Talk:Lionel Hampton

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"died of cardiac arrest at the Mount Sinai Medical center": we have a Mount Sinai Medical Center here in Toronto, Ontario -- surely that's not the place where Hamp died?

--Bob
bjonkman@sobac.com

Contents 1 = 2 Lionel HamptoM 3 Picture 4 Apartment Fire

[edit] =

Amazing what a little research will get you...

--Bob.

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"Flying Home" [...] is considered one of the first rock and roll records.

Would anyone care to who thinks this? I know LH was an early influence to R&R, but Flying Home doesn't particularly seem like the 'first one'. -- User:SeanO

Is the Smithsonian Institution authoritative enough for you? They included "Flying Home" on their album, Straighten Up and Fly Right, a collection of a dozen singles that were ancestors to rock and roll.

I would say there are several things that make "Flying Home" fit:

1. Audience reaction. People reacted as if it were something new, not just more big band music, but that saxophone solo brought them out of their seats.
2. The sax solo itself, a true r&b style honker. People may have played that way before, but it is one of the first on record. It is described in What Was the First Rock and Roll Record? as one of two 1939 recordings as influential in establishing the sound, and also states that Jacquet's solo was "what many critics have called the first R&B sax solo". The book's cutoff date was 1942 and uses another Jacquet solo as the starting point for its list of 50, but "Flying Home" and "Rock Me" by Lucky Millinder are the only two songs mentioned in the book as preceding the list.
3. Furthermore, the fact that the solo's form was crystallized, built in to the arrangement, and not just a sax break. After Jacquet recorded it, Arnett Cobb played it, and after Cobb, sometimes the whole sax section played it in unison. A jazz solo tends to be much more improvised than a rock and roll solo, and usually varies from playing to playing, whereas rock players find the solo that fits and play it every time. This isn't a firm rule, but it is a way that rock solos in general differ from jazz solos. Note that on both "Heartbreak Hotel" and "Rock Around the Clock" the guitar solos are played twice, note for note.
4. Finally, in addition to the Smithsonian, many other historians of rock and roll also call out "Flying Home" as one of the first singles to establish a rock and roll feeling in music, including me, who wrote that sentence, and also the first rock and roll record and who saw Arnett Cobb blow the roof off Symphony Hall in Boston playing "Flying Home" with the Hampton band.

It's pretty ironic that Hampton claims to hate rock and roll, but the fact is he was one of its progenitors. Ortolan88

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Would it be possible to say "'Flying Home' is an important ancestor to rock and roll" instead? I'm assuming that "Straighten Up and Fly Right" is also included, as are some of the jump blues of Louis Jordan (and possibly something from Cab Calloway). All of them are important to the development of Rock and Roll, but I wouldn't call them the "First Rock and Roll Record". I agree with everything that you have said, BTW, I just think the attribution is too strong.

Well, I wanted to link it to the first rock and roll record article. If you go there you will see that it is given as an important predecessor. I suppose I could mark it [[first rock and roll record|early ancestor of rock and roll]] but that seems a little bit much. Maybe I can reword it, "predecessor to the first rock and roll records" might do it. Seems a little clumsy. I think though when we look backwards, we can see it was a rock and roll record.

Actually, "Straighten Up and Fly Right" isn't in that article yet. Lots of work to be done on that one. The most important omission is "Rock and Roll" from the first Jazz at the Philharmonic sessions.

Plenty more to write about here. Someone just started jump blues, but there's also Western swing, hillbilly boogie, blues in country music, novelty songs, plenty, plenty more to cover.

Also, just as a point of clarification, air checks of radio broadcasts show that, at least during the 'commercial' swing era, solos were much more 'pat' (i.e.: they were played the same night after night) then we are used to in Jazz. Benny Goodman's On The Air album is a really good example of this: The air checks are usually faster, tighter, and longer than the studio recordings, but the solos are usually very similar. Of course some cats during the swing era, particularly Coleman Hawkins, were great improvisers and made it a point of 'never playing it the same twice', but they were very often the exception. -- SeanO

Yep. That's why I drew the distinction about rock solos. In both cases, the solo is being fitted to the arrangement (and the music is more commercial). Hampton's band was definitely a jazz band. Not all the big bands were jazz bands, and not all the jazz big bands were as interested in soloing. After all, lots of solos are just playing scales and runs, so a nice well worked out pat solo would be better.

