Marcus Belgrave, a world-class trumpeter and the reigning patriarch of Detroit’s jazz scene, fought heart and pulmonary issues for years and used oxygen 24 hours a day. But you would hardly know it to hear him play.

Belgrave still lit up bandstands from here to New York with his clarion tone, soulful improvisations and charismatic personality. And just as he had done for the last 45 years in Detroit, he mentored young musicians, initiating them into the expressive glories of jazz.

Belgrave’s heart finally gave out today at age 78. Death has silenced his horn, but his legacy will remain immortal.

Belgrave died at Glacier Hills, a care and rehabilitation facility in Ann Arbor. His wife, vocalist Joan Belgrave, said he died in his sleep. The cause of death was heart failure. He had been in and out of the hospital since April 19, battling complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and congestive heart failure. But he had also shown signs of steady improvement and was practicing daily. His wife said they had spent Saturday preparing for his return to the stage at the Concert of Colors in July.

His last public appearance was April 17 in Durham, N.C., as part of a “trumpet summit” with Russell Gunn and Rayse Biggs, but Belgrave continued to play in his hospital bed, including brief jam sessions with fellow musicians.

It’s impossible to overstate the impact that Belgrave has had on musical culture in Detroit as a musician, teacher and standard-bearer of jazz. Like an African griot, he came to embody the soul and mythology of the city’s jazz history, handing down the values of swing and blues to multiple generations of students — many of whose fame would eventually outshine his own. Belgrave symbolized Detroit’s continued vitality as an incubator and epicenter of jazz, and he remained a key link between the city and the international jazz scene.

“He became a mentor to entire generations of musicians, and a lot of us would not have found the music without him,” said bassist Rodney Whitaker. “He brought us together. I have not met one musician from the last 50 years in Detroit that Marcus has not had some sort of impact on.”

Belgrave’s A-list resume included a long tenure with Ray Charles in the 1950s and early ’60s and associations with jazz royalty like Max Roach and Charles Mingus. Ultimately, however, Belgrave’s greatest contribution was the remarkable honor roll of his former students who graduated to leading roles on the national scene — including pianist Geri Allen, bassists Whitaker and Robert Hurst, alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett, violinist Regina Carter, and drummers Karriem Riggins, Ali Jackson and Gerald Cleaver.

Belgrave took his advanced students under his wing, hiring them for gigs that provided critical on-the-job training.

“With Marcus there was a pipeline from high school right into a safety zone in the scene,” Allen told the Free Press in 2012. “We saw the passion and the professionalism up close. What Marcus has done for Detroit and what he’s done for all of us — he truly is a national treasure. How much we all love him can’t be expressed in words.”

Most of Belgrave’s teaching came under the umbrella of his Jazz Development Workshop. a shoestring operation. The students who became stars are by no means the whole story, because Belgrave’s influence extends to protegees like bassist Marion Hayden, who has become a pillar of the Detroit scene as a player and teacher. Then there are the countless inner city kids who didn’t become professional musicians but whom Belgrave helped keep on the straight and narrow.

“If you factor in those of us who also became mentors because of his example, Marcus has changed the lives of thousands of students,” said Whitaker, who directs the jazz program at Michigan State University.

Belgrave — who was born in Pennsylvania but settled in Detroit in 1963 after roughly five years with Ray Charles — could have had a larger national profile had he remained in New York. Mingus once lamented that he couldn’t afford to pry the trumpeter out of Detroit. “If I had Marcus Belgrave, I’d have the greatest band going,” the bassist-composer told Down Beat magazine in 1975.

But fame and fortune were never Belgrave’s goals.

“Actually, I feel famous, because I’ve been able to survive playing music in Detroit,” Belgrave told the Free Press in 2012. “Major musicians would say, ‘What is Marcus doing in Detroit?’ But I had to find a place where I belonged, and where I could have an impact. Being around all of this young talent gave me a sense of community and a purpose. I became a catalyst.”

Belgrave’s cult status grew once his famous protégés began trumpeting his name in interviews in the 1980s. In the 1990s, work with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, a handful of New York gigs and a few sideman appearances on CDs with Allen and others bumped up his visibility a bit.

Belgrave’s identity on the trumpet was unique. Initially inspired by Clifford Brown, his sound was broad and lustrous, and his solos unfolded in complete paragraphs of cogent melody, rhythmic wit and emotional resonance. As he reached his full maturity as an improviser in the 1970s, Belgrave favored the road less traveled, marrying down-home soul with spontaneous, offbeat tangents.

