Buddy Collette

William Marcel Collette was born in Los Angeles on August 6, 1921. He was raised in Watts, surrounded by people of all different ethnicities. He lived in a house built by his father in an area with cheap, plentiful land. The neighborhood in which he grew up was called Central Gardens area. For elementary school, he attended Ninety-sixth Street School because it allowed black students.

Collette began playing piano at age ten, at his grandmother's request. His love for music came not only from his community, but from his parents—his father played piano and his mother sang. In middle school, he began playing the saxophone. That same year, he formed his first band. They played the music of Dootsie Williams, which Collette's parents had received while at a party. The following year, Collette started a band with Ralph Bledsoe and Raleigh Bledsoe. Together they played for less than a dollar each at parties put on by people in the area on Saturday nights.

Following this, Collette started a third group which eventually included Charles Mingus on bass. He and Mingus became very good friends. When he was fifteen, Collette became a part of the Woodman brothers' band, along with Joe Comfort, George Reed, and Jessie Sailes.[1]

During his first couple years of high school, Collette began traveling to Los Angeles in order to form connections with other musicians. At the Million Dollar Theatre, he and his band competed in a battle of the bands, but lost to a band that included Jackie Kelson, Chico Hamilton, and Al Adams. Afterwards, Collette was asked to join the winning band, making twenty-one dollars per week. Later, Charles Mingus joined this band.

At the age of 19, Collette started taking musical lessons from Lloyd Reese, who also taught Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, and many others. Collette credits Reese with teaching him and the other musicians how to manage themselves in the music world.

During World War II, Collette served with the U.S. Navy band attached to the pre-flight school at St. Mary's College. Led by Marshal Royal, it was one of two regimental bands of African-American musicians. From that band of 45 musicians, two dance bands were formed, the first being the Bombardiers, led by Royal. The second dance band, the Topflighters, was led by Collette, who had been playing with Les Hite's band in 1941 before enlisting. His memoir records a trip that he, Bill Douglass, and Charles Mingus made from Los Angeles to San Francisco in October 1942, after hearing that a Navy officer was recruiting musicians from the union there to serve in an all-black band that would be stationed at St. Mary's.

Both Mingus and Douglass changed their minds, however. Douglass was later drafted by the Army; Mingus got re-classified 4-F. Collette, like most black Navy bandsmen, was trained at Camp Robert Smalls, at the Great Lakes, Chicago, complex of Navy bases.[2]

According to Collette, he formed the second dance band at St. Mary's after he refused to join the Bombardiers on baritone sax, and along with most of the remaining fellows in the marching band realized that the dance band service was much easier than general musicians duty. Also in his band were Orlando Stallings on saxophone; James Ellison, Myers Franchot Alexander and Henry Godfrey on trumpet; George Lewis on first trombone; Ralph Thomas on bass tuba; and a few fellows he recalls only by nickname: "the Indian" on bass; "the Spider" and "the Crow" on tenor saxophones.[3]

Both dance bands played gigs at the Stage Door Canteen, the USO in San Francisco that featured 24-hour service and entertainment, as featured acts and as back-ups to the stars that were performing there, usually unannounced, when they were in the San Francisco area.[3]

Willie Humphrey, a New Orleans Dixieland jazz legend, joined the marching band late. Collette recalls that Marshal Royal didn't realize who he was and wasn't that interested in Dixieland, so Collette was able to get him into the Topflighters and subsequently arranged songs to highlight Humphrey's talent.[3]

Collette and others from St. Mary's played at clubs around San Francisco, especially in Oakland and at Redwood City, south of San Francisco, while in the Navy. "When you're in uniform, you're not supposed to be working outside," he writes, "so we would get in civilian clothes–it was such a good job."[3]

After serving as a U.S. Navy band leader, he played with the Stars of Swing (Woodman, Mingus, and Lucky Thompson), Louis Jordan, and Benny Carter.[3]

In 1949, he was the only black member of the band for You Bet Your Life, a TV and radio show hosted by Groucho Marx. In the 1950s, he worked as a studio musician with Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Nat King Cole, and Nelson Riddle.

