sidran's interview with McLean, I've become intrigued again. In the Sidran piece Jackie talks about wanting to write a book about lost-legend jazz musicians and mentions Kirk Jr.; he speaks quite highly of him in the earlier Spellman article, too. Evidently Charlie Parker was a fan too, but Kirk Jr. dropped out of music by the time he was 20; Spellman alludes to "emotional troubles." What eventually happened to him? I think it's Spellman who describes his sound (presumably through talking to Jackie) as having a "delicate lightness."

[ghost of miles]

Okay, this seems to confirm what I thought might be the case. A Sonny Rollins quote from Downbeat:

Sonny: Yes, he was. In case anybody here doesn’t know, Andy Kirk had a great, great jazz band and a lot of great jazz musicians played in Andy Kirk’s band, including Lester Young, Mary Lou Williams, and many others. Those are two very prominent musicians who played with Andy Kirk’s band. Andy lived up on Sugar Hill and his son, Andy Kirk Jr., played saxophone and got very good teaching from his father and being around a really good jazz environment, so Andy Kirk Jr. was one of the very promising young players. Unfortunately, like so many of us, he got involved with bad habits, and in so doing, it cut short any promise that he had. And cut short his career—cut short his life, as a matter of fact.

This was a very painful episode for myself and my contemporaries, like Kenny Drew, Walter Bishop, Lowell Lewis. A lot of us went through a difficult, difficult period.

Damn. I'm glad that Jackie, Sonny, and some of the others did survive what Jackie called "the heroin plague."

[AllenLowe]

Phil Schaap, who knew Andy Kirk Senior very well, said he was never able to talk about his son, that the memory was too painful -

[ghost of miles]

Phil Schaap, who knew Andy Kirk Senior very well, said he was never able to talk about his son, that the memory was too painful -

Spellman definitely (and understandably) treats the subject with guarded sensitivity, though my between-the-lines reading made me think that Kirk Jr. might still be alive at the time of that book's writing (mid-1960s). Rollins' remark indicates that he must have died young, or relatively young.

[Guest]

no additional information but some really frightening spelling errors found here:

http://www.jazzterrassa.org/jazzterrassa/f...ics/jackie.html

Jack Tejonette, Gracian Ameur, III, Telemous Monk to name just a few...

[brownie]

And looks like the film director had a sexchange operation and now goes by the name of Charly Clark

[Daniel A]

Sonny Collins?

[chitownjazz]

In this NYTimes obit for Andy Kirk, it mentions that his son, who died in 1967, was an exceptional early be-bop saxophonist.

Edited October 30, 2007 by chitownjazz

[Brad]

Andy Kirk Jr. is mentioned quite a bit in Saxophone Colossus. 
 

[Niko]

since Kirk Jr's legacy is so slim I thought I'd post something I saw yesterday even though it isn't much: 

the  track Groove Street from Art Blakey's December 1947 Blue Note session is credited to Blakey and Kirk Jr on the original release. (Later issues claim Musa Kaleem aka Orlando Wright as the composer. Wright composed the flip side, Musa's Vision, so the most likely scenario is that this credit was wrongly extended to both sides of the record at a later date...).

also, I saw in Kirk Sr's NYT obit that Kirk Jr. lived from 1929 to 1967.