Bass on Top a column by Bass Tragedies The old saw is that jazz musicians die young. But compared to rockers and especially rappers, they live generally as long as the civilian population. A comprehensive list of birth and death dates compiled by my esteemed colleague Clifford Allen (with over 2,700 artists) yields an average lifespan of 70.63 years. Of course there have been tragic early deaths but far more jazz musicians lived into their nineties than died in their twenties. It is likely the unfulfilled promise of the latter that looms far larger than the actual long careers of the former; to wit, we can rhapsodize about what Booker Little, Dick Twardzik, Richie Powell, Charlie Christian, Clifford Brown, Fats Navarro, Bob Gordon, Bix Beiderbecke, Wade Legge, and Kaoru Abe could have accomplished with a few more decades at their disposal. That list has three each of trumpeters, pianists, and reed players but not included are the largest group: bassists. This issue’s column will be a retrospective on the four bassists who died in their twenties, recounting their significance across very short careers. Duke Ellington was 15 years into his career when Jimmie Blanton first worked with him at the Coronado Hotel in St. Louis on November 2nd, 1939. According to lore, members of the Ellington band heard Blanton while he was playing at a jam session in St. Louis and brought their employer along to see him, leading to an immediate invitation to join. In Anna Harwell Celenza’s chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington, “The 1940s: the Blanton-Webster band, Carnegie Hall, and the challenge of the postwar era,” she writes that Blanton “transformed the role of the double bass in jazz, using pizzicato and bowing techniques acquired from playing classical repertoire” while studying at Tennessee State University, and after having violin as his first instrument. DownBeat even wrote about his entry into the Ellington sphere a mere six weeks later: “Jimmie Blanton, 20[sic]-year-old-bassist has been signed by Duke Ellington and is attracting wide attention with his solid musicianship ... Duke says Jimmie is the ‘best bass man in the business.’” Blanton was only a few weeks past his 21st birthday and early on worked alongside Billy Taylor, Sr., who had been with the Ellington band since January 1935 but would leave the band in January 1940. It only took a few weeks before Ellington and Blanton would record their first duets, which were also supposedly the first instances of what has now become a very common jazz format, coming back to do more in October 1940 and May 1941, as well as having their duo accompanied by the John Scott Trotter Orchestra in May 1941 and then October 1941. The latter date was Blanton’s final work with Ellington the man; two weeks earlier was Blanton’s last appearance with the orchestra. In between was a septet session under the leadership of Barney Bigard with other fellow Ellingtonians. During this time he started exhibiting symptoms of tuberculosis and left the group to convalesce at the Outdoor Life & Health Rest Home in Duarte, California for two months and twenty-two days (according to Dr. Frederick J. Spencer’s authoritative tome Jazz and Death). On July 30th, 1942, Blanton passed away at age 23. All told, Blanton spent less than two years with Ellington. But given the band’s popularity, that was a busy schedule. Apart from concerts and recordings with Ellington were sessions led by his fellow sidemen like Bigard, Johnny Hodges, Rex Stewart, Cootie Williams, and Ray Nance but nothing outside the Ducal circle. Doug Watkins had a very different career trajectory despite getting his professional start right around the same age as Blanton, though in his case about four months prior to turning 21. He was a recent arrival from his native Detroit (some sources say Paul Chambers was his cousin, others that they were just close classmates at Cass Technical High School) when he made his recording debut, the November 13th, 1954 date Horace Silver Quintet Vol. 3 for Blue Note. It was an auspicious beginning, as it would lead to more Silver dates with a band that eventually morphed into Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, still Watkins’ second most known association even if it lasted less than a year. This set off a flurry of work with period and future Jazz Messengers like Hank Mobley, Donald Byrd, and Jackie McLean. An outlier at this time was Watkins’ participation in a February 1955 date under drummer Bill Bradley. It was with McLean in January 1956 that Watkins made his first session released on Prestige, another serendipitous moment, as it was the label for which he would work most often and that which released Watkins’ most known credit, Sonny Rollins’ June 22nd, 1956 magnum opus Saxophone Colossus. Watkins would also be on dates led by Phil Woods, Gene Ammons, Lee Morgan, and Thad Jones in 1956, the same year that saw him record his debut as a leader – something that sets him apart from the others on this column. But it was not for Prestige but rather the even more independent, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Transition, run by Tom Wilson. 1957-58 was Watkins’ most prolific era: apart from dates with some of the aforementioned, there was also The Prestige All-Stars, Kenny Burrell, Herbie Mann, Yusef Lateef, Pepper Adams/Cecil Payne/Julius Watkins/Dave Amram, Paul Quinichette, Curtis Fuller, John Jenkins, Art Pepper, Toots Thielemans, Louis Smith, Wilbur Harden, Tina Brooks, Georges Arvanitas, and others. For no obvious reason, Watkins slowed down, at least on record, from 1959-61 though there were highlights from that time: Donald Byrd’s Byrd In Flight (Blue Note), Dizzy Reece’s Soundin’ Off (Blue Note), Gene Ammons’ Boss Tenor (Prestige), spelling Charles Mingus on bass for his Oh Yeah Atlantic album (he would also accompany a piano-playing Mingus at New York’s Saint Peter’s Church during a late 1961 Jazz Vespers) and Watkins’ second and final date as a leader, Soulnik (New Jazz), where he played cello and Herman Wright played bass. Whether Watkins would have adapted to the rest of the decade’s changes in style – most likely given his work with Byrd and Lateef – would remain an unknown. Traveling to a Philly Joe Jones gig in San Francisco with Bill Hardman, Roland Alexander and Fred Green, Watkins died in a car accident on February 5th, 1962, age 27, when, according to the March 