In 1955, he was a founding member of the Chico Hamilton Quintet, playing chamber jazz flute with guitarist Jim Hall, cellist Fred Katz, and bassist Carson Smith.[1] [4] He also taught, and his students included Mingus, James Newton, Eric Dolphy, Charles Lloyd, and Frank Morgan. He helped merge an all-black musicians' union with an all-white musicians' union.[1]

In 1949, Collette was the first black musician to be hired by a nationally broadcast TV studio orchestra, on You Bet Your Life, hosted by Groucho. It has been noted that the conductor of the orchestra, Jerry Fielding, received hate-mail for standing by Collette. Collette's job and job security on the popular television show signaled that opportunities were becoming more readily available for black musicians by the 1950s.

Increasingly successful in the late 1940s, Collette was called upon frequently for collaborations and recordings on alto saxophone with musicians such as Ivie Anderson, Johnny Otis, Gerald Wilson, Ernie Andrews, and Charles Mingus. Most notably, Collette and Mingus formed their first band in 1933, the driving force that convinced Mingus to switch from cello to bass. He went on to form a short-lived yet cooperative band in 1946 with Mingus called "Stars of the Swing". Collette was a musical director for the jazz band program at Loyola Marymount University.

Around the early 1900s, Los Angeles was primarily divided into two music unions: Local 47, a union for white musicians, and Local 767, a union for black musicians.[1] Buddy Collette and several other black musicians including Bill Green, Charles Mingus, Britt Woodman Milt Holland made concentrated efforts to merge the two unions to one, color-blind union in the early 1950s.[1] Initially, the merge existed as an interracial symphony performing at the Humanist Hall on Twenty-third and Union.[1] This group received a great deal of publicity as iconic figures such as "Sweets" Edison, Nat King Cole, and Frank Sinatra provided public support of the interracial group.[1] The success of this group led to the coalition of the two segregated locals.

Buddy Collette eventually made the board of Local 767 along with Bill Douglass in the vice-president's position.[1] After three years of working with Leo Davis and James Petrillo, the presidents of Local 767 and Local 47 respectively, the two groups became what Collette calls an "amalgamation" of the two in 1953.[1] This merging signified greater opportunity for these musicians in both careers and insurance benefits, as well as great racial advancement. Up to forty locals have since replicated this success elsewhere, which has allowed the talent of a musician as opposed to his/her race determine success.[1]

In 1955, Collette became a founding member of the unusually instrumented chamber jazz quintet, led by percussionist Chico Hamilton. The quintet was notable for having cellist and pianist (Fred Katz) as the band's centerpiece, leading Collette to refer to Katz as "the first jazz cello player".[4] The group gained national prominence and became one of the most influential West Coast jazz bands, synonymous with the laidback "cool jazz" of the 1950s.[5] In the quintet, Collette played the reeds (tenor and alto saxophones, the flute and clarinet).[4]

In 1957, the group (accompanied by flutist Paul Horn and guitarist John Pisano) made a cameo appearance in the Burt Lancaster-Tony Curtis film, "Sweet Smell of Success".[6] Later that year, Collette collaborated with Horn in his own flutist ensemble, the "Swinging Shepherds", a four-flute-lineup.[7]

In November 1958, Langston Hughes read poems to accompaniment by Collette and his band at the Screen Directors Theatre in Los Angeles.[8] In 1960, Collette and his band gave a performance in the Newport Jazz Festival documentary "Jazz on a Summer's Day", alongside flutist Eric Dolphy.[6]

In 1996, when the Library of Congress commissioned Collette to write and perform a special big-band concert to highlight his long career, he brought together some old collaborators to perform with him, including Chico Hamilton.[4]

Collette died in Los Angeles of heart failure at the age of 89.[9]

Collette joined the faculty at California State University, Pomona campus in 1992 where he was a conductor of the jazz and combo band. Collette held important faculty positions at CSULA, CSULB, California State University Dominguez Hills, and Loyola Marymount University.

He was designated a Los Angeles Living Cultural Treasure by the city of Los Angeles in the late 1990s, and, in the early 2000s, he was composing music for JazzAmerica, a band of teen jazz virtuosos he co-founded.[10]

Collette's career and accomplishments were rewarded by the Los Angeles Jazz Society where he received a special commendation, and with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Federation of Musicians. Local 47, for his musical contributions spanning four decades. Collette's legacy lives on through the JazzAmerica program, a non-profit organization which he co-founded in 1994 that aims at bringing jazz into classrooms in middle school and high schools in the greater Los Angeles area tuition-free.

• Jazz Generations: A Life in American Music and Society by Buddy Collette with Steven Iosardi (2000)

• Interview at UCLA Oral History Project Archived June 7, 2020, at the Wayback Machine
• Buddy Collette – NAMM Oral History Library (2008)