James Moody (March 26, 1925 – December 9, 2010) was an American jazz saxophone and flute player and very occasional vocalist, playing predominantly in the bebop and hard bop styles. The annual James Moody Jazz Festival is held in Newark, New Jersey.
He was born in Savannah, Georgia, and raised by his (single) mother, Ruby Hann Moody Watters. Born partially deaf, he was deemed to have learning difficulties at school, and his mother moved him to Newark, New Jersey, where he attended the Bruce Street school for deaf children, and then Newark's Arts high school. Encouraged by an uncle who gave him a saxophone, a 16-year-old Moody began to learn the alto, and then the tenor sax.
Moody joined the US Army Air Corps in 1943 and played in the "negro band" at the segregated Greensboro Training Center. Following his discharge from the military in 1946, he played bebop with Dizzy Gillespie for two years. Moody later played with Gillespie in 1964, where his colleagues in the Gillespie group, pianist Kenny Barron and guitarist Les Spann, would be musical collaborators in the coming decades.
His first recordings as a bandleader were with James Moody and his Modernists in 1948, but he moved to Paris to stay with an uncle in an attempt to overcome alcoholism, and worked there in 1949 with the Miles Davis/Tadd Dameron quintet. In 1949, during a session with local players in Sweden, Moody recorded the improvisation on I'm in the Mood for Love, which was to become one of his signature achievements. The vocalist Eddie Jefferson put lyrics to the passage, and in 1952 King Pleasure turned the combination into the pop hit Moody's Mood for Love.
It wasn`t until he returned to the U.S. and toured with The Brook Benton Revue (with The James Moody Orchestra) that he became acquainted with music theory, crediting Tom Macintosh with explaining to him chord changes. Moody and his Orchestra performed for the eleventh famed Cavalcade of Jazz concert held at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles which was produced by Leon Hefflin, Sr. on July 24, 1955 and also featured Big Jay McNeely, Lionel Hampton and his Orchestra, The Medallions and The Penguins.
Though he continued to record distinctive projects that reaffirmed his stamp on the bebop tradition, Moody stayed with Gillespie's quintet until 1973, when he decided to give up touring and devote more time to his young daughter. Joining the Las Vegas Hilton orchestra, he found himself backing Bill Cosby, Ann-Margret, Liberace, Elvis Presley, the Osmonds, Lou Rawls and many others.
But after divorce from his first wife in 1979, he resumed his jazz career with appearances at the Nice jazz festival, the Sweet Basil club and the Kool jazz festival, both in New York, and Montreux in 1981, receiving a Grammy nomination for his solo on Manhattan Transfer's Vocalese album in 1985. By 1986 he was back as a jazz leader on a major label. He recorded the album Something Special for RCA/Novus that year, met his second wife, Linda, in 1987, married her in 1989 (with Gillespie as his best man), and settled in San Diego.
Through the 1990s, Moody also worked with Jackson, took up soprano saxophone, received a Grammy nomination for his singing Get That Booty, (a duet with Gillespie), worked with Lionel Hampton and Tito Puente, and saw a tribute to his remarkable flute improvisation with the publication in 1995 of James Moody's Greatest Transcribed Flute Solos. In 1997 he had a minor role in Clint Eastwood's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, received a Jazz Master award from the National Endowment for the Arts the following year, and in July 2000 was presented with an honorary doctorate from the Berklee College of Music, Boston, Massachusetts.
In 2005 Moody and his wife founded the James Moody scholarship endowment at Purchase College, New York, and, in early 2010, the James Moody scholarship fund for Newark youth in the town where he was raised. He kept the news of his inoperable pancreatic cancer from all but his innermost circle, and though he declined further treatment, he remained comfortable and typically genial through his last months, continuing to play his instruments at home on his stronger days.After palliative care, Moody died in San Diego, on December 9, 2010, from complications resulting from the cancer. Two months after his death, Moody won the Grammy Award posthumously for Best Jazz Instrumental Album for his album Moody 4B.
(Edited from Guardian obit by John Fordham
& Wikipedia)