Donald Byrd, a leading jazz trumpeter from the 1950s and 1960s, died on Feb. 4 in Dover, Del. at 80 years old, The New York Times reported.
His death was confirmed by Haley Funeral Directors in Southfield Mich. -- and although word of his death had circulated around for days -- it was not confirmed by his family.
Byrds was both successful and controversial in the music world, the Times reported. When he arrived in New York City in 1955 from his native Detroit, he was at the center of the hard bop movement -- a variation on bebop emphasizing jazz's blues and gospel roots, according to the Times. He recorded with some of the era's most prominent jazz musicians, including John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins and drummer Art Blakey.
He spent much of the 1960s teaching, according to the Times, and then made a transition to pop stardom in 1973 with his album "Black Byrd" produced by brothers Larry and Fonce Mizell, who were his students at Howard University in Washington, the Times reported. Not everyone was pleased with his new sound.
"Then the jazz people starting eating on me," Byrd said in a 1982 radio interview, according to the Times. "They had a feast on me for 10 years: 'He's sold out.' Everything that's bad was attributed to Donald Byrd. I weathered it, and then it became commonplace. Then they found a name for it. They started calling it 'jazz fusion,' 'jazz rock.' "
Despite the criticism, he continued making more pop albums. He organized some of his Howard students into a group called the Blackbyrds and produced their records, the Times reported.
"They use all of the music that I did in the '50s, '60s and the '70s behind people like Tupac and LL Cool J," Mr. Byrd told students in a lecture at Cornell in 1998, according to the Times. "I'm into all that stuff."
Besides music, Byrd was also passionate about education. He taught jazz at Howard, North Carolina Central University, Rutgers, Cornell, the University of Delaware and Delaware State University, and also studied law. He received a doctorate in education from Columbia University's Teachers College in 1982, according to the Times.
In his Cornell lecture, Mr. Byrd said musicians who changed music, especially John Coltrane, influenced him, the Times reported.
"I met him in the 11th grade in Detroit," Byrd said in the lecture. "I skipped school one day to see Dizzy Gillespie, and that's where I met Coltrane. Coltrane and Jimmy Heath just joined the band, and I brought my trumpet, and he was sitting at the piano downstairs waiting to join Dizzy's band. He had his saxophone across his lap, and he looked at me and he said, 'You want to play?'"
"So he played piano, and I soloed," he added, according to the Times. "I never thought that six years later we would be recording together, and that we would be doing all of this stuff. The point is that you never know what happens in life."
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