“I’m trying to hear the whole picture of the piece,” Belgrave told the Free Press. “The improvisation comes in as a part of being able to feel the whole framework of a song and then you work your way into the flow. I want to play like a singer and feel the rapture of the song.”

Belgrave’s ability to remain himself in a myriad of styles was a calling card. He’s recorded bebop, blues, ballads, funk, fusion, free jazz, post-bop and in recent decades worked all over the country playing and singing the Louis Armstrong songbook with spot-on authenticity.

Belgrave, who stood just 5 feet 4 inches tall, was an elfin figure with twinkling eyes, a gravelly voice and a bebopper’s beard that in later years turned more salt than pepper. He commanded a spiritual force that elevated the musicianship of a band even when he was simply in the audience as a listener.

“He’s the epitome of soul and taste,” Marsalis told the Free Press in 2009. “His sound is just so evocative, and he’s a master of swing and blues. When he walks into a room, he brings a good time with him.”

Despite his up-and-down health, Belgrave practiced religiously, putting in two hours a day on the horn, even when he landed periodically in the hospital. His doctors said the trumpet kept him alive, helping his respiration and allowing him to get everything he could out of his weakened lungs. The continued vitality of his playing astounded his fellow musicians and earned him critical accolades.

In his appearance at Dizzy’s Club in New York last July, Belgrave was especially proud to lead a band comprised of all current Detroiters and proteges. Critic Ben Ratliff wrote in the New York Times that the show was an example of the kind of music that doesn’t often get headlines: “Jazz played with a beautiful sense of proportion, modesty, refinement; using the full range of his instrument but free of aggression, anxiety, overplaying. (Belgrave) let the essence of the songs manifest themselves. It’s the result, maybe, of understanding something and then rendering it so that it coheres and can be passed on intact.”

A bebop baby

Marcus Belgrave was born on June 12, 1936, in Chester, Pa., a manufacturing town near Philadelphia. He started blowing a bugle at 4 and a trumpet at 6, taught by his father, a fine amateur musician. Belgrave’s cousin was baritone saxophonist Cecil Payne, who played with Dizzy Gillespie’s big band, and it wasn’t long before Payne was teaching Belgrave to play bebop melodies by Charlie Parker.

At 12, Belgrave began studying with a local teacher and performing with a concert band in nearby Wilmington, Del., that included Clifford Brown, six years older and on his way to becoming a major influence in jazz. Brown took a shine to Belgrave and helped him learn to improvise by writing out a solo for him on the chords to “How High the Moon.”

Belgrave joined the Air Force after high school and played in a service band stationed in Wichita Falls, Texas. One night he sat in with the Ray Charles band at a concert. Belgrave was back in Chester in 1958, when Charles offered him a job as second trumpet. He was 21.

Charles had a hot small band working at the intersection of rhythm and blues, jazz and gospel. For Belgrave, the experience was like graduate school.

“I had to learn patience,” Belgrave told the Free Press. “I wanted to play bebop, but I had to learn to play the blues. I played too many notes. And Ray would play such slow ballads that I’d be through eight bars before he got through one. But eventually he let me play obbligatos behind him on a ballad.”

Belgrave made his first recordings with Charles, playing brassy solos full of bebop curlicues on “Blues Waltz” (1958) and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (1959). He can also be heard to good advantage on “Fathead: Ray Charles Presents David Newman,” taped with Charles’ band in 1958.

Belgrave worked with Charles until 1963, except for a year and a half when he lived in New York. While based in the city, he toured for two months with drummer Max Roach and recorded with Charles Mingus on “Pre-Bird” (1960). He also worked with drummer Charli Persip and saxophonist and former Detroiter Yusef Lateef. Belgrave surely would have found wider fame had he not turned down potentially career-defining opportunities to play with Duke Ellington’s big band and Horace Silver’s quintet. Belgrave said in both cases he didn’t want to return to the grind of life on the road.

Belgrave settled in Detroit in 1963, lured by the city’s reputation as a jazz mecca and the former stomping grounds of Pontiac-born Thad Jones, whom Belgrave revered. The promise of steady work in the Motown studios was also a magnet, and he played on numerous Motown sides in 1963-64.

Belgrave fell into teaching in 1970. His friend, pianist Harold McKinney, recruited him to work for Detroit’s Metropolitan Arts Complex, a federally funded Model Cities program. Belgrave, a natural communicator, found the energy and excitement of the students intoxicating. Belgrave created the Jazz Development Workshop in the early ’70s, and there were also more formal posts along the way at Oakland University and elsewhere.