15th, 1962 issue of DownBeat, his car “crossed the highway and rammed head on into an oncoming pickup truck. The bassist apparently had fallen asleep at the wheel.” His discography was not massive, at least compared to his longer-lived brethren – it numbered less than 100 sessions, with posthumous reissues and compilations swelling it inaccurately – but within it are some classics of the hardbop genre. About a year after Watkins debuted on record, the two-years-younger Scott LaFaro (born in New Jersey, raised in upstate New York) did the same, in his case with Buddy Morrow but at the tender age of 19 and apparently about a year after picking up the bass after playing piano and reeds as a child. A smattering of dates followed, mostly with Morrow but also Chet Baker and Pat Moran, through the end of 1957. It was as he approached his 22nd birthday that LaFaro’s career really took off. Starting in 1958 and while based in California, LaFaro would record under Victor Feldman, Cal Tjader/Stan Getz, Hampton Hawes, Buddy DeFranco, Harold Land, Marty Paich, and Stan Kenton. By the middle of 1959, he was on the other coast in New York appearing on dates by Herb Geller and Tony Scott. Unlike Watkins but very much like Blanton, LaFaro really is celebrated for one thing in his career above all others: his tenure with pianist Bill Evans and how they, alongside drummer Paul Motian, reimagined the hierarchy of that format. December 28th, 1959 began that relationship on record with Portrait of Jazz, but the trio had actually first together worked two months earlier with Scott. LaFaro would work with Evans through June 1961 and was slated to continue – according to Motian, the trio was to have a session with Miles Davis – until his death on July 6th, 1961 at 25 in Seneca, NY, like Watkins in a car accident. Four days earlier he had been at Newport with Stan Getz. LaFaro only made a couple more albums with Evans that were released in his lifetime or shortly after his passing: the studio date Explorations and live recording from the Village Vanguard Waltz For Debby, both from 1961. Numerous posthumous live dates have come out, including the entirety of that final Village Vanguard concert together. Many have theorized that it LaFaro’s death was one of factors that precipitated Evans’ long decline into drug use and mental health issues, leading to his own demise at 51. LaFaro did have other work during his time with Evans: a pair of April 1960 sessions with fellow tragic figure Booker Little; dates with Steve Kuhn, John Lewis’ Orchestra (check him out with a string quartet and Jim Hall on the latter’s “Piece for Guitar and Strings” from December 1960); the aforementioned association with Stan Getz. But the next chapter of his career was being written with someone he presumably became acquainted with under Lewis: saxophonist Ornette Coleman, who hired LaFaro to be part of his double-quartet masterpiece Free Jazz from December 21st, 1960 and then to replace Charlie Haden in his band for the Ornette! date six weeks later. As a postlude, two recordings – a 1960 duet with Evans and 1961 trio session with pianist Don Friedman, plus a 1966 interview with Evans – were released under LaFaro’s name as Pieces Of Jade by Resonance Records in 2009. Nearly a full page was given over in memoriam to LaFaro in the August 17th, 1961 issue of DownBeat, wherein it was written: “Scott LaFaro’s development was beginning to pass belief. With an incredible bass technique, he left musicians open-mouthed.” And Ray Brown may have said it best in the same article, discussing seeing LaFaro at the Newport gig with Getz: “This was one of the most talented youngsters I’ve seen come up in a long time. For his age, he really had it covered ... his facility, his intonation, and his ideas. It’s a shame, really a shame. It’s going to set the instrument back 10 years. It will be that long before anyone catches up with what he was doing.” With Blanton it was tuberculosis, Watkins and LaFaro bad luck, but the final part of this column is tragic in its own way because Albert Stinson’s death, from a drug overdose at 24, could be deemed “avoidable.” He was born in Cleveland but raised in California, where he was playing with Terry Gibbs and Frank Rosolini and encountered by Charles Lloyd. The saxophonist, then working with Chico Hamilton, recommended Stinson for the “The New Dynamic Chico Hamilton Quintet” he was putting together. Stinson’s first recording date came 15 days after Watkins’ death: Drumfusion. [NB: a new millennium Barney Kessel CD assigns Stinson to the guitarist’s band for a 1958 appearance on the radio program Navy Show; this seems highly unlikely as he would have been 14-15 years old at the time.] Stinson would continue with Hamilton through 1965, appearing on Passin’ Thru, A Different Journey, Man from Two Worlds, Chic Chic Chico and El Chico, sessions recorded both in California and on the East Coast. This established a pattern that would continue through the bassist’s small discography: dates in former with Clare Fischer, Joe Pass, and Dennis Budimir (The Session With Albert Vol 1 was only released in 1972) and the latter with Lloyd, another Hamilton bandmate in Gábor Szabó, Bobby Hutcherson (Stinson’s sole Blue Note appearance, though Oblique first was released in Japan in 1979 and the US in 1990) and John Handy. A one-off of note was Stinson subbing for Ron Carter with the Miles Davis Quintet in 1967 at UC-Berkeley before Buster Williams arrived for the rest of the West Coast tour. Stinson’s final recording came under Larry Coryell, released eponymously under the guitarist’s name in 1969 and featuring a precursor to his Eleventh House, “The Jam with Albert” as its highlight track. It would be on June 2nd of that year that Stinson’s life came to a sudden and premature end, during a Boston engagement with Coryell. In his autobiography, Improvising: My Life In Music, Coryell recalled that, “Cats from out of town ... would come down to the club where I was working [in New York] ... and I heard some amazing jam sessions. One night drummer/bandleader Chico Hamilton came down to sit in, and he brought his bassist, a young talent named Albert Stinson ... his playing was reminiscent of the legendary Scott LaFaro ... Albert was a great bass player and a great guy – he was totally humble and totally dedicated to the music.”
© 2026 Andrey Henkin
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