Eli ‘Lucky’ Thompson
Tenor and Soprano Saxophone, Composer, Arranger
b. June 16, 1923, Columbia, SC; d. July 30, 2005, Seattle, WA
Few musicians command as much universal respect as Lucky Thompson. Just mentioning his name among the relatively few who still remember him and his recordings induces raised eyebrows and appreciative smiles. Yet because of a variety of factors, including a very difficult personality, unrealistic expectations and - despite his sobriquet - bad luck, his considerable legacy has never received the status and recognition it really deserves. Furthermore, by abandoning his professional career while still in the prime of his life, he failed to reach the full potential his talent had predicted. Instead he became a notable and regrettable casualty of jazz music’s first century.
Thompson emerged during the bebop era in the mid-1940s but despite being part and parcel of the new music, his playing did not incorporate the main saxophone influences of the time, namely Charlie Parker and Lester Young. Instead he drew upon swing era stalwarts like Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster and Don Byas whose styles were largely out of vogue. Nonetheless Thompson was always his own man and a virtuoso soloist. In 1947, his recording of Just One More Chance for the RCA Victor label gained considerable attention and even comparisons with Hawkins’s classic version of Body and Soul, inscribed in jazz history some eight years earlier.
By 1950, Thompson had already worked and recorded with Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Dinah Washington, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, participating in many groundbreaking sessions. And as that decade evolved, so did his style, taking on more modern harmonic and rhythmic aspects. In April of 1954, he recorded two extended blues with Miles Davis for the Prestige label and made history in the process by helping to revive Davis’s flagging career and ushering in a new genre that would become known as hard bop. His solos on these tracks (Walkin’/Blue ‘N Boogie) are models of melodic construction steeped in elegance and passion. But his unique, hybrid approach to improvisation, bridging the old and new and utilizing unconventional phrasing, was not an easy one to emulate and proved an obstacle to his acceptance as a major saxophone influence.
In the mid-1950s, Thompson’s star appeared to be rising as he turned out many memorable recordings under his own name and contributed significantly to sessions led by Milt Jackson, Jimmy Cleveland, Stan Kenton, Oscar Pettiford and Quincy Jones to name just a few. In reality, however, his thorny personality and refusal to compromise were making survival in the music business difficult, at least in America. His first extended stay in Europe took place in 1956 and from then until he left music for good in 1974, his career was a series of relocations, withdrawals and comebacks. Nonetheless, his European recordings are generally outstanding although poorly distributed at the time they were issued and, unfortunately, received little attention in the USA. As a result, artists like Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane rapidly eclipsed Thompson as the decade progressed.
Another aspect of Thompson’s oeuvre that is insufficiently recognized is his pioneering work on soprano saxophone. He began to play the smaller horn in Paris in 1957 and mastered this difficult instrument in a manner characterized by remarkable intonation, facility and tone. First recording on soprano in early 1959 in Paris, Thompson’s work actually predates that of John Coltrane by over a year. But because these sessions were issued only in Europe, they received little attention and were quickly forgotten until their reissue many years later. He would not record on soprano in his home country until 1963 (Moodsville - Lucky Thompson Plays Jerome Kern and No More) and by then, radical new directions in jazz initiated by Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman and others were in the forefront and his elegant but traditionally-based work would again be overlooked.
Thompson was a prolific composer churning out a broad range of material from pop and rhythm and blues songs to complex post-bop pieces. He was also one of a small number of musicians of his era concerned with the protection of rights to their music through copyright registration and the establishment of their own publishing companies. Such business aspects of the musical life were seldom attended to and many fine composers lost control of their works or received meager royalties from them. Thompson fought against this exploitation by entrenched record producers and publishers throughout his career, burning bridges in the process and ending up deeply embittered by an industry he viewed as corrupt and insensitive to genuine creativity and quality.
After teaching briefly at Dartmouth College in the early 1970s, Thompson, then only in his fifties, withdrew from music completely and essentially was not heard from again until discovered living in a homeless condition in Seattle in the mid-1990s. He had drifted into paranoia and dementia and spent his remaining years in assisted living facilities and nursing homes. He died of Alzheimer’s disease in 2005.
Discographies:
Salemann, Dieter, “Roots of Modern Jazz - The Be Bop Era, Vol. 13: Solography, Discography, Band Routes, Engagements of Lucky Thompson,” Berlin, Germany, 2001
Cohen, Noal, “The Lucky Thompson Discography”: http://www.attictoys.com/jazz/LT_intro.html
Essay:
Shull, Tad, “When Backward Comes Out Ahead: Lucky Thompson's Phrasing and Improvisation,” Annual Review of Jazz Studies 12: 2002, Ed Berger, Ed., Scarecrow Press, 2004
Noal Cohen, Montclair, NJ
September 2008
©Noal Cohen 2008
Noal Cohen is a jazz historian and co-author with Michael Fitzgerald of Rat Race Blues: The Musical Life of Gigi Gryce (Berkeley Hills Books, 2002), which won the ARSC Award for Excellence in 2003 and has been internationally acclaimed. His website (www.attictoys.com) contains detailed discographies of several notable musicians including saxophonists Bob Mover, Lucky Thompson and Frank Strozier, vibraphonists Teddy Charles and Joe Locke, trombonist Benny Powell and pianists Elmo Hope and Carl Perkins. In addition to participating in and consulting for educational programs in and around New York City, Cohen has contributed book reviews to the ARSC Journal and written liner notes for the Uptown record label.