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Epitaph:

Jimmy Knepper is gone. He died June 14th 2003 after fighting Parkinson’s Disease for a year and a half, looked after and nursed by his daughter, Robin Rios (Knepper), in Triadelphia, West Virginia.
Jimmy Knepper was the most important, singular inspiration for me as a trombone player. Not the first, but the greatest.



Prologue:

The first time I was introduced to Jimmy Knepper’s playing was in the home of the jazz guru of our youth, Henry Laursen, or Henry the Duck. Henry was a friend of legendary Taxa Ole, whose Record Store, in Skindergade, downtown Copenhagen, was the place, where we found rare, hard-to-get jazz records. At one time when Taxa Ole was ill, Henry looked after the store for him, and that’s when and where we met. He invited us to his home at Brandes Allé on Frederiksberg for some mind-blowing blindfold sessions that would turn our preconceived ideas about jazz music upside down.
One evening in the early sixties we arrived, all dressed up with a magnum bottle of white wine and 20 cigarettes as usual, for yet another evening of listening to records. Among other things we listened to Eddie Bert with Duke Jordan’s Quintet – an old Signal LP with Cecil Payne as the other horn - and Frank Rehak with Manny Albam’s Big Band. Henry, who was a great ‘educator’ and loved blindfold tests, said, eyes gleaming behind the spectacles: "What do you think of this?" and slapped a new LP on the turntable. "Well, too many notes, I prefer Eddie Bert to that – who is it?" Henry stared at me for a while (he was used to my being a little slow) and brought out the LP cover: ‘The Pepper-Knepper Quintet’ on Metro Jazz. "But the picture is mirrored," I protested indignantly. I asked him to let us listen to something else, which we did until the sun came up.
But something must have registered with me and spurred my curiosity, it was that strange guy from the Mingus records, so next time we visited Henry, I asked him to play some more. Too bad, he had just sold it back to Taxa Ole a couple of days ago. I went straight to Taxa Ole's the next day and there it was! Taxa put it on the record player, and NOW I was sold! Of course it cost a lot more than I could afford - we were all poor then - and Taxa knew just what to charge for, say, a mint-condition Candid rarity.
Jimmy made a tremendous impact on my conception of trombone playing, but that was not very ‘comme-il-faut’ on the local, modern jazz-scene that I and other young jazz musicians aspired to. NOT having J. J. Johnson as the absolute role model was bordering on criminal conduct - was at the very least conspicuous. We had a Mini-Dizzy, a Mini-Dexter and ditto J. J. on the scene around the Sunday-jams at the Vingaarden, an extremely fertile scene. But Jimmy Knepper as role model? C’mon now! (And he wasn’t even BLACK!)
Well, I didn’t give a hoot in hell and just kept going with my Knepper-ism. For years I tried to sound JUST A LITTLE BIT like him, but alas, I never succeeded. Then on the other hand the value of the inspiration from him can’t be overestimated. It made me think differently from my colleagues, gave me a modus operandi to integrate my previous, great inspirations from (‘kroner-logical’ order) Chris Barber, Arne ‘Papa Bue’ Jensen, Kid Ory, Vic Dickenson, Dickie Wells, Bill Harris, Eddie Bert, Åke Persson, Jimmy Cleveland, Jack Teagarden and later on Curtis Fuller, Frank Rehak, Eje Thelin, Grachan Moncur III, Willie Dennis and Roswell Rudd. In ‘62 we received the shocking news about Mingus hitting Jimmy Knepper in the mouth in connection with the preparations for the (in)famous, chaotic Town Hall Concert. Rumors about Jimmy’s ruined mouth and ditto career and the lawsuit against Mingus flourished. The recording was released and, right, Jim wasn’t part of it. In those times news didn’t cross the Pond (Atlantic Ocean) in a flash, and Jimmy Knepper, Mingus’ most important sideman alongside Dannie Richmond in the years 1957-1962, seemed to have disappeared from the surface.
But the hunt for Knepper-records continued. Since his coming to New York from the West Coast in 1956 he had recorded in many different settings outside Mingus. Some were obvious: ‘Out of the Cool’ with Gil Evans with his fantastic rendition of ‘Where Flamingos Fly’, others, like his recordings with Tony Scott with a/o Bill Evans and Henry Grimes, ‘The Trombone Scene’ with a/o Eddie Bert, Jimmy Cleveland, Frank Rehak and Willie Dennis (by the way his recording debut in New York) as well as a couple of records in his own name: the Bethlehem LP ‘A Swinging Introduction to Jimmy Knepper’ and the 33 1/3 rpm Debut EP with his good friend, altoist Joe Maini, pianist Bill Triglia and the Mingus/Richmond tandem, were hard to come by (here Jørgen Grunnet Jepsen’s discography was invaluable.)
Suddenly an obscure record from 1963 popped up: Gene Roland’s ‘Swinging Friends’ with tenor-tandem Al Cohn/Zoot Sims, Clark Terry and Snooky Young on trumpets and Jimmy Knepper on trombone. Roland and Knepper were old friends (Roland participated on trumpet on the aforementioned ‘Swinging Introduction’), and he took the initiative to put Jimmy back into the studio. He only had two solos. On the ballad feature ‘The Wrong Blues’ by Alec Wilder, his playing is as heartbreaking as on ‘Flamingos’. But he is obviously not back to the same shape as before the ‘incident’ with Mingus. His sound is a bit on the raunchy side, and a tad darker – not that it matters (in a negative sense), far from it. But most important: Jimmy Knepper was back!
But he was not overly visible, really, until he emerged on the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra’s second live LP from the Village Vanguard, soloing on ‘Kids are Pretty People’ some years later. And now he was back in shape. I made some backwards loop the loops from sheer joy over the fact that my hero was back - and where? Right there, in the eye of the hurricane with one of the most groundbreaking constellations of the times. Remember: In those days big bands (Duke Ellington’s apart) were considered old hat and nobody took them seriously like they did Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor and Sonny Rollins - until Thad Jones-Mel Lewis turned the tables on what was considered hip and gave us: the contemporary big band.

