Lionel Hampton, jazz vibraphonist, pianist, percussionist and bandleader, died on 31st August 2002

Lionel Hampton was born in Louisville Kentucky on April 20th 1908, moving to Birmingham, Alabama before his family to to Wisconsin and then in 1916 to Chicago. As a teenager he learnt xylophone and drums, and soon after moving to California around 1927 played drums for the Dixieland Blues-Blowers. He joined the Les Hite Band, and started practising the vibraphone, so when in 1930 Louis Armstrong hired the band, Hampton got to play vibes on a couple of songs. When Benny Goodman played the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles in 1936 he saw Hampton play, and Hampton joined the Goodman Trio along with Teddy Wilson and Gene Krupa to form a quartet, making it one of the only mixed-race groups of the era, and indeed one of the top small groups in an era dominated by big bands. While working with Goodman in new York, Hampton started to record with some of his own line-ups, and in 1940 he amicably left Goodman to form his own orchestra. The outfit rapidly became popular, his third recording in 1942 delivering the classic "Flying Home", with Illinois Jacquet's solo that presaged the R&B styles of which Hampton would be in the vanguard. His band through the 40s featured numerous soon-to-be-famous names - Charlie Shavers, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie and Dinah Washington among them. His recordings of the late 40s and early 50s were some of the best examples of the fusion of jazz and R&B, making his band a breeding ground for the bebop stars of the day. He continued to work and record with a variety of big bands and small groups during the 50s, often with illustrious contemporaries like Quincy Jones, Oscar Peterson, Art Tatum and Buddy De Franco, touring Europe regularly. He continued to work through subsequent decades, combining community and charity work with his music, until a stroke on stage in Paris in 1991 severely curtailed his activities.  Not surprisingly, as an elder statesman of jazz, he received many accolades and awards over the years. He died in New York in August 2002 at the age of 84. Acrobat has two collections of his work on catalogue - for details click here.