Who does not know Louie Bellson, the great jazz drummer, the master musician who had the honor to perform with such greats as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman and his late wife, Pearl Bailey? Bellson has just passed away at 82.
The artist died on Saturday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles because he had multiple complications of his Parkinson disease. The tragedy followed a broken hip in November, according to his wife, Francine.
Bellson managed to develop a career which spanned over more than six decades. He is “responsible” for performing on more than 200 albums with jazz greats including Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, Oscar Peterson, Woody Herman, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong.
In 1994 he was given the honor of being designated as a "master of jazz" by the National Endowment for the Arts, which said he "ranks among the foremost big-band drummers of the swing and post-swing eras and is best known for his precise technique and the invention of two pedal-operated bass drums."
Bellson is the author of more than 1,000 compositions and arrangements in several genres, including jazz, swing, orchestral suites, symphonic works and ballets. He is also recognized for having published more than a dozen books on drums and percussion.
It was Bellson's sound that helped power the Duke Ellington Orchestra back into the public spotlight during the early '50s.
Bellson left Ellington in 1953, the same year he married Bailey, and has pretty much followed his own path since. He worked for years with his wife, led his own bands and occasionally joined tours with Ellington, Count Basie and Tommy Dorsey. Sometimes billed as "Last of the Great Swing Drummers," the ever-modest Bellson differs with that assessment on two counts.
His final recording, "Louie & Clark Expedition 2" was actually a wonderful collaboration with trumpeter Clark Terry and it was released last year.
Bellson was born in 1924 in Rock Falls, Illinois. He was the son of Italian immigrants whose family name was originally Balassoni. According to his statements for the Jazz Connection, an Internet magazine, he was entranced by the sound of drums when his father took him to a parade when he was 3-years-old. Eventually, his father opened a music store and taught his son to play drums and other instruments.
As a teenager, Bellson became a pioneer regarding the double bass drum set-up, and two years later he went on to win the Slingerland National Gene Krupa drumming contest.
According to his Web site, a memorial service is being planned in Los Angeles, as well as a funeral and burial in his boyhood home of Moline, Illinois.