Theme:

In 1969 the Thad & Mel band appeared in Denmark: TV recording in the TV-City, and all us tough guys hanging around the Radio Big Band and the Reprise Theatre in Holte (THE place where all the new, young, hot players were doing their thing) were invited to the recording as the audience. And I was going to meet two of my absolute trombone-heroes, Eddie Bert and Jimmy Knepper. My old girlfriend, Kirsten Weinoldt, an eminent jazz photographer, who had moved to the States some months earlier, set up the ‘rendezvous’. Little Eddie Bert with the dapper, black moustache (lead-bone of the orchestra, Jim was on third) was the first one I met. Jim was nowhere to be seen, Mr. Invisi-bone. But I spotted an old, beat-up Bach 36 trombone with a Bach 6 1/2 AL mouthpiece, lying on a chair, and realized it had to be Jimmy’s (nobody else played medium-large Bach trombones in those days, it was Kings and Conns (like myself) or maybe Bach 16Ms like Bert). I asked Eddie, and he said, yes, it was Jimmy’s horn, and he couldn’t fathom why he played such a large combination horn/mouthpiece. As we were talking, I spotted a lanky, tall dude heading for us: "I’m Jimmy Knepper," said he and put his hand out to great me. Guys! I tell you, my heart was in my throat and I thought I would pass out: JIMMY KNEPPER!
The band played a hell of a concert (parts of which have been shown on the tube through the years). Jim had but one lonely solo (FAR TOO LITTLE) in Bob Brookmeyer’s arrangement of ‘Willow Weep For Me’, but what a solo! After the concert, Ole Kurt, bass trombonist in the Radio Big Band, came dashing over to me with all the signs of severe agitation painted on his face: "Did you hear it, Erling? He played a low D in his solo, and it isn’t even on the horn!" (The low D belongs to the register of the bass trombone and normally takes an F-attachment to play it, so Ole Kurt was deeply shaken by the fact that Jim played in ‘his register’ on a straight horn).
Shortly afterwards I went to the States. I had won a partial Down Beat Hall of Fame Scholarship for studies at Berklee School (now College) of Music in Boston, and good people from back here saw to it that I got further subsidies from our government to realize my dreams of getting to jazz’s native country.
I had a standing invitation from Jimmy Knepper and Booker Ervin, whom I met at a radio recording with the Radio Big band, where I was subbing, on June 4 of the same year (1969), to stay with them whenever I made it down to New York on recess from Berklee. Most of the time I stayed with Booker and his family, because he had an apartment on East 13th Street in the East Village, and Jim and his family lived further out, on Staten Island.
And guess where I spent my Monday nights, whenever I was in New York? At the Village Vanguard to dig Thad & Mel. Jim brought me as his guest, so I didn’t have to pay to get in (spending all night nursing my one coke), and it was incredible hangin' in the kitchen with all the guys, Snooky Young, Eddie Daniels, Richard Williams, Pepper Adams, Al Porcino, Richard Davis, Joe Farrell etcetera and listen to their stories and small talk. One evening Don Byas sat in with the band. Also Jo Jones, Basie’s old drummer, ‘the man who plays like the wind,’ was there, albeit not to play. At one point (in the kitchen on the break, of course) the two old-timers got into an argument over who could do the most push-ups. Liquor was liberal and everybody was in high spirits and egging the two competitors on. Soon they were both on the floor to demonstrate, not just push-ups, but one-arm push-ups! It was completely crazy, and hilariously funny. Finally Don Byas had pushed Jo Jones so far that he, Jones, frantically trying to out-do Byas, as a last, desperate measure hurled himself to the floor, crying: "But I can do no-arms push-ups!" Imagine this great artist lying on the floor in the kitchen of the Vanguard with a bunch of howling musicians around him, while he tries, by sheer willpower, to make no-arms push-ups! – Well, I guess this might not really have anything to do with this story, but serves as an indication of the kind of things, I was lucky enough to experience through my friendship with Jim.
