NEW YORK (WS News) — Jazz great Benny Golson, a tenor saxophonist and composer of standards such as “Killer Joe” and “Along Came Betty,” has died. He was 95.
Golson died Saturday at his home in Manhattan after a short illness, said Golson’s longtime agent, Jason Franklin.
Over his seven-decade musical career, Golson worked with some of the biggest luminaries in jazz, including Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton and John Coltrane. He built much of his reputation not as a performer but from his compositions, which also included “I Remember Clifford,” written in 1956 after trumpeter Clifford Brown, a friend, died in a car crash at age 25.
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Golson began learning the piano at age 9 and switched to the saxophone at age 14. He was still in high school when he started performing with other local musicians, including Coltrane, a childhood friend.
Golson began writing and arranging music while attending Howard University.
After stints in Gillespie’s big band and in drummer Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Golson co-founded The Jazztet in 1959 with flugelhorn master Art Farmer.
The Jazztet disbanded in 1962, and Golson moved on to writing music for movies and for television shows such as “Mannix,” “M-A-S-H” and “Mission: Impossible.” He also arranged music for performers including Peggy Lee, Lou Rawls and Dusty Springfield.
After a hiatus of more than a dozen years, Golson resumed playing the saxophone in the mid-1970s and launched a new version of the Jazztet with Farmer in 1982. He continued performing and writing music into his 90s.
He published “Whisper Not: The Autobiography of Benny Golson” in 2016.
Franklin, who worked with Golson for 25 years, said Golson stopped performing when COVID-19 shut down music venues in 2020 but continued working on projects, such as giving interviews for a forthcoming documentary, “Benny Golson: Looking Beyond The Horizon.”
