All Discussions Tagged 'arranger' - Pittsburgh Jazz Network2024-03-28T09:38:10Zhttps://jazzburgher.ning.com/group/obituaries/forum/topic/listForTag?tag=arranger&feed=yes&xn_auth=noJeannette native Slide Hampton, eminent jazz trombonist, composer and arranger, dies at 89tag:jazzburgher.ning.com,2021-11-24:1992552:Topic:5533672021-11-24T21:20:57.815ZDr. Nelson Harrisonhttps://jazzburgher.ning.com/profile/NelsonHarrison
<div class="pgevoke-story-toparea-cutout clearfix"><div class="pgevoke-story-toparea-cutout-image"><div class="pgevoke-story-toparea-cutout-gallerybutton"><div class="pgevoke-story-toparea-cutout-gallerybutton-inner"><div class="pgevoke-story-toparea-cutout-gallerybutton-circle"><span style="font-size: 2em;">Jeannette native Slide Hampton, eminent jazz trombonist, composer and arranger, dies at 89…</span></div>
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<div class="pgevoke-story-byline-right"><span> </span><div class="pgevoke-story-byline-date">NOV 23, 2021</div>
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<div class="pgevoke-contentarea-body"><div class="pgevoke-contentarea-body-inner pgevoke-story-bodytext-inner"><div class="pgevoke-contentarea-body-text"><p>Legendary jazz trombonist and bandleader Slide Hampton walked onstage at the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild in Pittsburgh on the night of Dec. 3 and shared a bit of advice with the music fans in attendance. </p>
<p>"Hang onto your hats," he smiled. </p>
<p>With that, the 13-piece JazzMasters big band was off on a high-flying mission — complete with thrills and chills but nary a spill — to reimagine the music of Dizzy Gillespie.</p>
<p>It was only one of the many nights Mr. Hampton, a native of Jeannette, brought his wildly imaginative riffs, interludes and shout choruses, along with his deft handling of quirky rhythms and occasional dissonance to Pittsburgh over the years.</p>
<p>A virtuoso jazz trombonist and as a Grammy Award-winning composer and musical arranger, Mr. Hampton died Thursday at his home in Orange, N.J. He was 89.</p>
<p>Mr. Hampton spent his entire life in music, beginning as a singer and dancer with a family band that included his parents and most of his 11 brothers and sisters after they moved to Indianapolis. He began playing the trombone at age 12.</p>
<p>Even though he was right-handed, he played the trombone left-handed because the first trombone he received as a child was configured that way. His sisters gave him the nickname of Slide.</p>
<p>“I was hearing music every day from the time that I was born,” he said in a 2007 interview with the National Endowment for the Arts, “so I knew right away that my life would be in music.”</p>
<p>The Hampton family band traveled throughout the Midwest and appeared at New York’s Carnegie Hall, Apollo Theater and Savoy Ballroom in the 1940s. Inspired by the bebop generation of jazz musicians, including trumpeter Gillespie and trombonist J.J. Johnson, who was also from Indianapolis, Mr. Hampton embarked on an independent musical career in his late teens.</p>
<p>Although he began playing the trombone begrudgingly — “I only did it because the band needed a trombone, and I was the youngest,” he said — Mr. Hampton was soon praised for his mellow tone and for his dexterity on the unwieldy instrument, which requires the use of a long metal slide to change notes.</p>
<p>“It has to use the beauty of its sound to make a point,” he told the New York Times in 1982. “Playing a trombone makes you realize that you’re going to have to depend on other people.”</p>
<p>Musicians recognized Mr. Hampton’s abilities as a trombonist, composer and arranger, and he worked for many notable bandleaders in the 1950s and early 1960s, including Lionel Hampton (no relation), Maynard Ferguson, Art Blakey, Max Roach and Gillespie. He also began to lead his own groups in clubs and recording studios.</p>
<p>In 1968, after touring Europe as a member of Woody Herman’s band, Mr. Hampton decided to stay. He lived in Paris for several years, working with European and expatriate American musicians and absorbing other styles of music, including Brazilian bossa nova and the classics.</p>
<p>“There is no way I’m going to tell you I don’t have a lot to learn from classical music,” he told the Houston Chronicle in 1992. “I listen to all the classical composers, from Bach and Beethoven to Stravinsky and Bartok. I’m looking ‘inside’ the music, to the musical and spiritual aspects.”</p>
<p>Mr. Hampton returned to the United States in 1977 with a renewed sense of purpose. He organized groups that emphasized the rich, brassy sound of the trombone, with as many as 14 trombones playing at a time. He developed a flair for performing and arranging Brazilian music.</p>
<p>He rejoined Gillespie’s band, serving as musical director, garnered critical acclaim for his own recordings and became widely lauded as one of the foremost trombonists of his time. Jazz critic Gary Giddins, writing in the Village Voice in 1990, called Mr. Hampton “perhaps the most underrated bebop virtuoso soloist alive.”</p>
