Jazz musician Donald Byrd, a leading trumpeter of the 1950s who collaborated on dozens of albums with leading artists of his time, has died at 80.
I’m creative; I’m not recreative... I don’t follow what everybody else does
Byrd, who was also a pioneer in jazz education, attended Cass Technical High School in Detroit, played in military bands in the US Air Force and moved to New York in 1955.
The trumpeter, whose given name was Donaldson Toussaint L’Ouverture Byrd II, rose to prominence when he joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers later that year, filling the seat in the bebop group held by his idol Clifford Brown.
He soon became one of the most in-demand trumpeters on the New York scene, playing with Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. He also began his recording career by leading sessions for Savoy and other labels.
In 1958, he signed an exclusive recording contract with the Blue Note label and formed a band with a fellow Detroit native, baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams, making their label debut with the 1959 album Off to the Races.
The band became one of the leading exponents of the hard-bop style, which evolved from bebop and blended in elements of R&B, soul and gospel music. A 1961 recording, Free Form, brought attention to a promising young pianist, Herbie Hancock.
In the 1960s, Byrd, who had received his masters degree from the Manhattan School of Music, turned his attention to jazz education. He studied in Paris with composer Nadia Boulanger, became the first person to teach jazz at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and started the jazz studies department at Howard University in Washington.
Jazz critics panned Byrd for deviating from the jazz mainstream, but he was unperturbed.
“I’m creative; I’m not recreative,” Byrd told the Detroit Free Press in a 1999 interview. “I don’t follow what everybody else does.”
Byrd invited several of his best students at Howard to join a jazz-fusion group called the Blackbyrds that reached a mainstream audience with a sound heavy on R&B and rock influences.
The band landed in the Top 10 on the R&B charts with the mid-1970s albums Street Lady, Stepping into Tomorrow and Place and Spaces.
In 1982, Byrd, who also had a law degree, received his doctorate from New York’s Teachers College and turned his attention from performing to education.
Byrd did not have much training in maths but created a groundbreaking curriculum called Music + Math (equals) Art, in which he transformed notes into numbers to simultaneously teach music and maths.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he returned to playing hard-bop on several albums for Landmark, the label which also featured saxophonists Kenny Garrett and Joe Henderson.
In 2000, the National Endowment for the Arts recognised Byrd as a Jazz Master, the highest US jazz honour.