Booker Little
1938 — 1961 · Memphis-born jazz trumpeter and composer; Out Front and the Five Spot nights with Eric Dolphy; gone at twenty-three
Booker Little Jr. was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on the second of April 1938, to a musical house — his father a Pullman porter who played trombone, his mother a church organist. At Manassas High School he came up inside a storied circle that included George Coleman, Frank Strozier, and Phineas Newborn Jr., and after beginnings on trombone and clarinet he took up the trumpet in his early teens.
At sixteen he entered the Chicago Conservatory, taking his bachelor's degree in trumpet in June 1958, and that same month flew to join Max Roach's group — succeeding Kenny Dorham in the chair that carried Clifford Brown's lineage. He worked with Roach in 1958 and again from 1960, and his horn is on We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, recorded in the late summer of 1960.
The last year held his testament. Out Front, recorded in the spring of 1961 with Eric Dolphy and Max Roach, set down a language of controlled dissonance decades ahead of its hour; that July at the Five Spot, one recorded night with Dolphy became three albums; and his final sessions, issued as Booker Little and Friend, were cut weeks before the end. Critics have long called him the brightest heir of Clifford Brown's line.
He died in New York of complications of uremia on the fifth of October 1961, twenty-three years old. Honored be Booker Little, who said everything early, because he had to.
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