On the occasions when we went home to Jim after the concert – way late at night – or rather early in the morning, and after the obligatory cup of coffee at their regular late-night hang-out, a coffee-shop somewhere around Times Square – in his old, raggedy car, the trip to Staten Island was a mixed pleasure. Jim was tired, and the brandy, with which he had a close relationship at this time, didn’t help his obvious lack of talent for driving a motor vehicle. But we always made it in one piece. And I remember thinking about the story he told me at one time about his old friend and colleague Willie Dennis, who killed himself on the way home from a gig a couple of years earlier: Willie was on his way through Central Park, and where the road makes a left turn - he continued straight ahead, ramming a tree. Tragic. I desperately told myself: "If I’m gonna die now, I die in style with my great inspiration and role model." Later we would sit in the kitchen in the house on Bayview Place with the fantastic view of the Statue of Liberty and overlooking the skyline of Manhattan, drinking coffee out of mugs and talking. Maybe Maxine, Jim’s wife (ex-trumpet player) would pop up and, head shaking, warn Jim: "Don’t keep the young man up all night, Jim!"
Very often it was during these relaxed, warm sittings in the kitchen (not necessarily in the middle of the night) that I got the chance to satisfy my curiosity about a lot of things, among these not in the least the story about what really happened, when Mingus floored him. So here it is as Jim told it to me:
Jim was doubling as a copyist for Mingus on the Town Hall project. Everything was of course running late and chaos reigned, so Jim was sitting up, night after night copying music like a madman. So one night his wife, Max, took seriously ill and he had to rush her to the hospital. As he came running in the door next morning, trying to explain to Mingus why he hadn’t finished the music, Mingus blew his top without giving him half a chance to explain himself, yelling: "Where’s my music?!" - "Are you trying to ruin my career?!!" and hit him in the mouth! He knocked out a molar, smashing his mouth and Jim’s career was in ruins. "I had to sue him," he explained to me, "’cause I didn’t have the money to pay the huge dentist’s bill and couldn’t make an income, not being able to play." Mingus was furious about the lawsuit (which Jim won) and tried to get back at him by the lowest means imaginable. And you can imagine all you want, ‘cause I’m not gonna go public with that.
I cautiously asked Jim, how he felt about Mingus, now that so many years had passed, I mean, what Mingus did was unforgivable. (I always had a secret hope that maybe one day - - they would play together again?) "Angry with Mingus, carry a grudge? No way! He is one of the most wonderful and warmest people I have known, and a genius to boot. He just can’t always control himself and his volcanic feelings and believes, sometimes correctly, that people are out to harm him. No, I love Charles and would play with him again." (Which he did some years later, until Mingus’ death in ’79, after which he took over the Mingus Dynasty group, instigated by his widow, Sue Graham Mingus, as musical director and arranger up through the eighties.)