<p>He practiced the trombone four to five hours a day, all the while continuing to write original compositions and musical arrangements.</p>
<p>In an interview with the Post-Gazette before that 1993 show, Mr. Hampton said his goal was to interpret the music of his predecessors, not repeat it.</p>
<p>"I think the thing that's important as far as the music that came before is to have an influence from that music that's obvious in what you do," he said. “But just an influence. Not a copy. Their purpose in making the music was so that it would influence people after them to do something of their own."</p>
<p>He found that influence listening to the big bands.</p>
<p>Big bands produce "a very high level of energy," he said. "You feel it physically. You actually feel it. It's not just a matter of listening to it. And that's actually what we want to achieve with this ensemble.”</p>
<p>In September 2000, he was back at in town at a North Side studio recording a Christmas album with legendary Nancy Wilson and members of the Dizzy Gillespie Alumni All-Star Band, which also performed shows at the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild.</p>
<p>In 2001, he participated in an open jam session marking the first jazz festival at Nemacolin Woodlands Resort in Laurel Highlands.</p>
<p>And in 2002, he was among the class inducted into the Pittsburgh Jazz Society's Jazz Hall of Fame.</p>
<p>Mr. Hampton won his first Grammy for his arrangement of Duke Ellington’s “Cotton Tail” on singer Dee Dee Bridgewater’s 1997 album, “Dear Ella.” He won another Grammy, for best instrumental composition, for “Past Present & Future,” an original work featured on a 2004 recording by the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra.</p>
<p>“All my stuff is by inspiration, not by theory or even experience,” Mr. Hampton told Newark’s Star-Ledger newspaper in 2005. “I just write what I’m inspired to write, let it go wherever it goes.”</p>
<p>Locksley Wellington Hampton was born April 21, 1932. He was in his early teens when his family band played at Carnegie Hall.</p>
<p>Over the years, Mr. Hampton taught at several colleges, including Harvard, the University of Massachusetts and DePaul University in Chicago. During the early 1990s, he conducted master classes at Slippery Rock University and Duquesne University.</p>
<p>He became a mentor to countless younger musicians, especially trombonists. In 2005, he was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, the country’s highest official honor for jazz musicians.</p>
<p>His wife of more than 50 years, the former Althea Gardner, died in 2006. A son, Gregory Hampton, died in 2019. Survivors include three children, Lamont Hampton of Nashville, Locksley Hampton of Wilmington, N.C., and Jacquelyn Hampton of Atlanta; five grandchildren; and numerous great-grandchildren.</p>
<p class="pgevoke-story-endofstorydate">First Published November 23, 2021, 11:35pm</p>
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</div> Howard Johnson, 79, Dies; Elevated the Tuba in Jazz and Beyondtag:jazzburgher.ning.com,2021-01-19:1992552:Topic:5266812021-01-19T13:48:27.935ZDr. Nelson Harrisonhttps://jazzburgher.ning.com/profile/NelsonHarrison
<div><div class="css-1vkm6nb ehdk2mb0"><h1 class="css-rsa88z e1h9rw200" id="link-249dc654">Howard Johnson, 79, Dies; Elevated the Tuba in Jazz and Beyond</h1>
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<p class="css-w6ymp8 e1wiw3jv0" id="article-summary">He helped to find a new role for a notoriously cumbersome instrument in a wide range of musical settings, including the “Saturday Night Live” band.…</p>
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<div><div class="css-1vkm6nb ehdk2mb0"><h1 id="link-249dc654" class="css-rsa88z e1h9rw200">Howard Johnson, 79, Dies; Elevated the Tuba in Jazz and Beyond</h1>
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<p id="article-summary" class="css-w6ymp8 e1wiw3jv0">He helped to find a new role for a notoriously cumbersome instrument in a wide range of musical settings, including the “Saturday Night Live” band.</p>
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<div class="css-1a48zt4 ehw59r15"><div class="css-bsn42l"><img alt="Howard Johnson in concert in Amsterdam in 1986. One critic called him &ldquo;the figure most responsible for the tuba&rsquo;s current stature as a full-fledged jazz voice.&rdquo;" class="css-11cwn6f" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/01/15/obituaries/Johnson-01/merlin_182301369_0784b3b3-c26f-425c-844a-5bde60cdb0c9-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale"/></div>
<span class="css-16f3y1r e13ogyst0">Howard Johnson in concert in Amsterdam in 1986. One critic called him “the figure most responsible for the tuba’s current stature as a full-fledged jazz voice.”</span><span class="css-cnj6d5 e1z0qqy90"><span class="css-1ly73wi e1tej78p0">Credit...</span><span>Frans Schellekens/Redferns</span></span><br/></div>
