Bob Wilber born 15 March 1928

Born in New York, he was the younger child of Allen Wilber, an academic publisher. His mother, Mary, died when he was a year old, and on his father’s remarriage four years later the family moved out to the Westchester suburb of Scarsdale. Allen Wilber was a jazz fan who planted inspiration in his three-year-old son’s mind with his record of Duke Ellington’s Mood Indigo on the phonograph. The boy also learned about swing bands such as Benny Goodman’s and Glenn Miller’s, but he preferred the earthier, bluesier music of the early New Orleans players, and Bechet’s famous New Orleans Feetwarmers group most of all. Wilber attended Ellington’s wartime Carnegie Hall concert with his father in 1943, and in his autobiography, Music Was Not Enough, recalled he admired the orchestra’s immaculate presentation and dress almost as much as its music. 

Wilber learned piano at first, and began studying the clarinet from the age of 13. A shy child, he soon discovered his clarinet could be a passport when his contemporaries started dubbing him “Kid Wilber”, and he began jamming regularly with fellow enthusiasts. On his high-school graduation in 1945, Wilber respected his parents’ wishes that he should study at a formal institution, but dropped out of the Eastman School of Music, Rochester, in upstate New York, after one term, playing increasingly regularly at Jimmy Ryan’s with friends who shared his traditionalist enthusiasms. They included the fine boogie and Dixieland pianist Dick Wellstood – and he was introduced by a fellow-musician, Mezz Mezzrow, to Bechet. 

Wilber & Bechet

The 17-year-old Wilber took a day job as a stock clerk and hung out on 52nd Street at night, and became one of Bechet’s favourite pupils. Three years later, Bechet sent Wilber and his young Wildcats group to the 1948 Nice jazz festival to represent his music on the same bill as Louis Armstrong’s All-Stars, securing Wilber’s reputation as a standard-bearer of the emerging “trad-jazz” movement, mirrored in Britain by Ken Colyer, Humphrey Lyttelton and Chris Barber. While still in his 20s, Wilber worked with a raft of veterans including the cornetists Muggsy Spanier and Wild Bill Davison, the Armstrong drummer Baby Dodds, and the influential stride-piano master James P Johnson. 

During the Korean war he was drafted into the US army, and between 1952 and 1954 played in an army band, adding the tenor saxophone to his resources. After his discharge, he took lessons with the pianist Lennie Tristano and Tristano’s saxophone protege Lee Konitz, to investigate how a modern jazz map might be drawn that could be understood by travellers from both bebop and Dixieland/swing.  Wilber and a sextet of like-minded participants formed a cooperative called The Six in the mid-1950s, a hybrid of Dixieland and bop. Later in the 1950s, Wilber worked with Bechet again, with the Bix Beiderbecke-influenced cornetist Bobby Hackett in 1957, and with Goodman, touring and recording in 1958-59. He also worked with the Chicago jazz legend Eddie Condon. 

He adopted a curved-bell soprano saxophone in the 1960s, which he felt gave him a richer low-register tone, and in 1968 became a founder member of the World’s Greatest Jazz Band, a globetrotting ensemble devoted to Dixieland and led by the trumpeter Yank Lawson and bassist Bob Haggart. 

Wilber engaged WGJB members, including Lawson and the tenorist Bud Freeman, for his own 1969 tribute to a personal idol when he recorded The Music of Hoagy Carmichael. For much of the 1970s he teamed up with his fellow classical/jazz virtuoso Kenny Davern in a new group, the entertaining and widely popular Soprano Summit. Wilber was active in the New York Jazz repertory company, which toured the USSR in 1975. 

After his divorce from the actor Shirley Rickards, Wilber married the English jazz and cabaret singer Joanne “Pug” Horton in 1976. They and a Scandinavian group recorded a fine Wilber-arranged tribute to his clarinet inspiration Goodman (with Swingin’ for the King in 1979) and from 1980 to 1984 the couple collaborated on a new Bechet tribute, Bechet Legacy. In 1984 Wilber and Horton founded the Bodeswell label to record their own work. 

He recorded extensively into the 1990s with the cream of younger mainstream players, including the saxophonist Harry Allen and guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, vividly recovering some neglected Coleman Hawkins originals on his 1994 Hawkins tribute, Bean. He shone as principal soloist with France’s Tuxedo Big Band in 1999, and in 2002 in immaculate remakes of Fletcher Henderson scores for the 1930s Goodman orchestra. In 2008 he travelled worldwide to perform concerts marking his 80th birthday. In 2009 he played at the Lincoln Center concert in honour of Goodman’s centennial. 

He died at his home in Chipping, Campden, England. on August 4, 2019  at the age of 91.

(Edited from John Fordham obit @ The Guardian & Wikipedia)