Another thing I learned was that – I mean, here’s Jimmy Knepper, who plays with Thad & Mel, an acclaimed world star! – one can’t trust what one sees. "How I make a living? I’m a landlord. When I was about to get my career up and running again after the catastrophe with Mingus, I was lucky, the phone rang, could I sub for Frank Rehak, who hadn’t shown for a rehearsal on a Broadway Show?" (I think it was Hello Dolly, but can’t remember) "It turned out that he never showed for the gig, he had his problems, you know, so I held the job four years. Bought this house and another one, which I rent out. And that’s what I’m living off of – and then the twenty bucks every Monday with Thad." - Shook up? Betcha!
Some days we would go down into the basement to play duets. Telemann’s flute duets a/o. "We just read ‘em down in bass clef, then they don’t go too high," he said in his lackadaisical, deadpan, matter-of fact way.
He told me that the only way he could stay in shape was by having a duet-partner. "I can’t practice anymore, without a duet-partner I’m sunk!" He and trumpet player Richard Williams would be playing duets in the men’s rooms, band rooms, any place they could get away with it, when they were touring or giggin’ together with Thad & Mel. One of the first gigs I caught in New York was at a joint up in Harlem. There was a nice, spacey band room, and while the other cats enjoyed themselves and relaxed, Jim and Richard were sitting in a corner whipping out duets like mad. I asked Jim what duets they played, and he said: "Anything, we have played all there is to be had for brass instruments and are now into flute duets, violin duets, whatever we can lay our hands on." On my question as to how they read material, not written for trumpet and trombone, he casually added: "Oh, we just transpose."
Sometimes, when Jim, Max and the kids had gone to bed, I was allowed to go up into the attic and copy his original compositions. They were alphabetically arranged, lead sheets, arrangements of standards, original pieces in close score, wedding music, Bar Mitzvah, you name it, in one stylistic nightmare. I was confused. He later explained to me that it was all music, and to him there was no distinction between the various styles of music. – Well, they were all there – Ogling Ogre, Cunningbird, Who You, Adams in the Apple (Less Sterner East), Primrose Path, Just Tonight, Figment Fragment – and I copied like a madman, nights on end. Maxine thought I was crazy – but understood. Jim just smiled and shook his head.
In 1971 he emerged in Copenhagen with Gil Evans’ first synthesizer band. He brought his wife, and they were looking good, composed and relaxed. He told me confidentially that he had skipped the brandy. And were we in for a treat: A couple of ferocious concerts at the old Montmartre in Store Regnegade and a TV production in the TV-City. Our own Palle Mikkelborg was subbing for Little Johnny Coles, who was delayed, because he had forgotten his passport when they arrived at the airport. Boy, how I envied Palle!
In the fall of ’73 I was back at Berklee after a couple of years with the Danish Radio Big Band. Jim was now on lead-bone and Quentin ‘Butter’ Jackson had taken over Jim’s third trombone chair. I caught a couple of concerts at the Boston Performance Center with Hank Jones at the piano, George Mraz on bass and Jon Faddis, Dizzy’s protege, on trumpet. Man, how they played. Listening to ‘Butter’ in one tune, Jim in the next one was almost too much. It certainly took a strong heart. ‘Butter’ had recently suffered a stroke and was paralyzed on one side of the face – but that was impossible to hear!