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<div class="css-18e8msd"><div class="css-vp77d3 epjyd6m0"><div class="css-hus3qt ey68jwv0"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/giovanni-russonello" class="css-uwwqev"><img alt="Giovanni Russonello" title="Giovanni Russonello" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/04/03/multimedia/author-giovanni-russonello/author-giovanni-russonello-thumbLarge.png" class="css-1rjmmt7 ey68jwv2"/></a></div>
<div class="css-1baulvz"><p class="css-4z5zii e1jsehar1"><span class="byline-prefix">By<span> </span></span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/giovanni-russonello" class="css-brehiz e1jsehar0"><span class="css-1baulvz last-byline">Giovanni Russonello</span></a></p>
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<li class="css-ccw2r3 epjyd6m1"><span class="css-1sbuyqj e16638kd3">Jan. 14, 2021</span></li>
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<div class="css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">Howard Johnson, who set a new standard by expanding the tuba’s known capacities in jazz, and who moonlighted as a multi-instrumentalist and arranger for some of the most popular acts in rock and pop, died on Monday at his home in Harlem. He was 79.</p>
<p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">His death was announced by his publicist, Jim Eigo. He did not specify a cause but said that Mr. Johnson had been ill for a long time.</p>
<p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">Fluent and graceful across an enormous range on one of the most cumbersome members of the brass family, Mr. Johnson found his way into almost every kind of scenario — outside of classical music — where you might possibly expect to find the tuba, and plenty where you wouldn’t.</p>
<p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">His career spanned hundreds of albums and thousands of gigs. He played on many of the major jazz recordings of the 1960s and ’70s, by musicians like Charles Mingus, McCoy Tyner, Carla Bley and Charlie Haden; contributed arrangements and horn parts for rock stars like John Lennon and Taj Mahal; and performed as an original member of the “Saturday Night Live” band.</p>
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<div class="css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">“I could find myself in almost anybody’s record collection,” he said in<span> </span><a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heh3YsqF0cQ" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">an interview</a><span> </span>in 2015 for the online documentary series “Liner Note Legends.”</p>
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<p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">And for more than 50 years, Mr. Johnson led ensembles with tubas on the front lines — first Substructure, then Gravity, which became his signature solo achievement. Consisting of a half-dozen tubas and a rhythm section, Gravity aimed, he said, to elevate the public’s estimation of the instrument.</p>
<p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">From the 1930s, when traditional New Orleans music fell out of favor in jazz, the tuba had been relegated to the sidelines; the upright bass had almost entirely replaced it. Mr. Johnson helped to find it a new role, by expanding its range upward and by playing so lyrically. In recent years<span> </span><a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://jazztimes.com/features/profiles/tuba-in-the-house/" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">critics have hailed</a><span> </span>a broader renaissance for the tuba in jazz, building on the foundation that Mr. Johnson laid.</p>
<p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">Writing in The New York Times in 2006, the critic Nate Chinen<span> </span><a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/04/arts/music/04jazz.html" title="">called Mr. Johnson</a><span> </span>“the figure most responsible for the tuba’s current stature as a full-fledged jazz voice.”</p>
<p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">Howard Lewis Johnson was born on Aug. 7, 1941, in Montgomery, Ala., and raised in Massillon, Ohio, outside Canton. His father, Hammie Johnson Jr., worked in a steel mill, and his mother, Peggy (Lewis) Johnson, was a hairdresser. They weren’t musicians, but they kept the radio on at all times, usually tuned to gospel, R&B, jazz or country.</p>
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<div class="css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">It was on boyhood visits to his uncle’s house that Howard first became enchanted with live music. “He lived over a juke joint, and if I spent the night and slept on the floor, I could hear the bass line very well,” he remembered in<span> </span><a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="http://www.rollmagazine.com/howard-johnson%E2%80%99s-hornspiration-theres-always-room-for-something-new/" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">a 2017 interview</a><span> </span>with Roll magazine. “And that was very satisfactory.”</p>
