Black Music Sunday: Celebrating jazz legend Clark Terry

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Sunday December 14, 2025 · 6:01 AM PST

2025/12/14 · 06:01

Clark Terry, left, plays trumpet at the Texas Inaugural Ball Monday night, Jan. 20, 1997, in Washington. Terry was playing at the ball with the Count Basie Band and the singer at right is Jon Hendricks. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) — Clark Terry, left, plays flugelhorn at the Texas Inaugural Ball Monday night, Jan. 20, 1997, in Washington. Terry was playing at the ball with the Count Basie Band and the singer at right is Jon Hendricks.

Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 290 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.

Clark Virgil Terry Jr., known to the music world simply as Clark Terry, was born Dec. 14, 1920, in St. Louis, Missouri, and joined the ancestors on Feb. 21, 2015. We’ve discussed him here in the past in the context of his birthplace, however he deserves his own tribute.

From his website official biography:

Clark Terry’s career in jazz spanned more than seventy years. He was a world-class trumpeter, flugelhornist, educator, composer, writer, trumpet/flugelhorn designer, teacher and NEA Jazz Master. He performed for eight U.S. Presidents, and was a Jazz Ambassador for State Department tours in the Middle East and Africa. More than fifty jazz festivals featured him at sea and on land in all seven continents. Many were named in his honor.

He was one of the most recorded musicians in the history of jazz, with more than nine-hundred recordings. Clark’s discography reads like a “Who’s Who In Jazz,” with personnel that included greats such as Quincy Jones, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Dinah Washington, Ben Webster, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Barnet, Doc Severinsen, Ray Charles, Billy Strayhorn, Dexter Gordon, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Gerry Mulligan, Sarah Vaughan, Coleman Hawkins, Zoot Sims, Milt Jackson, Bob Brookmeyer, and Dianne Reeves.

Among his numerous recordings, he was featured with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Count Basie Orchestra, Dutch Metropole Orchestra, Chicago Jazz Orchestra, Woody Herman Orchestra, Herbie Mann Orchestra, Jimmy Heath Orchestra, Donald Byrd Orchestra, and many other large ensembles – high school and college ensembles, his own duos, trios, quartets, quintets, sextets, octets, and two big bands – Clark Terry’s Big Bad Band and Clark Terry’s Young Titans of Jazz.

His Grammy and NARAS Awards include: 2010 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, NARAS President’s Merit Award, three Grammy nominations, and two Grammy certificates.

Robert Dupuis at Musician Guide has some interesting details of his early years:

Born into poor circumstances in St. Louis, Missouri December 14, 1920, Terry constructed his first trumpet out of a piece of garden hose, a funnel, and a cut-off piece of pipe for the mouthpiece. As Terry told Down Beat 's Mitchell Seidel, "the neighbors got sick of me blowing that horrendous noise on that gadget, so they chipped in and collected the $12.50 and bought me a trumpet from a pawn shop." While attending Vachon High School, he would rehearse with Ernie Wilkins, later to become one of Count Basie's principal arrangers and a member of his sax section. Terry played in a local drum and bugle corps before moving in with an older sister, where he helped pay the bills by hauling ashes. At about the same time he realized that his childhood dream of becoming a boxer did not mesh with the stronger desire to play the trumpet. [...]

"I always enjoyed practicing," he told Larry Birnbaum of Down Beat …. Later, in the navy, I used to practice out of a clarinet book, because I always wanted to play fast passages, and I noticed that the clarinet books had faster things to play." … His practicing led to good things. After high school he played with a group called Dollar Bill and Small Change; he traveled with the Rueben & Cherry Carnival; he played for blues singer Ida Cox's "Darktown Scandals;" he worked with pianist/leader Fate Marable who worked the Mississippi River on riverboats.

In 1942 he began a three-year stint in the United States Navy, playing with the elite band at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center near Chicago under the leadership of alto saxophonist Willie Smith. Among his bandmates there were Wilkins and trumpeter Gerald Wilson, who was later to become the leader himself of several notable bands. After leaving the Navy, Terry spent a few months with Lionel Hampton's band, then returned to St. Louis for a tour with George Hudson at the Club Plantation. The band earned gigs and praises in New York, but after 18 months, the trumpeter moved to California where he played with the Charlie Barnet band for nearly a year.