From this point onwards, Jim’s career was shaping up again. Not in the least thanks to the first LP release in his own name since the late fifties, ‘Cunningbird’, on Nils Winther’s SteepleChase Records, with a/o his old partner from the Mingus days Dannie Richmond on drums and Al Cohn on tenor. Around the same time he had joined the Lee Konitz Nonet and appeared on records with that group and in other constellations. Audiences and critics alike started to react strongly to Jimmy Knepper again. Critic Lee Jeske coined the phrase: ‘the Divine Jimmy Knepper’ in the early eighties, a time when Jim appeared in Denmark at regular intervals, often fronting the Mingus Dynasty, but also, in 1981, with George Gruntz’s Concert Jazz Orchestra at a concert in the new Montmartre, the Jazz-Kay edition, in Nørregade. (The old one in Store Regnegade was run by Herluf Kamp-Larsen.)
I went to the club early and found Jimmy in the back room bar warming up. As he spotted me in the mirror over the bar, he slowly turned around, still playing. Looking me straight in the eye, he emptied the spitvalve in the middle of a phrase without taking his hand off the horn and without breaking the phrase. "See this?" he asked as he had finished the phrase, showing me a cord, which he could activate with a finger, running from the hand-grip of the slide to the spitvalve. "Got the idea from Albert Mangelsdorff - hip, eh? - All hook, line and sinker. It’s point 9 mm fishing line - will bring in a tuna." So now you know where I got the idea from, dear reader. I asked about the tour and how it was going and, yeah, it was okay, but unfortunately it was basically all grandstanding and show-off, he thought (between friends). "You know there is this Argentine kid with the band (I didn’t know that) he’s a real natural, hope they won’t ruin him, too." The "Argentine kid" turned out to be the later so famous bandoneón player Dino Saluzzi. And again Palle Mikkelborg was present! - More envy.
The last time I met Jim was in 1989. I‘m sitting at home preparing a concert in two parts at the Pumpehuset with the Radio Big Band. One part with my tango arrangements, music by Piazzolla and me, and the other with my more jazzy things. I was going to conduct and play as a soloist, too. Phone rings: "This is Jimmy Knepper, I’ll be coming to Copenhagen to give a clinic next week and play a couple of gigs (with Thomas Clausen’s trio) at the Ben Webster Club." – And then I got busy!
What to do, when you got a good idea? You called Erik Moseholm, then of the Danish Radio: "Erik, it’s Erling, Jimmy Knepper’s coming to town, can't you fix a soloist fee, then we’ll add him to the bill as special guest at the concert. I have a couple of Mingus things and one of Jim’s own compositions, ‘Who You’. Those would be obvious to present Jim and would fit the jazz part perfectly. And I have this here feature that I used to play, Jobim’s ‘Inútil Paisagem’. I actually wrote that with Jim and Lee Konitz in mind, and always wanted Jim to play it, one day. Per Carsten can play Konitz’s part. What do you think?" Erik hit the roof, enthusiastic as only he can be, and fixed a moderate soloist fee for Jim on the spot. Way to go!
I conducted, played a little, Jim came on as guest star soloist – and I just ‘happened’ to have taken the opportunity to rearrange one piece, Mingus’ ‘Nostalgia in Times Square’, for two plunger trombones. So for the first, last and onliest time I played with my idol publicly.
Jim was staying in my basement studio, in Hobrogade, where I sit writing this article, sleeping on an obnoxious couch, just like Lee Konitz and Bobby Jones had done, years back, in my dump of a small apartment in Korsgade in the seventies. But then he could save a little money, and I could pay back his hospitality.
Jim was 62 at this time and seemed more fragile than before, though still playing great. He was just as dry-witted and eloquent as always.
I had heard that they were going to re-record Mingus’ music from the 1962 Town Hall Concert under the title of ‘Epitaph’, and all the original guys, still around, were supposed to participate, so I asked enthusiastically how it went, assuming that he was part of it and looking forward to hearing the result. He dryly said that he had thanked no to the project, "They aren’t doing this right. They are bringing in music that isn’t even Mingus’ own music. No, I didn’t care to do it." He had also dropped working for Sue Mingus’ Mingus Dynasty a while back because of some misgivings he didn’t want to get into.
Up through the nineties we were in contact through the telephone at long intervals - and a few letters. Among other things I sent him some private recordings of Lee’s Nonet from the seventies and some of my own new stuff, like he sent me some of his few and far between new things. After the, for him, career-wise so fertile eighties, he was again becoming less and less visible.