Belgrave also became involved in Detroit’s legendary Tribe, a ’70s cooperative that ran a record label and produced concerts. Belgrave’s first LP under his own name, “Gemini II,” a progressive jazz-rock fusion album, was made for Tribe in 1974.

Belgrave later made numerous recordings for his own Detroit Jazz Musicians Co-Op label, including two exemplary CDs in the 1990s: “Live at the Kerrytown Concert House” (with Detroit pianists Tommy Flanagan, Geri Allen and Gary Schunk) and “Working Together,” which documents Belgrave’s partnership with the late drummer and composer Lawrence Williams. Limited distribution prevented these recordings from making a bigger splash.

In later decades, Belgrave also appeared on recordings by Allen, Kirk Lightsey, McCoy Tyner, Horace Tapscott, Junko Onishi, Robert Hurst and David Murray.

In recent years, Belgrave found a measure of financial security by accepting a teaching post at Oberlin from 2001-2010, and he was awarded the $50,000 Kresge Eminent Artist prize in 2009.

Belgrave’s 2007 marriage to Joan Belgrave, his third wife, a singer with whom he often performed, also brought stability to his life. Joan helped him manage his business affairs and monitored his health.

In addition to his wife, Belgrave is survived by two daughters and two sons. Services will be at 11 a.m. Saturday at Greater Grace Temple, 23500 W. Seven Mile, Detroit. A gathering will follow at the Carr Center, 311 E. Grand River Ave., Detroit.

Belgrave’s life stood as a monument to the continuum of jazz history, and he was sustained by a profound understanding of community, character and fellowship. Connecting his trumpet playing and his teaching was a respect for the past as a springboard to the future. The greatest lesson of all in jazz, he once said, was to be an individual.

“In order to get to the future, you have to go to the past,” he told the Free Press. “I try to instill that you learn from the masters in your presence and go back and forward from there. In order to find yourself, you have to be cognizant of what went down before you. That’s always been my philosophy.”

Originally published at freep.com

It’s with great sadness that we announce the passing of beloved music man & longtime President of Blue Note Records, Bruce Lundvall. He was 79 years old. The cause was complications from a prolonged battle with Parkinson’s disease. Born in Englewood, New Jersey in 1935, Bruce was a lifelong jazz lover whose passion for the music was ignited by Clifford Brown, Charlie Parker & the other beboppers he heard as an underage teenager at clubs along West 52^nd Street in New York City in the 1950s.

A self-described “failed saxophone player,” Bruce took an entry level marketing job at Columbia Records in 1960 and over the following two decades rose to lead the North American division of the label, signing artists including Dexter Gordon, Herbie Hancock, Stan Getz, Wynton Marsalis & Willie Nelson. After launching the Elektra/Musician label in 1982, he received the offer of a lifetime in 1984 when EMI approached him about reviving Blue Note Records which had been dormant for several years. He jumped at the chance, partnering with producer Michael Cuscuna to bring back the label’s earlier stars like Jimmy Smith, McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson & Jackie McLean, and signing new artists including Dianne Reeves, Cassandra Wilson, Michel Petrucciani, John Scofield, Charlie Hunter and Medeski Martin & Wood.

Under Bruce’s stewardship Blue Note established itself as the most-respected and longest-running jazz label in the world. He presided over a prosperous nearly-30-year period of the label’s history, reaching commercial heights with artists including Bobby McFerrin, Us3, Norah Jones, Al Green and Amos Lee, while recording some of the most important jazz artists of our time including Joe Lovano, Greg Osby, Jason Moran, Robert Glasper, Ambrose Akinmusire, Don Pullen, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Terence Blanchard, Jacky Terrasson, and many others.

“Bruce was a one-of-a-kind, larger-than-life human being,” said Don Was, current Blue Note President. “His Joie de Vivre was equaled only by his love for music, impeccable taste and kind heart.  He will be sorely missed by all of us who loved and admired him but his spirit will live forever in the music of Blue Note Records.”

