Remembering Curtis Fuller: 1934-=2021

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Fuller came to New York at the age of 22 with a unique style and sound. His tone was rich and full, but with an airiness that added delicacy to the weight of his instrument. He possessed great melodic invention with a strong sense of construction. And those abilities made him a wonderful, mature composer from the start. Also, it probably didn't hurt that he was one of the most personable, uplifting, kindest and funniest men around. A joy to hear and a joy to be around.”

“The results of all four albums (the first was with Hank Mobley) are extremely rewarding, due in no small part to Curtis's talent as a composer. His material has originality, variety and is soloist-friendly (i.e. the composer's cleverness never cripples the soloist).”

- Michael Cuscuna

© Copyright ® Michael Cuscuna - Mosaic Records, copyright protected; all rights reserved; used with the author’s permission.

“Curtis Fuller was born in Detroit, Michigan on December 15, 1934. He came to music late, playing the baritone horn in high school and switching to the trombone at age 16. Detroit, at the time, was the breeding ground of an astonishing pool of fresh, highly individual talent. Milt Jackson and Hank Jones had already gone to New York and made their names. But coming of age in Detroit in the early fifties were Fuller, Donald Byrd, Elvin and Thad Jones, Paul Chambers, Louis Hayes, Kenny Burrell, Barry Harris, Pepper Adams, Yusef Lateef, Sonny Red, Hugh Lawson, Doug Watkins, Tommy Flanagan and many others who would make the mid-decade migration lo New York and eventually international recognition.

In 1953, Curtis left the local scene to serve his two-year stint in the army, where he met and played with Cannonball Adderley and Junior Mance among others. When he returned home, he began working with Yusef Lateef’s quintet.

"Yusef was using that two-stringed instrument, the rebat, and a lot of other strange instruments. We were using balloons and soda bottles. He was writing tunes with astrological and mystical titles. He was really out there before we ever heard Sun Ra. This is long before Roland Kirk."

The Lateef quintet with Fuller, Hugh Lawson, Ernie Farrow and Louis Hayes came to New York in April 1957 to record two albums for Savoy and a third produced by Dizzy Gillespie for Verve. The 12-inch LP, less than two years old, was still a relatively new phenomenon. The level of recording activity was voluminous. Fortunately, the amount of jazz talent descending upon New York at the time, coupled with the great artists already in residence, was worthy of such prolific documentation.

Word of Curtis's talent spread rapidly around New York. Although he initially came under the spell of J. J. Johnson and listed Jimmy Cleveland, Bob Brookmeyer and Urbie Green among his favorites, Fuller came to New York at the age of 22 with a unique style and sound. His tone was rich and full, but with an airiness that added delicacy to the weight of his instrument. He possessed great melodic invention with a strong sense of construction. And those abilities made him a wonderful, mature composer from the start. Also, it probably didn't hurt that he was one of the most personable, uplifting, kindest and funniest men around. A joy to hear and a joy to be around.

In May, after being in town for about a month, he recorded with Paul Quinichette and made his first albums as a leader: two quintet albums for Prestige with Sonny Red featured on alto. Like the Blue Note debuts by Kenny Burrell and Triad Jones the prior year, he used mostly transplanted Detroit players. "We were a very close-knit group and stuck together more than other guys from other places. In fact, we still are to some extent. We all came up together, learned together and really trusted each other. And that trust is an important thing."

Blue Note's Alfred Lion had also heard about Fuller and went to see him at the Café Bohemia with Miles Davis's sextet. "I'd known Miles from his time in Detroit. His girlfriend in those days went to high school with me. So when I came to New York, Miles asked me to play with him. It was a sextet with Sonny Rollins and me. Sonny had just married his first wife. Anyway, Alfred dug what he heard and asked me to come by his office the next day. So I went up there. He was hung up with something, so I just sat there in the office wailing patiently to see him...you know, the new kid in town. He took me to see Freddie Redd at a lesbian club that night. I was just a country boy from Detroit. I'd never seen scenes like that.

