Howard McGhee papers, music, and audiovisual recordings

Howard McGhee, briefly one of the most influential bebop trumpeters of the late 1940s, was born March 6, 1918 in Tulsa, Oklahoma and raised in Detroit. He received his first formal musical education in a marching band in a boy's school in the historically-African American town of Boley, Oklahoma when, after learning how to play the cornet, his teacher gave him a clarinet. McGhee later said that learning to play the clarinet added to his agility on the trumpet. Beginning in 1935, he began playing the trumpet exclusively, which was also around the time he left school to play in small traveling carnival bands in Oklahoma. McGhee joined a seven-piece band led by the young pianist Jay McShann, who soon found fame in Kansas City. Over the next few years McGhee played in a handful of Midwestern territory bands and, like many other trumpeters of his generation, was influenced by trumpeter Roy Eldridge. Around this time, McGhee began booking musicians for a Detroit nightclub, a job that put him in contact with nationally famous musicians and helped build his reputation as a talented performer, composer and arranger. Beginning in 1941, he worked as a trumpeter and arranger for a succession of bands, including those of Lionel Hampton, Andy Kirk (where he succeeded Mary Lou Williams as the band's arranger and with whom he first recorded his signature number, "McGhee Special" for Decca Records), Charlie Barnet, Count Basie, Georgie Auld, and Billie Eckstine. He joined Coleman Hawkins' quintet in late 1944, traveled to Los Angeles the following year, where he first met Dizzy Gillespie, and remained there for two years. In Los Angeles until late 1947, McGhee formed groups with saxophonist Teddy Edwards and also recorded with Charlie Parker, including Parker's famous recording of "Lover Man." Also in 1947, he joined impresario Norman Granz's popular Jazz at the Philharmonic concert tours before making a series of recordings with musicians including Ray Brown, J. C. Heard, Milt Jackson, Hank Jones and James Moody. McGhee played at the Festival International de Jazz in Paris in 1948, and was named top trumpeter by Down Beat the following year. He briefly accompanied Parker and also played intermittently in a group with pianist Horace Silver and guitarist Tal Farlow in the 1950s, but his career was substantially sidelined by heroin addiction during this decade. However by the early sixties, "Maggie," as he was known by fellow musicians and fans, began playing more frequently, performing with the Woody Herman and Duke Ellington orchestras in 1960 and 1961, respectively. In the mid-1960s, McGhee formed his own big band and began a long association with Saint Peter's Church, New York's jazz church, where Reverend John Gensel initiated a jazz ministry around 1965. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, McGhee worked regularly for Newport Jazz Festival producer George Wein, toured Europe and continued to record. McGhee's 1963 Newport Jazz Festival was particularly well received. McGhee died in New York on July 17, 1987. He was married three times, first to dancer Dorothy Schnell, with whom he had three children, Howard Jr. ("Boots"), Dru Ann, and David; Sandy Spencer; and Tina Teahan, who survived him.