Over the course of a music industry career spanning more than 50 years, Bruce was the rare record label executive who was universally loved and trusted. He steadfastly believed in putting artists first, letting the music lead and the commerce follow. Bruce received countless awards including the 2011 GRAMMY Trustees Award and the Jazz Foundation of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He served as the Chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA); Director of the National Association of Recording Artists and Science (NARAS); Director of the T.H. Martell Foundation for Leukemia Research, the industry’s most prestigious charity. He is the namesake of the Montreal Jazz Festival’s Bruce Lundvall Award as well as JazzTimes magazine’s Bruce Lundvall Visionary Award, both of which honor prominent non-musicians who have left a mark on the world of jazz. Bruce’s authorized biography, Playing By Ear by author Dan Ouellette, was released last year.

As a testament to Bruce’s unbreakable spirit, just last year in August 2014 as he struggled against the effects of Parkinson’s, Bruce organized a jazz festival at his assisted-living facility in New Jersey that featured Jones, Reeves, Ravi Coltrane, Chucho Valdes, Bill Charlap, Renee Rosnes and others as a benefit for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.

Bruce is survived by his wife Kay; three sons: Tor, Kurt and his wife Blythe, and Eric and his wife Johanna; as well as two grandchildren: Rayna and Kerstin. A private family service will be followed by a forthcoming public service, details will be announced shortly. In lieu of flowers, Bruce’s family requests that a donation be made to the Michael J. Fox Foundation.

B. B. King, whose world-weary voice and wailing guitar lifted him from the cotton fields of Mississippi to a global stage and the apex of American blues, died on Thursday at his home in Las Vegas. He was 89.

His death was reported on his website, which said he died in his sleep. Mr. King, who was in hospice care, had been performing until October 2014, when he canceled a tour, citing dehydration and exhaustion stemming from diabetes.

Mr. King married country blues to big-city rhythms and created a sound instantly recognizable to millions: a stinging guitar with a shimmering vibrato, notes that coiled and leapt like an animal, and a voice that groaned and bent with the weight of lust, longing and lost love.

“I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions,” Mr. King said in his autobiography, “Blues All Around Me” (1996), written with David Ritz.

In performances, his singing and his solos flowed into each other as he wrung notes from the neck of his guitar, vibrating his hand as if it were wounded, his face a mask of suffering. Many of the songs he sang — like his biggest hit, “The Thrill Is Gone” (“I’ll still live on/But so lonely I’ll be”) — were poems of pain and perseverance.

The music historian Peter Guralnick once noted that Mr. King helped expand the audience for the blues through “the urbanity of his playing, the absorption of a multiplicity of influences, not simply from the blues, along with a graciousness of manner and willingness to adapt to new audiences and give them something they were able to respond to.”

B. B. stood for Blues Boy, a name he took with his first taste of fame in the 1940s. His peers were bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, whose nicknames fit their hard-bitten lives. But he was born a King, albeit in a sharecropper’s shack surrounded by dirt-poor laborers and wealthy landowners.

Mr. King went out on the road and never came back after one of his first recordings reached the top of the rhythm-and-blues charts in 1951. He began in juke joints, country dance halls and ghetto nightclubs, playing 342 one-night stands in 1956 and 200 to 300 shows a year for a half-century thereafter, rising to concert halls, casino main stages and international acclaim.

He was embraced by rock ’n’ roll fans of the 1960s and ’70s, who remained loyal as they grew older together. His playing influenced many of the most successful rock guitarists of the era, including Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.

Mr. King considered a 1968 performance at the Fillmore West, the San Francisco rock palace, to have been the moment of his commercial breakthrough, he told a public-television interviewer in 2003. A few years earlier, he recalled, an M.C. in an elegant Chicago club had introduced him thus: “O.K., folks, time to pull out your chitlins and your collard greens, your pigs’ feet and your watermelons, because here is B. B. King.” It had infuriated him.

When he saw “long-haired white people” lining up outside the Fillmore, he said, he told his road manager, “I think they booked us in the wrong place.” Then the promoter Bill Graham introduced him to the sold-out crowd: “Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the chairman of the board, B. B. King.”

“Everybody stood up, and I cried,” Mr. King said. “That was the beginning of it.”

By his 80th birthday he was a millionaire many times over. He owned a mansion in Las Vegas, a closet full of embroidered tuxedoes and smoking jackets, a chain of nightclubs bearing his name (including a popular room on West 42nd Street in Manhattan) and the personal and professional satisfaction of having endured.

Through it all he remained with the great love of his life, his guitar. He told the tale a thousand times: He was playing a dance hall in Twist, Ark., in the early 1950s when two men got into a fight and knocked over a kerosene stove. Mr. King fled the blaze — and then remembered his $30 guitar. He ran into the burning building to rescue it.

