William Marcel "Buddy" Collette (August 6, 1921 – September 19, 2010) was an American jazz flutist, saxophonist, and clarinetist. He was a founding member of the Chico Hamilton Quintet. He played with Frank Sinatra, Nat "King" Cole, Nelson Riddle, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Charlie Parker and Sarah Vaughan. His resume encompasses a virtual history of jazz and traditional pop music in the second half of the 20th century and has appeared on 325 known recording sessions.
Collette was the son of a piano-playing truck driver while his mother was a singer, active in the church. He was raised in Watts, then a multi-ethnic and semi-rural district, and attended Jordan high school, befriending Britt Woodman (who was later a trombonist with Duke Ellington) and Charles Mingus. He persuaded the 13-year-old Mingus to switch from cello to bass, telling him that he needed a bassist for his own amateur combo. The two became virtually inseparable, journeying into town to hang out with the top musicians of the day, entranced by their glamorous aura. "We could hear them on the radio and we could touch them – that was reality for us," Collette said.
He had piano lessons at first but took up the alto saxophone when he was 12, later becoming proficient on tenor and baritone saxophones and majoring on the flute. He first played with friends before starting bands of his own and working downtown with Al Adams. He subsequently joined Cee Pee Johnson's band, a successful professional outfit, appearing with Johnson in the 1941 RKO radio pictures movie Tom, Dick and Harry and playing radio dates. "I was on top of the world, making $65 a week," he said, recalling that his father's weekly pay was then $25. He was also active on the after-hours scene on Central Avenue, jamming with local heroes such as the tenor saxophonists Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray.
Collette auditioned for an all-black US navy band in 1941 and saw out his service in charge of both the jazz band and concert orchestra, based in San Francisco. He learned to conduct and studied with classical musicians, a process he continued after demobilisation in Los Angeles, under the GI bill. In 1946 he was a founder member of the Stars of Swing, with Woodman, Mingus and the tenorist Lucky Thompson, this all-star group seemingly destined for success until Thompson became unco-operative.
Anxious to expand his musical horizons, Collette joined the Humanist Symphony Orchestra, an integrated ensemble conducted by the likes of Elmer Bernstein and Fielding. It was partly due to the support of the white musicians involved that Collette and others felt emboldened to press for amalgamation. At first the officers of the black union branch, Local 767, resisted, happy to be the kingpins in their own territory, but Collette and others gradually gained committee positions and the merger became a reality.
For four decades Collette divided his time between recording studio and TV engagements – becoming the first African-American to perform in a television studio band, appearing on Groucho Marx's
Busy as an educator and a member of the faculty of a number of music schools, Collette was both teacher and mentor to the virtuoso reeds players Eric Dolphy and Charles Lloyd, both of whom eventually performed with Hamilton's group. Collette's autobiography was published in 2000 (there had been an earlier audio version) and he was an enthusiastic participant in Stephen Isoardi's Central Avenue Sounds oral history programme at UCLA. The Los Angeles author RJ Smith once described Collette as "an inspiration to everyone who meets him and a jazz historian's dream". Always accessible to journalists and researchers, he was unfailingly gracious and accommodating.
In 1996, when the Library of Congress commissioned Collette to write and perform a special big-band concert to highlight his long career, Collette brought together some of his old musical mates from Los Angeles, including Jackie Kelson, Britt Woodman and Chico Hamilton. Grammy-nominated, Collette was made a "living Los Angeles cultural treasure" in 1998. A stroke the same year left him disabled, but he continued to front his occasional big band and to act as a cheerleader for jazz in his native city.
He died of heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on September 19, 2010 after suffering breathing difficulties a day earlier. He was 89 years old.
(Edited mainly from an article by Peter Vacher @ The Guardian)
Here’a a clip of The Skymasters featuring Buddy Collette with All The Things You Are. Recorded at The North Sea Jazz at The Hague, Holland on July 16, 1989.