Jazz Bassist and Historian Milt Hinton Dies at 90.

During his distinguished 70-year career, Hinton performed with almost every luminary of jazz and popular music, from Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane to Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand and Paul McCartney. He is one of the most-recorded musicians in the history of the business.

Hinton also documented his world with a camera, compiling close to 60,000 negatives depicting hundreds of jazz artists and popular musicians on the road, in the studio, backstage and at parties. Many of his photographs are published in a series of two books, “Bass Line: The Stories and Photographs of Milt Hinton" and “OverTime: The Jazz Photographs of Milt Hinton" (both published by Pomegranate Artbooks, Box 808022, Petaluma, CA 94975), as well as in dozens of magazines and newspapers.

Milt was very active on the jazz party and festival scene throughout the 1980s and 90s. We in the Jim Cullum Jazz Band were very fortunate to have worked with him many times, as well as featuring him on the Riverwalk Public Radio series in the show, “Rhythm Is My Business: A Tribute to Milt Hinton."

At the 1995 Summit Jazz Festival in Denver, Milt was a member of the Bob Wilber All-Stars. Wilber introduced him saying that he possesses “..the strongest pulse of any bass player in the world." He was also the master of the “slap" bass technique that originated in New Orleans with Bill Johnson (born in 1872), a man Milt knew during his early Chicago days. Jazz historian Richard Hadlock described Milt's slapping as “..a living link with the New Orleans bass style."

Personal note: I first got to know Milt after I joined the Jim Cullum Jazz Band in 1991. He was always a lot of fun to be around and was very interested in discussing topics related to playing jazz on the bass fiddle. My fondest memory is of trading “fours" with Milt on a novelty song, “The Day The Bass Players Took Over The World" on Riverwalk as well as several jazz parties and concerts. While I sang the melody of the tune, Milt would stand behind me and say, “Right on!" Afterwards, he told me, “People seem to like our act."

For the production of “Rhythm Is My Business" on Riverwalk, we decided to re-create a bass feature number that Milt had written for himself while he was with the Cab Calloway band in 1936, “Ebony Silhouette." The original was the first recording anywhere that anyone could remember of a bass fiddle being featured out in front of a band playing the melody of a tune, preceding the more well-known Ellington/Blanton feature “Jack the Bear" by six years. I had transcribed the difficult solo bass part of “Ebony Silhouette" in 1973 while a student at Rutgers University. It was this activity that helped me decide to become a bass fiddle player at that time. I plunked down my transcription in front of Milt in 1992 during the rehearsal for the Riverwalk production."I haven't seen this thing in 30 years!" said Milt. He performed it flawlessly.

--Don Mopsick, Bassist and Web Guy