Teddy Charles, (April 13, 1928 – April 16, 2012) was an American jazz musician and composer, whose instruments were the vibraphone, piano, and drums. He was considered to be one of the great jazz vibraphonists and composers of all time.
Theodore Charles Cohen was born in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts. The youngest of four siblings, he was encouraged to play the piano and the drums by his brothers and went on to study classical percussion at the Juilliard School in New York in 1946. The city was the hub of the new bebop movement at the time, and Charles began socialising with Woody Herman's sax sidemen Stan Getz and Brew Moore, and with the drummer Ed Shaughnessy. He once found himself deputising on piano for Thelonious Monk in a Coleman Hawkins band.
Charles taught himself the vibraphone and studied composition with Hall Overton. His career took off during the last throes of the big-band era; he joined Benny Goodman's briefly bop-oriented group in 1948 and the bassist Chubby Jackson's big band in the following year. He also played in ensembles led by the bebop clarinettist Buddy DeFranco and in 1950 toured with Artie Shaw's orchestra.
From 1952, however, Charles became increasingly absorbed in his own music – with the help of Shaughnessy, Overton and the trumpeter Art Farmer. He also participated in the pioneering Jazz Composers Workshop bands formed by the bassist Charles Mingus, with whom he performed at the Newport jazz festival in 1955. He was a sideman and principal arranger on the exquisitely graceful ballad session Blue Moods (for Mingus's own Debut label) with Mingus, Elvin Jones and Miles Davis.
Charles was known as an innovator and one of only a handful of specialists to give the soft-toned vibraphone penetration and edge, while nurturing its subtle colours. In the 1950s, he composed highly original pieces drawing on bebop and 20th-century classical music, and collaborated with some of the most adventurous jazz composers and arrangers of the period. His acclaimed Teddy Charles Tentet album (1956) featured pieces by such "cool school" originals as the saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre and the trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, and by the theoretically advanced "modal jazz" innovator, George Russell.
Here's "Violetta" from above album
Charles led his own sessions for Prestige, Atlantic, Savoy, Jubilee, Bethlehem (where he produced around 40 records, mostly for other artists), and Warwick from 1951-1960. He also worked as a producer and session player, recording the fast-rising John Coltrane as part of the acclaimed New Directions series at Prestige. By 1960, Charles was also working as a salvage diver and chartering his sailboat. Scheduled to make a return visit to Newport with Mingus, he decided to sail to the gig, but got becalmed and missed it. He did, however, play at Mingus's alternative Newport festival of new music at the nearby Cliff Walk Manor in 1960, before abandoning jazz – and separating from his fashion-model wife, Diana – for a seagoing life for most of the next 20 years.
Charles left the icy streets of New York and headed for the balmy Caribbean, where he sailed the famous Golden Eagle, formerly owned by the DuPont family, and became one of the pioneering American charter boat skippers in the Caribbean. He later bought and restored the derelict Tiki, the famed 85-foot wooden schooner from the 1950s TV series “Adventures in Paradise,” and began running a charter service out of Martinique where he lived. In 1973, he bought and restored the Mary E., a 1906 swordfishing schooner.
Charles observed that there was plenty in common between the uncompromising demands of seafaring and the spontaneous challenges of jazz. Though he would jam with steel-band and calypso players in the Caribbean, it was not until he began playing the piano with a jazz clarinettist in Antigua in 1980 that the jazz bug returned and drove him to relocate his sailing business to the Bronx and Long Island in the summer months and resume work as a musician. Charles also became the owner of the famed Seven Seas Sailing Club of City Island.
He played intermittently with the pianist Harold Danko, with whom he recorded a lively 1988 session with a quartet at the Verona jazz festival. He lectured occasionally, played the prestigious Village Vanguard, Iridium and Smalls clubs in New York, reformed a tentet and celebrated Charlie Parker's music in March 2009 with another veteran, the pianist Hank Jones. Charles also held regular jazz sessions at his home – the ambience of which the New York Times described as "Melville meets Kerouac – everything seems to have come off a ship deck or a bebop bandstand".
His last recording was the 2011 collaboration with Wily Bo Walker and Danny Flam featuring the song "You Don't Know What Love Is". He died at the Peconic Bay Medical Center in Riverhead, due to complications of heart disease on April 16, 2012, aged 84.
(Edited
from obit by John Fordham @ The Guardian, Wikipedia, AllMusic & The Suffolk
Times)