Just FYI, I am one old fart who was actually around for a lot of this, prototypical white southern early adopter of rock and roll who has stayed with it all the way since. "My" first rock and roll record was "Drinking Wine Spodee Odee" when I was nine years old in 1949. Still rockin' after all these years. Ortolan88

[edit] Lionel HamptoM

It would appear that WP has propagated a myth of a musician of almost the same name, born exactly 5 years later. My Google search on

Lionel HamptoM

produced "522 hits" on the first page (and more tellingly for those inquiring that far, "176 of about 454" on the last).

Besides copies on other sites, made from WP of old versions of April 12, i eventually found in the history an old version of it with

• 1913 - Lionel Hampton, musician (d. 2002)

and further archaeology would surely turn up a Hamptom entry in a still earlier version.

Whoever removed the Hamptom entry didn't bother to do a what-lks-here check and find that List of people by name: Ham included

• Hamptom, Lionel, (born 1913), musician
• Hampton, Fred, (fl. 1960s), American Black activist
• Hampton, Lionel, (1908-2002), musician

where the error is far less obvious. I'm creating the redirect, and changing the LoPbN entry to lead directly to Lionel Hampton, keeping it as a warning flag that "references to Lionel Hamptom, whether born 1913 or otherwise should be understood as references to Lionel Hampton". I don't think many people would look at Talk: List of people by name: Ham, and IMO this talk page is the best place for extended documentation of the foulup. IMO the one remaining Hamptom reference (in the LoPbN piping, not as a lk to the rdr) in the main namespace suffices for that namespace, but i think this more definitive and more explicit record is also needed, since it is unclear that the external sites that picked up the error from us will ever be expunged.
(BTW, the first of my hits, CNN lacks the Hamptom string in either rendered or source version; cached version hints at something i had not suspected about Google searches, in saying in its heading (emphasis here as on the Google-cache page)

These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: lionel hamptom

meaning, i guess, that Google bases hits not only on

• the content of the hit-pages matching the search keys,

but also on

• matches with the search keys by some aspects of pages, that in turn lk to high-scoring pages that don't match the search keys.

Did that make any sense? Some pages are hits not bcz they match the search terms, but bcz of the way pages that do lk to them (and my guess is, bcz these "pseudo hits" are high-scoring pages). Which makes the online world yet another step more complex.)
--Jerzy•[[User talk:Jerzy|t]] 13:53, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Picture

There has got to be a better public domain picture of Hamp than one with America's brainless leader. Perhaps one where he's actually playing vibes...--Josh Rocchio 17:46, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

I agree and would prefer no picture at all to this one.Sluzzelin 23:17, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

I'd prefer one of him playing, but I don't see the problem with this one. It's just Hampton receiving an award and he was in fact a Republican. (Granted Hampton was like a Rockefeller Republican as I recall)--T. Anthony 01:59, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm working on finding a better picture. The National Endowment of the Arts has a great photo ([1]), I've asked them to clarify the copyright status of it. If they say it's good, then up it goes!!! --SeanO 02:07, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

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[edit] Apartment Fire

I seem to recall that Hamp had a devastating fire in his apartment shortly before his death. I don't have the time to look this up right now, but I seem to recall that his lifetime's worth of memorabilia was destroyed and that he barely escaped alive. Anyone want to fill in this blank??

I was a court reporter taking the testimony at the trial brought against Lionel Hampton by the tenants of his apartment building for the fire that originated out of his apartment back in January of 1997. His caretaker accidentally knocked over a halogen lamp on his bed where it caught fire. The dim-witted nurse opened the windows of the 20th-floor apartment to "blow out the flames" that quickly spread across his bed, quilt, etc. She was unaware that such heavy winds would actually exacerbate the flames, causing it to do even more damage. Mr. Hampton's caregivers took him out of the apartment unharmed, but all of his possesions perished that day, as did the apartments of several other well known celebrities. Already being somewhat senile and very fragile by the year 2000 when the case came to trial, he was of little knowledge and assistance, but the case nevertheless went forward. Sad.brennivan 17:29, 8 September 2006 (UTC) Brennivan