Terry was an NEA Jazz Master and they continue his story and accolades:

Upon his discharge from the Navy in 1945, he found work with Lionel Hampton's band. He rounded out the 1940s playing with bands led by Charlie Barnet, Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, Charlie Ventura, and George Hudson. From 1948-51, Terry was a member of Basie's big band and octet.

Terry's reputation grew with Ellington's band, with whom he worked from 1951-59, often featured as a soloist on trumpet and flugelhorn. He also led his own recording dates during this time. After working with Quincy Jones in 1959-60, he found steady work as a freelance studio artist, eventually becoming a staff musician at NBC. As a member of the Tonight Show orchestra—one of the first African-American musicians employed in a television house band—he came to prominence through his popular "Mumbles" persona, his unique way of mumbling a scat vocal solo. He worked and recorded with artists such as J.J. Johnson, Oscar Peterson, and Ella Fitzgerald, then co-led a quintet with Bob Brookmeyer. Thereafter he led his own small and large bands, including his Big Bad Band, beginning in 1972. He also became part of Norman Granz's traveling all-stars, Jazz at the Philharmonic.

As a jazz educator he was one of the earliest active practitioners to take time off from the road to enter the classroom, conducting numerous clinics and jazz camps. This work culminated in his own music school at Teikyo Westmar University in Le Mars, Iowa. Terry was the subject of the 2014 documentary Keep on Keepin’ on about his work mentoring blind piano prodigy, Justin Kauflin.

A distinctive stylist, he was also a engaging entertainer, often alternating trumpet and flugelhorn in a solo duel with himself in concerts. He recorded and performed in a wide variety of settings, such as the One-on-One recording of duets with 14 different pianists. Terry received numerous awards and honors, including a Grammy Award (and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010), the French Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, a knighthood in Germany, and a star on St. Louis' Walk of Fame.

I enjoyed this obituary piece on Terry’s music, written by composer and cornet player Taylor Ho Bynum for The New Yorker:

Master improvisers have a personality in their playing, a singularity to their sound. They have the ability to adapt to any musical context while maintaining a sense of personal identity, displaying distinct individuality while always contributing to the needs of the collective. One of the greatest practitioners of this humanistic art died on Saturday: the ebullient, effervescent, irreplaceable, irrepressible trumpet virtuoso Clark Terry.

[...]

The trumpet (or the flugelhorn, a related instrument with a darker, fatter sound that Terry single-handedly popularized among jazz brass players) is a notoriously difficult instrument to play, but Terry made it dance. He pioneered a kind of “doodle-tonguing” articulation, which allowed notes to spill out of his horn without ever sounding rushed or frantic. His tone was a wonder of flexibility and range, a warmer, more liquid timbre than Miles Davis’s icy cool or Dizzy Gillespie’s bright attack. (And if I were forced to name a triumvirate of post-Armstrong trumpet innovators, those would be the three.) He employed a compendium of jazz styles—from the growling plunger mutes of early big bands to the lightning runs of bebop—while wholly transcending category. He was also an entertainer, a witty man on the bandstand where his “Mumbles” scat-singing routine was a big hit, but don’t let the comedy obscure the music—Terry was a genius.

[...]

His discography approaches a thousand recordings, with well over a hundred as a leader. His autobiography captures his gift for storytelling and his wry humor, especially in chronicling his early years on the road, with struggles through segregation and gigs in juke joints and carnivals, all while developing one of most distinctive improvisational voices in music history. It pains me to never hear that sound live again; no musician has made me laugh out loud in surprise and wonder more often than Clark Terry. But his imprint is a lasting one—a testament to the power of individual creativity, and a reminder that the best we can do is to be like no one but ourselves.

Speaking of his autobiography, there are details and reviews available on his website, and The National Visionary Leadership Project has several interviews with Terry on their YouTube channel I suggest you check out.

Here’s a biography of Terry from Leonard Shea’s YouTube Channel: