People, Locations, Episodes

Art Farmer, Jazz Trumpeter born

Art Farmer

This date marks the birth of Art Farmer in 1928. He was a Black jazz musician.

Born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, Farmer was raised in Phoenix and moved to Los Angeles in 1945 with his twin brother, Addison.  During the late 1940s, Farmer worked with the bands of Jay McShann, Johnny Otis, Gerald Wilson, Roy Porter, and Benny Carter on the West Coast. In the early '50s, he worked with Wardell Gray and then toured with Lionel Hampton, recording in Europe with Clifford Brown.  He moved to New York City shortly thereafter and worked with Horace Silver, Gerry Mulligan, and Quincy Jones.

He became a co-leader of the Jazztet with Benny Golson and worked in a quartet format with Jim Hall and Steve Kuhn. He again traveled to Europe in the mid-1960s for solo tours and worked with Jimmy Heath before taking a job with the Austrian Radio Orchestra in 1968. After that, he toured the world, often returning home for club dates and recordings. He took up the flumpet, a hybrid blending quality of the trumpet and flugelhorn.

A trumpet great whose career has spanned more than a half-century, his polished sound often has the quality of aching loneliness, especially since he took up the flugelhorn as his primary instrument in the early 1960s. Among his many outstanding recordings are "Modern Art,"; "Big Blues,"; "Blame It On My Youth" with Clifford Jordan, and "Silk Road." Art Farmer died in October 1999.

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