Benny Golson

From the late 1960s through the 1970s Golson was in demand as an arranger for film and television and thus was less active as a performer, but he and Farmer re-formed the Jazztet in 1982. Many of Golson's compositions have become jazz standards, including "I Remember Clifford", "Blues March", "Stablemates", "Whisper Not", "Along Came Betty", and "Killer Joe". He is regarded as "one of the most significant contributors" to the development of hard bop jazz, and was a recipient of a Grammy Trustees Award in 2021.

Benny Golson studied at Howard University. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is music, jazz and saxophone performance. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are jazz and jazz fusion. Works named in the authority record are Killer Joe. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship and NEA Jazz Masters.

He was born Benny Golson in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on January 25, 1929. His father, also Bennie Golson, left the family early. His mother Celadia brought the family up, working as a seamstress and a waitress. Golson witnessed racism first at age eight on a trip to Georgia with an uncle. He began taking piano lessons at age nine; his interest in music was nurtured at Benjamin Franklin High School in Philadelphia giving him ambitions to become a concert pianist; he was fascinated by the music of Brahms and Chopin. At age 13, he was taken to New York's Minton Playhouse, where bebop was born, and he experienced some bop pioneers including Thelonious Monk. He saw Lionel Hampton's band, featuring Arnett Cobb on tenor saxophone, at Philadelphia's Earle Theatre. Inspired, he switched to the saxophone at age 14. At the high school, he played with several other promising young musicians, including John Coltrane, Red Garland, Jimmy Heath, Percy Heath, Philly Joe Jones, and Red Rodney. He later attended Howard University.

After graduating from Howard University, Golson joined Bull Moose Jackson's rhythm and blues band; Tadd Dameron, whom Golson came to consider the most important influence on his writing, was Jackson's pianist at the time. From 1953 to 1959, Golson played with Dameron's band and then with the bands of Lionel Hampton, Johnny Hodges, Earl Bostic, Dizzy Gillespie, and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, with whom he recorded the classic Moanin' in 1958. Golson was working with the Lionel Hampton band at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1956 when he learned that Clifford Brown, a noted and well-liked jazz trumpeter who had done a stint with him in Dameron's band, had died in a car accident. Golson was so moved by the event that he composed the threnody "I Remember Clifford", as a tribute to a fellow musician and friend. In addition to "I Remember Clifford", many of Golson's other compositions have become jazz standards. Songs such as "Stablemates", "Killer Joe", "Whisper Not", "Along Came Betty", and "Are You Real?", have been performed and recorded numerous times by many musicians. From 1959 to 1962, Golson co-led the Jazztet with Art Farmer, mainly playing his own compositions. Golson then left jazz to concentrate on studio and orchestral work for 12 years. During this time, he composed music for such television shows as Mannix, Ironside, Room 222, M*A*S*H, The Partridge Family and Mission: Impossible. He also formulated and conducted arrangements to various recordings, such as Eric Is Here, a 1967 album by Eric Burdon, which features five of Golson's arrangements, conducted by Golson. During the mid-1970s, Golson returned to jazz playing and recording. Critic Scott Yanow of AllMusic wrote that Golson's sax style underwent a major shift with his performing comeback, more resembling avant-garde Archie Shepp than the swing-era Don Byas influence of Golson's youth. He made a successful second career playing in clubs and on festivals internationally. In 1982, Golson re-organized the Jazztet with Farmer. Golson is central to the plot of the 2004 Steven Spielberg movie The Terminal, and makes a cameo appearance as himself. In the film, main character Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks) has the autographs of everyone who appears in A Great Day in Harlem, a famous 1958 photo of prominent jazz musicians, except Golson's; he has traveled to the US from Europe to obtain this final signature. Pianist Ray Bryant's song "Something in B-Flat," which was included on Golson's debut album as a leader, Benny Golson's New York Scene, can be heard during a scene where Viktor is painting and redecorating part of an airport terminal; in a later scene, Golson's band performs "Killer Joe". The album Terminal 1 was released by Golson shortly after the film, as a "homage to Steven Spielberg".

Golson's early playing has been described as "characterised by a distinctively fibrous, slightly hoarse tone... firmly within the mainstream-modern tradition exemplified by another of his heroes, the tenor player Don Byas." During the 1960s, however, he absorbed some of the techniques pioneered by his friend John Coltrane, whom he described as "an inextinguishable example of spiritual nobility." He is regarded as "one of the most significant contributors" to the development of hard bop jazz.

Golson was married to Seville Golson; they had three sons, Odis, Reggie and Robert, and the marriage ended in divorce. He married the ballet dancer Bobbie Hurd in 1959; they had a daughter, Brielle. In an interview with Awake! on October 8, 1980, Golson said that since the late 1960s he and his wife had become members of Jehovah's Witnesses. Golson died, following a short illness, at his home in Manhattan, New York, on September 21, 2024, at the age of 95.