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<p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">A gifted student, he learned to read before he was 4 and skipped a grade in school. His first instrument was the baritone saxophone; after receiving just two lessons from his junior high school band teacher, he taught himself the rest. A year later, he learned the tuba entirely by watching other players’ fingerings in band rehearsals. He would wait until everyone had left the practice room, then tiptoe over to the tuba and try out what he had seen.</p>
<p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">In the high school band, he thrived on friendly competition with his fellow tuba players. Many of them were receiving private lessons, but left to his own devices Mr. Johnson blew by them, stretching the instrument far past its normal range and maintaining a graceful articulation throughout.</p>
<p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">“I thought I was playing catch-up — that all the stuff that I taught myself to do, the others could already do it,” he told Roll. “The ones who were the best in the section were kind of like role models: I wanted to play like them someday. But by the end of that school year, I could play much better than they could. And I could do a lot of other things.”</p>
<p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">After high school, Mr. Johnson spent three years in the Navy, playing baritone sax in a military band. While stationed in Boston, he met the drummer Tony Williams, a teenage phenom who would soon be hired by Miles Davis, and fell in with other young jazz musicians there. After being discharged, he moved briefly to Chicago, thinking it would be a good place to hone his chops before eventually moving to New York. At a John Coltrane concert one night, he met the prominent multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy, a member of Coltrane’s band. When he mentioned that his range was as great on the tuba as it was on the baritone, Dolphy urged him to move to New York right away.</p>
<p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">“He said, ‘If you can do half of what you say you can do, you shouldn’t be waiting two years here; I think you’re needed in New York now,’” Mr. Johnson recalled. “So I thought, ‘It’s February, maybe I should go to New York in August.’ I thought about it some more, and I left six days later.”</p>
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<div class="css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">Mr. Johnson also learned to play the bass clarinet, euphonium, fluegelhorn and electric bass as well as the pennywhistle, which he particularly loved as a foil to the tuba in terms of both pitch and portability. Characteristically, he took this unlikely instrument not as a novelty but seriously, developing a lightweight, even-toned,<span> </span><a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dlr3yeLiq7A&list=OLAK5uy_m-vAgXu64gwPzvN7ITLc7WwrHdxQlHIho&index=6" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">exuberant sound</a><span> </span>on it.</p>
<p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">On arriving in New York, he soon found work with the saxophonist Hank Crawford, the bassist Charles Mingus and many others. He began a two-decade affiliation with the composer and arranger Gil Evans, sometimes contributing arrangements to his orchestra.</p>
<p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">In 1970, after being connected through a business associate, Mr. Johnson persuaded the blues and rock singer Taj Mahal to allow him to write arrangements of Mr. Mahal’s songs that would include a suite of tubas, and then to take them on the road. Mr. Johnson and three other tuba players are heard on “The Real Thing,” Mr. Mahal’s 1971 live album. He would continue to work with Mr. Mahal off and on.</p>
<p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">Mr. Johnson was soon getting work from other rock musicians. He led the horn section for the Band in the 1970s, including on the group’s farewell performance, captured in Martin Scorsese’s famed concert film “The Last Waltz.” He continued working with Levon Helm, the Band’s drummer and singer, for decades.</p>
<p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">But Mr. Johnson’s greatest public exposure came on television. In 1975 he joined the house band for a new late-night comedy show then called “NBC’s Saturday Night.” He remained in the ensemble for five years, helping to shape its rock-fusion sound and making an appearance in some of the show’s most fondly remembered musical sketches.</p>
