Norman Simmons born 6 October 1929

Sarney Norman Simmons was born in Chicago. As a child he initially learned to play music on his family’s upright player piano; soon he was picking out songs by ear. His most formative influence was Duke Ellington, whom he admired both as a pianist and a composer and arranger. His own output always carried a similar sense of balance, with careful attunement to the personalities of his musical partners. While attending Wendell Phillips Academy High School, Simmons excelled in visual arts as well. Simmons enrolled at the Chicago School of Music at 16. By 19 he had formed his own band. 

During a career spanning more than 65 years, Simmons specialized in a precise and nuanced style at the piano, with a keen sense of dynamic variation and harmonic colour. For the first half of the 1950s he was a house pianist at the Beehive Lounge in Chicago, backing travelling greats like Wardell Gray and Lester Young. He was part of the band that played with bebop titan Charlie Parker in Feb. 1955, during Parker's final appearance in Chicago.

The strength of Simmons' instincts as an arranger and accompanist, especially but not exclusively behind vocalists, brought him into a rare stratum of musical achievement, but also played a likely role in his chronic undervaluing as a bandleader. In 1966, his arrangement for Ramsey Lewis' hit of "Wade in the Water" became a large commercial success. 

He released fewer than a dozen albums, including several on his own Milljac label. His last was In Private, a refined and easygoing trio album made for the Savant label in 2004. His earliest was the self-titled Norman Simmons Trio, which the Argo label released in 1956;

But Simmons also credited Jamal as one of his piano influences, along with Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington and Hank Jones. And like Jones, who devoted a substantial part of his career to backing Ella Fitzgerald, Simmons took pride in his intuition as a singer’s pianist  with a skill that kept him in high demand and steady employ for years. It was a singer, Ernestine Anderson, who convinced him to leave Chicago for New York, near the close of the '50s. 

Carmen McRae relied on his perceptive support throughout the 1960s and early ’70s, featuring him on albums including Sings Lover Man and Other Billie Holiday Classics and Woman Talk. The depth of their simpatico is perfectly clear if you can listen to the 1962 performance of Thelonious Monk’s “‘Round Midnight,” taped for Ralph Gleason’s Jazz Casual show. 

Simmons also found collaborative success with, among others, Betty Carter and Anita O'Day in the 1970s; Helen Humes and Joe Williams in the '80s; Dakota Staton and Etta Jones in the '90s; and Carol Sloane and Mark Murphy in the '00s, where he remained a busy freelancer. 

In his later years he taught extensively, with Jazzmobile and at William Paterson and the New School  in New Jersey, the state in which he was resident for more than half a century. He was also deeply involved with Jazz House Kids, whose founder and president, Melissa Walker, is another of the singers to have studied and recorded with him. His involvement with Jazz House Kids never flagged, Walker says. “At the end of a recent summer workshop, the applause for him was this resounding standing ovation,” she recalls. “He started to tear up, and he spoke to all of the students at Montclair State University and said, ‘You don’t understand. This music has been my life." 

Simmons died from multiple myeloma on May 13, 2021 in Mesa, Arizona. He was 91. 

(Edited mainly from an article by Nate Chinen @ WBGO)