Epilogue:

A couple of years back I had one of my rare students, this one a lovely young girl, Mia Engsager. She got the opportunity to got to the States for a while and asked me, whom she should look up, over there. I suggested she look up Jimmy Knepper. "But I can’t just do that," she protested, awestruck. I told her, I would set it up for her and call Jim, who of course said that she would be more than welcome. To make a long story short, I spoke with her, when she came back, and asked how it went at Jim’s and Max’s. They had been so extremely sweet, she told me, and Jim had told her a lot of things about trombone playing and music. "But," and here she hesitated, almost looking over her shoulder to make sure nobody was listening, "Jim said to me: "Don’t tell Erling." – but he doesn’t play anymore, hasn’t for quite a while," she confessed. She thought I ought to know, anyway. Two weeks later, there was a letter from Jim: "Many thanks for sending that lovely girl to see us. Max and I loved her. And it made me think that maybe there would be a little more mileage in the old trombone, so I’ve started up again and have a planned concert next month. That arrangement you did of ‘Who You’, could I have a copy of that? So I can play it at the concert?" Of course he could! Registered airmail, pronto.
We spoke a couple of times on the phone after that. Last time I heard from him was around X-mass time. He was on my answering machine. "This is Jimmy Knepper. Erling, do you have Horace’s (Parlan) address? I - - - beep, beep, beep."
I figured he would call back, but he didn’t. I didn’t get around to calling him back, either. We were not very good at that
Last fall I received an email from Kirsten. She had spoken to Maxine (she always called Jim on his birthday) and Max had told her that Jim had gotten Parkinson’s Disease and had moved down to his daughter, who was looking after him.
On June 14th this year, I saw the following posting on the Online Trombone Journal, signed by Sam Burtis, his co-trombonist from the Lee Konitz Nonet:

Jim Knepper died today.
He was one of only about three people who ever cared enough to try to manage to get some real musical information through my thick skull, and I loved him dearly.
He was incapable of telling a lie.
He gave a great deal to relatively few people.
I guess that's about as good a way as any to go about it.
Keep the faith.
Sam Burtis

Erling Kroner, Copenhagen
Translated and adapted by the author from the original Danish manuscript, originally published in Jazz Special, August 2003 edition.
All rights reserved ©Kroner Music 2003

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photo series TV-Byen, Copenhagen September 4, 1969 ©Kirsten Weinoldt

above talking with Phil Woods with Thad & Mel at TV-Byen	soloing on Brookmeyer's arrangement of	Willow Weep For Me
with Snooky Young & Al Porcino		Eddie Bert & Jimmy

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Article from the New Yorker magazine 1991