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He was a promising clarinettist until he saw Charlie Parker playing the saxophone at a club in Chicago
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Lou Donaldson, who has died aged 98, was an alto saxophonist whose fluid, soulful style helped to shape the face of modern jazz; a protégé of the king of bebop, Charlie Parker, he went on to forge a new style – hard bop, which melded bebop’s rhythmic complexity with blues and gospel harmonies.
In the following decade he was celebrated for his work in “soul jazz” – often playing with a Hammond organist – a bluesy, danceable sub-genre that gave him his biggest hit, the 1967 track Alligator Boogaloo, which penetrated the Billboard Hot 100. That year he was also successful with his version of the Bobby Gentry classic Ode to Billy Joe, which featured an up-and-coming George Benson on guitar.
Donaldson had been a promising clarinettist who took up the alto sax during his US Navy training at a radar unit near Chicago. One evening, he ventured into a club in the city.
“Some guy was laying back in the corner asleep,” he wrote. “I thought he was a bum or something. Then somebody came in and said, ‘Man, get Bird to play one.’ So they woke him up, gave him this horn – he didn’t have a horn. Man, such saxophone I never heard in my life. I said, ‘I’m giving up the clarinet! From now on I’m going to play saxophone just like this guy, if I can,’ because his tone was so sharp it just cut right through your heart.”
“Bird” was Charlie Parker, and the course of Donaldson’s life was set.
Louis Andrew Donaldson was born on November 1 1926 in Badin, a small town in North Carolina; his father was a preacher, his mother a school teacher who also gave piano lessons. But her son refused to be taught the instrument, and was more interested in baseball until the gospel music he heard in church induced him to learn the clarinet, despite being an asthma sufferer.
He attended North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, where he studied law and played in the college band. He was still playing baseball, semi-professionally, but gave up after nearly breaking a finger and realising that his musical prospects might be at risk.
He was drafted into the Navy in 1945, and had his Charlie Parker moment, then was medically discharged the following year; he returned to college, and the band, and graduated in 1947.
He joined a band of fellow veterans, the Rhythm Vets, who provided the soundtrack to a 1947 comedy short made for black audiences, Pitch a Boogie Woogie. Encouraged by touring musicians he moved to New York in 1950 and established himself in the city’s thriving jazz scene. He joined the house band at Minton’s Playhouse, the epicentre of the nascent bebop movement, and played on early tracks by the likes of Thelonius Monk, Bud Powell and Horace Silver.
He was snapped up by the Blue Note label, and in 1953 recorded the album New Faces, New Sounds, which announced hard bop to the world, and followed it by joining the Art Blakey Quintet for A Night at Birdland, which is still considered to be one of the great live jazz recordings.
Donaldson also led his own bands, and in 1958 he made the Blues Walk album, and began working with Hammond organists such as Jimmy Smith and Big John Patton. In the 1960s and into the ensuing decade he consolidated his unique brand of “soul jazz” on such albums as The Natural Soul (1962), Goodness Gracious! (1963) and Midnight Creeper (1968).
He also maintained a fierce touring schedule, and in 1982 The Daily Telegraph wrote that at a Ronnie Scott’s gig he gave “the kind of bravura display of which only really first-class musicians are available.” He was back the following year, the Telegraph noting that in a cover of Charlie Parker’s Confirmation, “The notes fairly pour forth, a torrent of connected phrases which build into a solo as good as anything ever played on Scott’s cramped stage.”
Probably influenced by the death of his hero and mentor, Charlie Parker, aged only 34, Donaldson – who did not even drink or smoke – was distinctly untypical in jazz circles in eschewing drugs, and he did his best not to work with addicts. “Junkies are hazardous people,” he said in 2012, “real hazardous.”
Though he had a big heart, Donaldson did like to pass acerbic opinions on other musicians, including Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane – “I got news for you. Coltrane killed jazz” – and Wynton Marsalis, of whom he remarked: “There ain’t much of nothing happening there.” His own work was extensively sampled by such leading lights of the hip-hop generation as De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Kanye West and Dr Dre.
He announced his retirement in 2018, but made appearances at several subsequent birthday tribute shows.
Lou Donaldson married Maker Turner in 1950, and she went on to become his manager. She died in 2006 and he is survived by their daughter; another daughter died in 1994.
Lou Donaldson, born November 1 1926, died November 9 2024
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