Hirt, Alois Maxwell

▪ 2000

“Al” 

      American jazz and pop musician (b. Nov. 7, 1922, New Orleans, La.—d. April 27, 1999, New Orleans), became the most popular American trumpeter of the 1960s, with 17 hit albums during 1961–68 and a number of hit singles, notably the Grammy Award-winning “Java” (1963). An imposing figure with a trademark beard and exuberant personality, he first found a following playing Dixieland jazz but reached the height of his popularity playing rock and pop music. “I'm a pop commercial musician,” he insisted, denying that he was a jazz artist, yet his instrumental power and mastery won him the widespread admiration of both modern and traditional jazz musicians. When he was six years old, his parents bought him a trumpet from a pawnshop; he studied at the Cincinnati (Ohio) Conservatory of Music, served in the army during World War II, and toured with dance bands. Based in his hometown from 1950, he began leading a Dixieland jazz band and formed an enduring popular partnership with clarinetist Pete Fountain, with whom he played music off and on for over half a century and, for a while early on, also worked with as an exterminator. After his first recordings as a bandleader in 1955, Hirt's star steadily rose. He appeared on bandleader Lawrence Welk's popular television show and, from 1959, appeared in nightclubs nationally. Along with his own hit albums such as Our Man in New Orleans (1962) and the million-selling Honey in the Horn (1963), Hirt costarred with singer Ann-Margret on the album Beauty and the Beard (1964) and with the Boston Pops Orchestra on Pops Goes the Trumpet (1965). He made several film appearances as well and was featured in his own television series in the summer of 1965, also the year in which he performed in concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City. Yet even at the height of his fame, he seldom was away for very long from his family (he had six children) in New Orleans. There the nightclub he operated on Bourbon Street from 1961 to 1983 was a leading tourist attraction, and there he specialized in playing the Dixieland music that was always his favourite idiom. Duke Ellington first performed his New Orleans Suite at Hirt's nightclub in 1970, and it was Hirt who gave Wynton Marsalis, son of Hirt's piano accompanist Ellis Marsalis, the youth's first trumpet.

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