October 5, 1918–July 30, 1942
Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Blanton originally learned to play the violin, but took up the bass while at Tennessee State University, performing with the Tennessee State Collegians from 1936 to 1937, and during the vacations with Fate Marable. After leaving university in order to move to St Louis and play full time with the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra (with whom he made his first recordings), he joined Duke Ellington's band in 1939.
Despite staying with Ellington for only two years, Blanton made an incalculable contribution in changing the way the double bass was perceived in jazz. Until his emergence, the double bass was rarely used to play anything but quarter notes in ensemble or solos. By playing the bass more like a horn, Blanton began sliding into eighth- and sixteenth-note runs, introducing melodic and harmonic ideas that were totally new to the instrument. His virtuosity put him in a different class from his predecessors, making him the first true master of the jazz bass and demonstrating the instrument's unsuspected potential as a solo instrument. Such was his importance to Ellington's band at the time, together with the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster, that it became known as the Blanton–Webster band.
Blanton's arrival helped spur the Ellington band into a major creative phase, and the young bassist created some of the first important bass solos in jazz in such Ellington compositions as “Ko Ko,” “Jack the Bear,” and “Concerto for Cootie.” In addition, Blanton recorded a series of duets with Ellington on piano, the most astounding of which is the playful “Pitter Panther Patter.” In 1941, having been diagnosed with congenital tuberculosis, Blanton was forced to retire to a California sanatorium, where he died a few months later. Blanton's legacy became the model for bass players over the next 20 years — Charles Mingus, Oscar Pettiford, and Ray Brown all reflect his influence.
There is an unbelievably tragic symmetry between the lives of Jimmy Blanton and Charlie Christian. Both were string players who broke into a major big band in the fall of 1939, completely rewrote the vocabularies of their instruments, never led recording sessions of their own, played at the prophetic birth-of-bop jam sessions at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, and died from the same illness in their twenties in the same year. In Blanton's case, he fractured the 4/4 meter straitjacket that had shackled bass players before him. With his big rounded tone, flexible technique, superb sense of swing, and fluent imagination with both a bow and fingers, Blanton's bass could dance freely around the band and phrase like a horn, all without undermining the music's bass foundation.
Links: 02_jack_the_bear.mp3 http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=244144274