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<div class="css-1a48zt4 ehw59r15"><div class="css-1xdhyk6 erfvjey0"><span class="css-1ly73wi e1tej78p0">Image</span><img alt="Mr. Johnson with his band Gravity on a 1978 episode of &ldquo;Saturday Night Live.&rdquo; He was also an original member of the show&rsquo;s house band." class="css-1m50asq" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/01/15/obituaries/Johnson-SNL/merlin_182303016_7b9f2a42-2e0b-46c6-bbd3-890cf60db4aa-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale"/></div>
<span class="css-16f3y1r e13ogyst0">Mr. Johnson with his band Gravity on a 1978 episode of “Saturday Night Live.” He was also an original member of the show’s house band.</span><span class="css-cnj6d5 e1z0qqy90"><span class="css-1ly73wi e1tej78p0">Credit...</span><span>NBC/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images</span></span><br/></div>
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<div class="css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">Mr. Johnson is survived by his daughter, the vocalist and songwriter Nedra Johnson; two sisters, Teri Nichols and Connie Armstrong; and his longtime partner, Nancy Olewine. His son, the musician and artist David Johnson, died in 2011.</p>
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<div class="css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">With Gravity, which he led from the 1970s until the end of his life, Mr. Johnson poured the sum of his musical experiences into arrangements for six tubas and a rhythm section that alternated between acoustic and electric.<span> </span><a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.nytimes.com/1977/10/11/archives/tubas-are-the-law-of-gravity.html" title="">Reviewing a Gravity performance</a><span> </span>in 1977 for The Times, Robert Palmer lauded the group’s “fresh sound” and said he was disarmed by its “sunny good humor and affection for the jazz‐and‐blues tradition.”</p>
<p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">Mr. Palmer made particular note of Mr. Johnson’s versatility: “Whether he is improvising on tuba, which he plays in a roaring and whooping style with remarkable facility, or on the baritone saxophone, which he wields with fluent authority and a dark, smoking tone, he combines New Orleans phrasing, avant‐garde shrieks, blues riffing and multi‐noted bebop flurries in a consistently exciting and wildly original style.”</p>
<p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">In the 1990s, well into middle age, Mr. Johnson signed with Verve Records and released three albums with Gravity, full of blues-battered, elegantly arranged music: “Arrival: A Pharoah Sanders Tribute” (1994), “Gravity!!!” (1995) and “Right Now!” (1998). The last album featured Mr. Mahal singing roisterous straight-ahead jazz on some tracks.</p>
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<span class="css-16f3y1r e13ogyst0">Mr. Johnson in 2008. Despite health problems, he remained active until nearly the end of his life.</span><span class="css-cnj6d5 e1z0qqy90"><span class="css-1ly73wi e1tej78p0">Credit...</span><span>Michael Jackson</span></span><br/></div>
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<div class="css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">Mr. Johnson remained active until nearly the end of his life, despite a number of health setbacks. In 2017, he and Gravity released a quietly triumphant last album, “Testimony,” with some original members still in the band. His daughter also makes an appearance on the album.</p>
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<div class="css-1fanzo5 StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">In 2008, the instrument maker Meinl Weston unveiled the HoJo Gravity Series tuba, designed for players with Mr. Johnson’s wide range.</p>
<p class="css-axufdj evys1bk0">“This is something I hear every time: ‘I didn’t know a tuba could do that!’” Mr. Johnson said in<span> </span><a class="css-1g7m0tk" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-hlfpefMck" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">a 2019 interview</a><span> </span>with the Fillius Jazz Archive at Hamilton College in upstate New York. “Well, that means I haven’t been doing my job, because I’ve been doing it since 1962, and people still don’t know.”</p>
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<div class="css-13ldwoe">A version of this article appears in print on<span> </span><span class="css-1dmwf73">Jan. 15, 2021</span>, Section<span> </span>A, Page<span> </span>24<span> </span>of the New York edition<span> </span>with the headline:<span> </span>Howard Johnson, 79, Who Elevated the Mighty Tuba in Jazz<span>. <a href="http://www.nytreprints.com/">Order Reprints</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper">Today’s Paper</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=48JQY">Subscribe</a></span></div>
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