Collection: Chico Hamilton

Chico Hamilton grew up in Los Angeles at a remarkable moment in that city's jazz history. His high school band at Jefferson High included Charles Mingus, Dexter Gordon, Illinois Jacquet and Buddy Collette before any of them had made a record. After touring with Lionel Hampton at nineteen and army service from 1942 to 1946, he spent six years as Lena Horne's drummer, which put him on a first-name basis with everyone in American entertainment but kept him off the jazz bandstand. The 1952 break in Horne's European touring schedule freed him to join the Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker, the pianoless chamber group whose light, airy sound caught a mood that nobody had quite named yet. He recorded with Mulligan's group for Pacific Jazz until 1955, then formed his own quintet, with cello, flute and reeds, guitar, bass and drums, an instrumentation with no precedent in jazz. The quintet appeared in the Alexander Mackendrick film "Sweet Smell of Success" (1957), with a score written by Hamilton and Elmer Bernstein, and at the Newport Jazz Festival documented in "Jazz on a Summer's Day" (1958). He assembled a second great quintet in 1962, this time with Charles Lloyd on tenor saxophone and flute, Gabor Szabo on guitar, George Bohanon on trombone and Albert Stinson on bass, a group that pointed toward the jazz-rock that was coming. Later editions of the quintet brought in Ron Carter, Larry Coryell and Arthur Blythe. He moved to New York in 1966, wrote film and television music, helped found the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, and continued leading bands into his nineties. He died in New York on 25 November 2013, aged 92.