Tadd Dameron (February 21, 1917 – March 8, 1965) was an American jazz composer, arranger, and pianist.His full discography includes almost 300 recordings on which he appeared as a performer or the arranger.
Tadd Dameron was born Tadley Ewing Peake, the son of Isaiah and Ruth Peake in Cleveland, Ohio. When his mother later married Adolphus Dameron, Tadd and his brother, Caesar, legally changed their names to Dameron. Tadd grew up with music all around him, his mother first taught him to play piano, “not to read, but by memory.” But, it was Dameron’s older brother, Caesar, a saxophonist, who got his brother interested in jazz by listening to the records of the big bands of the 1930’s like Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, and the Casa Loma band that was playing unique arrangements at the time.
Cleveland jazz musician Andy Anderson said he first heard Dameron in the 1930s when Caesar brought his kid brother to a nightclub, and asked if the boy could sit in with the Snake White Band. Anderson said he was amazed when Tadd started playing piano. Anderson said, “He’s got ten fingers and all of them went down on the keys and all of them were on different notes. You didn’t expect to hear anything like that.” Before long, a Central High School friend, trumpeter Freddie Webster, persuaded Dameron to join his band playing in Cleveland. By 1938 at the age of 21, he began to write arrangements for a band that had been formed in Cleveland by James Jeter and Hayes Pillars. Originally, he spelled his name "Tad" until a numerologist told him that the addition of a second "d" would bring him luck.
In 1940, Dameron went on the road with bands led by Zack Whyte and Blanche Calloway and went to New York with Vito Musso’s band. When Musso’s band folded, he went to Kansas City where he composed and arranged for Harlan Leonard’s Rockets. Among his compositions for the Leonard band were “400 Swing,” “Rock and Ride” and “A La Bridges.” At this point in his life, Dameron was writing almost pure swing. There was no evidence yet of the modern sounds he would later pioneer.
He began to experiment with a few new ideas while writing arrangements for the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra. He was soaking up all the new bebop he was hearing and was beginning to use some of the new style in his big band arrangements. Dameron recalled, “I started writing in my own style when I got on Count Basie’s band.” In 1942, Trummy Young, a trombonist Dameron had known on the Lunceford band, introduced Tadd to Dizzy Gillespie.
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Milt Orent, Mary Lou Williams, Tadd & Dizzy
In the late 1940s, Dameron wrote arrangements for the big band of Dizzy Gillespie, who gave the première of his large-scale orchestral piece Soulphony at Carnegie Hall in 1948. Also in 1948, Dameron led his own group in New York, which included Fats Navarro; the following year he was at the Paris Jazz Fair with Miles Davis. Arranging for Gillespie’s big band, Dameron took the long phrases, powerful upbeat rhythms and chord changes of bop that Dizzy and Charlie Parker were pioneering, and used them in big band arrangements. Among his early compositions for Gillespie was “Good Bait.”
Dameron was honored by Esquire magazine in 1947 as “The Best New Jazz Arranger.” That same year, he formed his own small group that featured Fats Navarro, an amazing young trumpet player. They recorded some classic sides for Blue Note and Capitol. After Navarro died in 1950 at the age of 26, Dameron found another young trumpeter who would become a jazz legend. Dameron was preparing for a recording session and later recalled he had decided to hire a relative unknown, Clifford Brown. On June 11, 1953, they went into the recording studio in New York City. Clifford Brown’s trumpet soared brilliantly above the chanting nine-piece ensemble.
Tadd with Billy Eckstine
By 1956, only three years after Dameron had introduced him on record, Clifford Brown had become one of the most respected trumpeters in jazz. Dameron continued to write and arrange, including his best known composition, “If You Could See Me Now,” recorded by Sarah Vaughan and Dameron’s old boyhood buddy Freddie Webster. After recording a couple of albums as “Mating Call,” with John Coltrane in ’58, he spent much of 1959-61 in Federal Prison in Lexington KY, on narcotics charges. After he was released, Dameron wrote for Sonny Stitt, Blue Mitchell, Milt Jackson, and Benny Goodman.
Tadd Dameron’s last session recording was “The Magic Touch of Tadd Dameron,” (1962) but was sidelined by health problems; he had several heart attacks before dying of cancer in 1965, at the age of 48. He was buried at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.
(Edited
from bio by Leo T. Sullivan @ Jazz
Website & Dameron-Damron Family Association)