Milt Jackson – The Jazz Tome

Milt Jackson at the vibraphone, with Ray Brown on bass behind, New York, ca. 1946–1948

Photo by William P. Gottlieb (public domain)

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Jackson took up the vibraphone when at high school in Detroit, and he wasn't a bad singer, spending some time working in a gospel quartet. But Dizzy Gillespie heard him in Detroit and in 1945 offered him a job, first with his sextet and then with the big band. Jackson's debut on the session which produced Anthropology (1946) showed that he was already fully conversant with bebop and unfazed by playing an instrument which hardly seemed like the most appropriate for the style. He went on to work in small groups with other leaders and with Woody Herman's big band before rejoining Gillespie's sextet in 1950. But it was the first sessions by the Milt Jackson Quartet, for Prestige in 1952, which decided his direction for the next 20 years, since the group evolved into the Modern Jazz Quartet and became a busy and prolific recording and touring ensemble. Jackson fitted into the group as well as he fitted into any band he played with: he was the principal improviser in the band, although improvising was not really the MJQ's forte. Away from it, he continued to make records of his own, and occasionally play with other groups: there was a fine series of albums for both Riverside and Atlantic, and meetings with John Coltrane and Wes Montgomery. When the MJQ went into abeyance in 1974, it was generally thought that this had been due to Jackson's restlessness with his own career, although he was happy to join the re-formed ensemble in the 80s, and stayed until its final 1997 appearances. In the meantime, Norman Granz began recording him for Pablo, and he recorded a whole string of sessions for that label; his final association was with Quincy Jones's Qwest operation. 'Bags' was one of the rare jazz performers whose work was all of a piece, and always interesting. He took the vibes into the hi-fi era by slowing the oscillator on the instrument, giving him a more luxuriant tone. He could swing at any tempo, and his slow playing was rich and eventful without being crowded. Perhaps the key to his consistency and longevity, though, was his mastery of playing blues: his own tunes always seemed to be irreducibly simple blues pieces such as Bags' Groove, and he was quite content to play entire sets of blues, always finding something fresh to say. A neat pencil of a man with lugubrious eyes and a compensating huge smile, he was an indispensable part of jazz for five decades.

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.