"But we developed a relationship that you couldn't believe. There were certain guys he really enjoyed: Morgie [Lee Morgan], Tina [Brooks], [Hank] Mobley, me and a few others. Alfred liked the cats that swung. He was different, Frank was too. They used to argue so much that I started calling them the Animal Brothers, you know, Lion and Wolff."

So Curtis joined the Blue Note family, appearing on a Clifford Jordan date on June 2 and making his own, THE OPENER, on June 16. That summer Curtis was everywhere.

"Alfred brought me on dates with Jimmy Smith and Bud Powell. And then we did BLUE TRAIN with Coltrane. And I became the only trombone soloist to record with those three artists."

He played on Sonny Clark's DIAL S FOR SONNY on July 21 and did his three tracks with the Bud Powell trio on August 3. The next day, he made his second Blue Note album BONE & BARI. On August 25, Curtis played on Lee Morgan's CITY LIGHTS and with the same front line cut tracks with Smith that would appear on HOUSE PARTY and THE SERMON. Five days later, he recorded on a Jackie McLean date for Prestige.

Clark's SONNY'S CRIB with Fuller and Coltrane was done on September 1. And two weeks after that came one of the most perfect masterpieces in jazz history, John Coltrane's BLUE TRAIN. That same month, he also made another quintet album featuring Sonny Red on Savoy and appeared on a John Jenkins/Donald Byrd session for the same label.

Curtis closed out the year with his third Blue Note album with Art Farmer on December 1 [CURTIS FULLER - ART FARMER] and a sensational sextet date by Lou Donaldson entitled LOU TAKES OFF two weeks later.

So after eight months in New York, Curtis Fuller had made six albums as a leader and appeared on 15 others. Even in those prolific times, that's pretty impressive for a newly-arrived trombonist.

TWO BONES, Curtis's final album for Blue Note as a leader (he would remain an essential part of the mix as a sideman throughout the sixties), was recorded on January 22, 1958, but wasn't issued until 1978 and then only briefly in Japan. "Originally it was supposed to be me and Bob Brookmeyer. The J & K group had been popular, so Bob and I were going to do something called B & C, using valve trombones. Alfred didn't like the idea at all. He really favored black musicians and didn't like the valve trombone thing. I wasn't happy playing the valves anyway. So the only other trombonist I wanted to play with at the time was Slide Hampton. He was with Lionel Hampton or maybe Maynard Ferguson by then. In fact, he later got me into Maynard's band for a while. So that's how that record happened [TWO BONES]."

If there was anything predictable about Blue Note in the fifties, it was instrumentation. So it is interesting that Curtis was able to record quintet albums with baritone saxophone, trumpet and trombone as the second horns. The results of all four albums (the first was with Hank Mobley) are extremely rewarding, due in no small part to Curtis's talent as a composer. His material has originality, variety and is soloist-friendly (i.e. the composer's cleverness never cripples the soloist).

Curtis continued to work constantly with a variety of great artists: "I played a lot with Lester Young at Birdland. [Drummer] Willie Jones got me the gig. Erroll Garner was the pianist the first time, then Bud Powell and then Nat Pierce. Billie Holiday would come on stage and sing a few tunes with us. She wasn't allowed to work officially because she'd lost her cabaret card. But I didn't know much about that stuff then. I was as clean as the Board of Health.

"[Birdland manager] Oscar Goodstein got me on a lot of other gigs at that time. The club would usually have a big band, a singer and a small group, I ended up doing one-and two-week runs with guys like Johnny Griffin and Jimmy Forrest.

"At the same time, Miles was encouraging me to hang out at Gil Evans's apartment. He told me I should really learn that big band stuff and see what Gil was doing, which I did. I ended up on that album GREAT JAZZ STANDARDS."

At the end of 1958, Benny Golson asked Curtis Fuller to share the front line for a Riverside blowing date entitled THE OTHER SIDE OF BENNY GOLSON, which put the emphasis on Benny's tenor playing rather than his composing and arranging. The chemistry between these two hornmen clicked, and they would record an album under Curtis's name for Savoy and three under Benny's name for Prestige in 1959 with various rhythm sections. They also made two Fuller albums for Savoy with trumpet added to the front line, which laid the groundwork for the creation of the Jazztet.

