Clark Terry was one of the most influential swing and bebop trumpeters of our time, not to mention a pioneer of the flugelhorn in jazz. He was also a composer, educator, and mentor whose career in jazz spanned more than 70 years, during which he became one of the most prolific of all jazz musicians, appearing on over 900 recordings! Born and raised in St. Louis, he blended the St. Louis sound upon which he ‘cut his teeth’ (as a youth he made a makeshift trumpet by attaching a funnel to a garden hose and using a lead pipe as a mouthpiece) with more contemporary music styles. Terry played with some of the greatest of the big bands, but his years with Basie and Ellington (who secretly recruited Clark away from Basie) in the late 1940s and 1950s established his lasting prominence.
The uppermost video is Mack The Knife, an earlier version of Terry recorded with the Oscar Peterson Trio in Finland during 1965. It features Clark on flugelhorn, Ed Thigpen on drums, Ray Brown at the bass, and of course Peterson playing piano.
To the left is a rare duo between Clark Terry on both flugelhorn and trumpet (watch carefully) and Red Mitchell on bass, with a most unusual rendition of Take The A Train. At the bottom the Ellington/Strayhorn mood continues with Satin Doll, recorded in Copenhagen during 1985 by the Clark Terry Quartet … comprised of Terry on trumpet, Duke Jordan playing piano, Jimmy Woode on bass, and Svend Norregaard drums.
