This Week in Texas Music History, Texas jazz echoes off the walls of one of the world’s premier art museums.
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On February 9, 1961, Wichita Falls-born alto saxophonist and flutist Leo Wright appeared with Dizzy Gillespie’s quintet in performance at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Bolstered by the addition of Wright as well as Lalo Schifrin on piano, Gillespie led a reinvigorated quintet in the alternative performance space of MOMA, resulting in a live record on Verve entitled An Electrifying Evening with the Dizzy Gillespie Quintet. Wright filled the sax and flute chair in Gillespie’s group that had once been held by James Moody and Les Spann, and he would make the most of this collaboration with the trumpet pioneer.
The live recording features three Gillespie compositions—“Kush,” with its repetitive, hypnotic bass figure and Wright’s explosive solo; a brisk take on “Salt Peanuts”; and a complex rhythmic workout on “Night in Tunisia.” The quintet also riffed on Duke Ellington’s “The Mooche,” which thrives on the rapport of drummer Chuck Lambkin and bassist Bob Cunningham and finds Wright providing another elegant yet boisterous solo.
Prior to his stint with Gillespie, Leo Wright had worked with Charles Mingus’s Jazz Workshop in the late 1950s. In 1960 he paired with another Texan from the Mingus band, trumpeter Richard Williams from Galveston, on Williams’s LP New Horn in Town. Williams also appeared on Wright’s Blues Shout, one of Wright’s three records on Atlantic that, along with An Electrifying Evening, stand out as highlights of his recorded work.
Wright also worked with the Texas tenor player Booker Ervin in the 1960s and with Dallas pianist Red Garland in the 1970s. Though Wright worked and lived in Europe for much of his later life, his connection with fellow Lone Star State musicians remained a touchstone throughout his career.
Sources:
Dave Oliphant in Laurie E. Jasinski, Gary Hartman, Casey Monahan, and Ann T. Smith, eds. The Handbook of Texas Music. Second Edition. Denton, TX: Texas State Historical Association, 2012.
Dave Oliphant. Texan Jazz. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.
Alyn Shipton. Groovin’ High: The Life of Dizzy Gillespie, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