Curtis closed 1959 with a United Artists sextet album sum NO EASY, produced by Tom Wilson, the creator of Transition Records, who'd become something of an Alfred Lion protégé". In fact, Alfred bought many of the Transition masters when the company was going out of business and issued the label's final session HERE COMES LOUIS SMITH on Blue Note. Wilson moved on to UA where he did a number of excellent albums, many in the Blue Note mold. (In the sixties, he went on to produce Bob Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel for Columbia and Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention for Verve.)

SLIDING EASY found Hank Mobley in the tenor chair with Benny Golson concentrating on the arrangements. Lee Morgan is on trumpet and the rhythm section is pure Detroit (Tommy Flanagan, Paul Chambers and Elvin Jones).

In February 1960, the Jazztet, a sextet under the leadership of Benny Golson and Art Farmer, made their first album. Curtis Fuller was the trombonist and McCoy Tyner made his recording debut as the pianist. The Jazztet became a very successful unit from the start, but Fuller and Tyner left a few months into the life of the band. They were headed in other directions.

McCoy found his destiny with John Coltrane's quartet. Armed with a major label contract from Columbia/Epic, Curtis formed his own quartet. But work was sparse, and he toured Europe with the Quincy Jones Orchestra and South America with an all-star package that included Zoot Sims.

In the summer of '61, Curtis made Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers a sextet for the first time. The combined writing and playing talents of Fuller, Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter and Cedar Walton, driven by Blakey and Jymie Merritt (later Reggie Workman), created one of the most exciting and distinctive bands in the history of hard bop. For three years, this group recorded one classic performance after another. With only three horns atop Blakey's volcano, they achieved a sound damn near as big as Basie's.

Curtis stayed with the Jazz Messengers until February 1965 by which time Lee Morgan had rejoined the band and John Gilmore and John Hicks had replaced Shorter and Walton. He spent the rest of that decade freelancing around New York, adding his beautiful sound to a number of Blue Note dates such as Lee Morgan's TOM CAT, Hank Mobley's A CADDY FOR DADDY, Joe Henderson's MODE FOR JOE and Wayne Shorter's SCHIZOPHRENIA.

But the jazz scene of the late fifties was unraveling economically and artistically. "Those were great times. We'll never see anything like that again. I had an apartment on 101st Street. Jimmy Heath was living with me for a while after he came back to New York. Coltrane was on 103rd. We were best friends, and he used to send guys around from his apartment to mine all the time. Sometimes, I think he just wanted to be alone and practice. But guys were coming over constantly, jamming and working on things. Paul Chambers used to drag his bass all the way in from Brooklyn on the subway just to make music. It was really something else.

"Certainly, there were a lot of special times after that. I remember one night in the late seventies. Dexter Gordon and I closed Bradley's and went on to one of those bars in the West Village. I can't think of the name of it. Anyway, Tommy Flanagan and Jimmy Rowles were there at the piano, trying to stump each other on tunes and changes. It was unbelievable how many obscure, beautiful tunes they knew. Dexter's gone. Now Rowles is dead—"

In the six years between 1957 and '62, Curtis Fuller made 19 albums as a leader. In the 34 years since, he's made six. But that is a statement on the state of the recording industry not Fuller's activity or growth. During the seventies and eighties, he was very active with the Timeless All-Stars, a superb band that included Bobby Hutcherson, Harold Land, Cedar Walton and Billy Higgins. He worked with such masters as Count Basie and Dexter Gordon and took part in all-star events built around Blakey's Jazz Messengers and Golson's Jazztet.

After some health problems in the early nineties, Curtis is active again. What is as remarkable about Curtis Fuller as his lyrical improvising and ingenious writing is his personality. On the road, on stage or in the studio, Curtis is a relaxed professional who lifts every situation with his incredible sense of humor and his natural sparkle.”

— Michael Cuscuna, June 1996