Nobody ever says a bad word about Clark Terry. As a brass player, bandleader, mentor and spokesman for jazz music, he is incomparable. He grew up in St Louis and played there in touring shows in the late 30s, before joining a navy band in 1942. He then worked with Lionel Hampton, in a group nominally led by George Hudson which Terry actually directed, and with Charlie Barnet's orchestra, before enlisting with Count Basie in 1948, subsequently also working in Basie's small group. In 1951, he moved on to Duke Ellington's orchestra, where he became an indispensable part of Duke's brass section, on both trumpet and flugelhorn – the latter an instrument which had thus far enjoyed very little jazz attention, and which Terry helped make into a significant part of the brass player's arsenal. Ellington featured him regularly, and in such setpieces as the Such Sweet Thunder suite (1957), his mischievous humour and improvisational exuberance often light the touchpaper for the whole band. After leaving Ellington, Clark found himself in constant demand. He was a studio regular all through the 60s and much of the 70s, held down a chair in the Tonight Show band (the first black staff musician at NBC), starred in Gerry Mulligan's Concert Jazz Band, co-led a quintet with Bob Brookmeyer, toured with Jazz At The Philharmonic, founded an orchestra (sometimes known as Clark Terry's Big B-A-D Band) which lasted on and off into the 80s, got himself in the thick of jazz education, and acted as an inspiration to numerous trumpet players as a result. Later groups, such as the nonet Clark Terry's Spacemen and the Statesmen Of Jazz, surrounded him with fellow veterans, but even when he was the eldest of the gang, nobody outdid Terry for musical energy. His instantly identifiable style is perhaps a mix of such forebears as Rex Stewart and, reputedly, a school of mellow-toned St Louis trumpeters who didn't otherwise gain much attention. On flugelhorn, which he increasingly adopted as time went on, he established a burring, beautifully melodious sound which more or less set the style for the instrument. While remaining a musician who belonged to the swing idiom, he had little trouble addressing the issues of bop, and has found himself amenable to pretty much any jazz situation. His vocal speciality is a tune called Mumbles, which he loves to throw out to audiences as an encore, a mush-mouthed assemblage of nonsense scat. He was seriously ill at the start of the new century but amazed everyone by playing again soon afterwards, still the irrepressible Clark Terry.

Biography from Richard Cook's Jazz Encyclopedia (2005).

If you'd like more information, check out The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (2002) or The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz (2007), both of which are still in print.