Hampton, Lionel Leo

▪ 2003

“Hamp”; “King of the Vibes” 

      American musician (b. April 20, 1908, Louisville, Ky.— d. Aug. 31, 2002, New York, N.Y.), was one of the first jazz vibraphonists; he became a star during the swing era and then led bands with endless, infectious energy for over 50 years. Hampton played vibes with a percussive, swinging style that excited audiences; he also improvised lyric melodies at slower tempos and composed the popular ballad “Midnight Sun.” Most of all, Hampton was famous as a showman who entertained crowds by singing, drumming, and playing two-finger piano solos; leaping and tap dancing atop tom-toms; dressing his bands in outrageous costumes and parading them through theatres and nightclubs; and performing shows that ran past closing time. His bands were loud and raucous—“Where do you think rock ‘n' roll came from?” he quipped. A parade of top modern jazz musicians, including singers Dinah Washington, Aretha Franklin, and Betty Carter, composer-arrangers Charles Mingus and Quincy Jones, trumpeters Clifford Brown and Art Farmer, guitarist Wes Montgomery, and saxophonists Illinois Jacquet, Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, and Arnett Cobb, began their careers with Hampton. He went to school in Kenosha, Wis., where a nun taught him to play drums, and in Chicago, and in the late 1920s he moved to Los Angeles, where he began playing the recently invented vibraphone and soon was leading a band. From 1936 to 1940 he made history as one of two African Americans to play in the first racially integrated concert jazz group, the Benny Goodman Quartet; during those years he also led a series of classic recordings (including “Sweethearts on Parade,” “When Lights Are Low,” and “Sunny Side of the Street”) that featured great swing musicians. Despite the decline of the big-band business, Hampton's 1940–65 big band was an ongoing success, scoring hits such as “Flying Home” and “Hamp's Boogie Woogie” and touring the world; in later decades Hampton led small and large bands, including the all-star Golden Men of Jazz in the 1990s. He campaigned and raised funds for Republican politicians such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan; as a philanthropist he established scholarships and built public-housing projects in New York City and Newark, N.J. He performed annually at the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival, a student competition supplemented by clinics and concerts at the University of Idaho, where the university's music school was named for him in 1987 and where the $60 million Lionel Hampton Center, which was to house the university's jazz festival, music school, performance facilities, and international jazz archive, was launched in 2001.

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