Freddie Hubbard born 7 April 1938

Freddie Hubbard (April 7, 1938 – December 29, 2008) was an American jazz trumpeter. He played bebop, hard bop, and post-bop styles from the early 1960s onwards. His unmistakable and influential tone contributed to new perspectives for modern jazz and bebop.

Frederick Dewayne Hubbard was born in Indianapolis, the youngest of six children. His mother and sister played the piano, and several siblings played other instruments or sang. Young Freddie played the tonette and mellophone, then the trumpet, flugelhorn, piano, French horn, sousaphone and tuba - notably studying with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra's first trumpeter Max Woodbury at the Arthur Jordan Conservatory of Music.

The Indianapolis jazz scene was a vigorous one in the early 1950s, and he was soon playing with one of its most famous jazz families - the Montgomery brothers, including in Wes Montgomery one of jazz's greatest guitarists. Following his move to New York in 1958, Hubbard's melodic invention and cool exuberance brought him work with Miles Davis drummer Philly Joe Jones,  (1958-9, 1961) with the saxophonist Sonny Rollins (1959), and  and composer Quincy Jones, with whom he toured Europe (1960-61)and he was soon winning awards from the prestigious jazz magazine Down Beat.

                                   

Barely into his 20s, the young trumpeter sprang to the front of the line of first-choice sidemen. He seemed comfortable with everything from big-band music to the emerging free jazz. Although he always sounded like a bebopper at heart, his technique and unerring ear allowed him to veer in and out of orthodox tonality. 

On June 19, 1960, Hubbard made his first record as a leader, Open Sesame, at the beginning of his contract with Blue Note Records, with saxophonist Tina Brooks, pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Sam Jones, and drummer Clifford Jarvis. Six days later he returned the favour to Brooks and recorded with him on True Blue. Hubbard featured on many of the early 1960s landmark recordings and participated in such radically experimental session as those for Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz (1961) and John Coltrane's Ascension albums, but was criticized for his overly conventional playing.

In 1961 he joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, but left in 1964 to lead his own group. He also played as sideman with Max Roach (1965-6). Hubbard was invariably compared with Brown, and since Brown had died young in a car accident, he was inevitably treated as Brown's natural heir. He was also bound to be perceived as a Davis rival, but though Hubbard outstripped Davis for technique, he lacked the older man's creative breadth, collaborative instincts and sense of jazz's place in a wider world of modern art. However, from 1966 Hubbard worked principally with his own quintets and quartets, though he made a tour of the USA with Herbie Hancock's group V.S.O.P. in 1977 (with former Davis sidemen Hancock, Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams), recapturing the acoustic sound and one-touch ensemble conversations of the great mid-1960s Davis quintet at a time when the original creator had moved to electric jazz-funk.

His most constant sideman was Kenny Barron, who played in his groups of the late 1960's (with Louis Hayes), early 1970's (with Hayes and Junior Cook), and early 1980's (with Buster Williams and Al Fosrte). Hubbard spent much of the 1970s playing a less ambiguous and mysterious version of Davis's own chart-chasing, pop-influenced electric jazz, recording extensively for the commercially-oriented CTI label. 

Albums including First Light, Straight Life (both of which won Grammys) and Red Clay, made between 1970 and 1971, were generally well-received by the cognoscenti, but their successors were increasingly pop and disco-oriented, with Hubbard's former improvisational vivacity being replaced by such repetitive mannerisms as whirring trills and ostentatious high-note eruptions that made many of his solos in that style indistinguishable from each other. By the time he returned to more lyrical acoustic jazz, the world had moved on and younger players - Marsalis in particular - were making something fresh of it. But Hubbard made some elegant and musical recordings in returning to his roots in the 1980s and spent his last years trying to rebuild his musical resources and his reputation.

Hubbard played at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1980 and in 1989 (with Bobby Hutcherson). He and Woody Shaw recorded two albums as co-leaders for Blue Note and played live concerts together from 1985 to 1987. In 1987, he was a co-leader with Benny Golson on the Stardust album. In 1988, he again teamed up with Blakey at an engagement in the Netherlands, from which came Feel the Wind.[4] In 1988, Hubbard played with Elton John, contributing trumpet and flugelhorn and trumpet solos on the track "Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters (Part Two)" for John's Reg Strikes Back album. In 1990, he appeared in Japan headlining an American-Japanese concert package.

Following a long setback of health problems and a serious lip injury in 1992 when he subsequently developed an infection, Hubbard was again playing and recording occasionally, even if not at the level he set for himself during his earlier career. His best records ranked with the finest in his field.Hubbard received a jazz masters award from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2006. He shifted to the less demanding flugelhorn, and worked sporadically on bar and nightclub gigs, often organised by his arranger, producer, fellow-trumpeter and manager David Weiss, who led the New Jazz Composers' Octet, with which Hubbard was to make his last recording On The Real Side. The album was recorded in 2007 in Englewood, NJ to celebrate his 70th birthday in 2008 and released on the Times Square label in the same year as his milestone birthday and his subsequent death in the winter.

On December 29, 2008, Hubbard died in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, California, from complications caused by a heart attack he suffered on November 26.

(Edited from The Guardian, New Grove Dictionary of Jazz & Wikipedia)