Jazz maestro Freddie Hubbard dies aged 70

FREDDIE HUBBARD, the Grammy-winning jazz musician whose blazing virtuosity influenced a generation of trumpet players and who collaborated with such greats as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, has died.

The 70-year-old suffered a heart attack a month ago.

Hubbard died at Sherman Oaks Hospital, said his manager, fellow trumpeter David Weiss of the New Jazz Composers Octet. He had been hospitalised since suffering the heart attack.

A towering figure in jazz circles, Hubbard played on hundreds of recordings in a career dating from 1958, the year he arrived in New York from his hometown of Indianapolis, where he had studied at the Arthur Jordan Conservatory of Music and with the Indianapolis Symphony.

Soon he had hooked up with such jazz legends as Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley and Coltrane.

“I met Trane at a jam session at Count Basie’s in Harlem in 1958,” he told the jazz magazine Down Beat in 1995. “He said, ‘Why don’t you come over and let’s try and practice a little bit together.’ I almost went crazy. I mean, here is a 20-year-old kid practicing with John Coltrane. He helped me out a lot, and we worked several jobs together.”

Hubbard played on more than 300 recordings, including some of the most important jazz albums of the 1960s, including Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage, Coleman’s Free Jazz, Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch, Coltrane’s Ascension, Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil and his own classic, Ready for Freddie.

However, he enjoyed his biggest success in the 1970s with such albums for Creed Taylor’s fusion-oriented CTI label as Red Clay and First Light. The latter won him a Grammy in 1972 for best jazz performance by a group.

His career slowed in the 1980s, and he attributed that in part to a period of heavy drinking and partying with “the rock crowd.”

In the 1990s, relentless touring, coupled with his hard style of playing, nearly ended his career when his lip became infected. He had to rest for a period and switch to a softer style.

He came back in the last decade, however, releasing New Colors in 2001 and On The Real Side in 2008, both with the New Jazz Composers Octet, playing updated versions of some of his compositions, such as Theme for Kareem.