He learned thereafter that the fight had been about a woman named Lucille. For the rest of his life, Mr. King addressed his guitars — big Gibsons, curved like a woman’s hips — as Lucille.

He married twice, unsuccessfully, and was legally single from 1966 onward; by his own account he fathered 15 children with 15 women. But a Lucille was always at his side.

Riley B. King (the middle initial apparently did not stand for anything) was born on Sept. 16, 1925, to Albert and Nora Ella King, both sharecroppers, in Berclair, a Mississippi hamlet outside the small town of Itta Bena. His memories of the Depression included the sound of sanctified gospel music, the scratch of 78-r.p.m. blues records, the sweat of dawn-to-dusk work and the sight of a black man lynched by a white mob.

By early 1940 Mr. King’s mother was dead and his father was gone. He was 14 and on his own, “sharecropping an acre of cotton, living on a borrowed allowance of $2.50 a month,” wrote Dick Waterman, a blues scholar. “When the crop was harvested, Riley ended his first year of independence owing his landlord $7.54.”

In November 1941 came a revelation: “King Biscuit Time” went on the air, broadcasting on KFFA, a radio station in Helena, Ark. It was the first radio show to feature the Mississippi Delta blues, and young Riley King heard it on his lunch break at the plantation. A largely self-taught guitarist, he now knew what he wanted to be when he grew up: a musician on the air.

The King Biscuit show featured Rice Miller, a primeval bluesman and one of two performers who worked under the name Sonny Boy Williamson. After serving in the Army and marrying his first wife, Martha Denton, Mr. King, then 22, went to seek him out in Memphis, looking for work. Memphis and its musical hub, Beale Street, lay 130 miles north of his birthplace, and it looked like a world capital to him.

Mr. Miller had two performances booked that night, one in Memphis and one in Mississippi. He handed the lower-paying nightclub job to Mr. King. It paid $12.50.

Mr. King was making about $5 a day on the plantation. He never returned to his tractor.

He was a hit, and quickly became a popular disc jockey playing the blues on a Memphis radio station, WDIA. “Before Memphis,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I never even owned a record player. Now I was sitting in a room with a thousand records and the ability to play them whenever I wanted. I was the kid in the candy store, able to eat it all. I gorged myself.”

Memphis had heard five decades of the blues: country sounds from the Delta, barrelhouse boogie-woogie, jumps and shuffles and gospel shouts. He made it all his own. From records he absorbed the big-band sounds of Count Basie, the rollicking jump blues of Louis Jordan, the electric-guitar styles of the jazzman Charlie Christian and the bluesman T-Bone Walker.

On the air in Memphis, Mr. King was nicknamed the Beale Street Blues Boy. That became Blues Boy, which became B. B. In December 1951, two years after arriving in Memphis, Mr. King released a single, “Three O’Clock Blues,” which reached No. 1 on the rhythm-and-blues charts and stayed there for 15 weeks.

He began a tour of the biggest stages a bluesman could play: the Apollo Theater in Harlem, the Howard Theater in Washington, the Royal Theater in Baltimore. By the time his wife divorced him after eight years, he was playing 275 one-night stands a year on the so-called chitlin’ circuit.

There were hard times when the blues fell out of fashion with young black audiences in the early 1960s. Mr. King never forgot being booed at the Royal by teenagers who cheered the sweeter sounds of Sam Cooke.

“They didn’t know about the blues,” he said 40 years after the fact. “They had been taught that the blues was the bottom of the totem pole, done by slaves, and they didn’t want to think along those lines.”

Mr. King’s second marriage, to Sue Hall, also lasted eight years, ending in divorce in 1966. He responded in 1969 with his best-known recording, “The Thrill Is Gone,” a minor-key blues about having loved and lost. It was co-written and originally recorded in 1951 by another blues singer, Roy Hawkins, but Mr. King made it his own.

Mr. King is survived by 11 children. Three of them had recently petitioned to take over his affairs, claiming that Mr. King’s manager, Laverne Toney, was taking advantage of him. A Las Vegas judge rejected their petition this month.

The success of “The Thrill Is Gone” coincided with a surge in the popularity of the blues with a young white audience. Mr. King began playing folk festivals and college auditoriums, rock shows and resort clubs, and appearing on “The Tonight Show.”

Though he never had another hit that big, he had more than four decades of the road before him. He eventually played the world — Russia and China as well as Europe and Japan. His schedule around his 81st birthday, in September 2006, included nine cities over two weeks in Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France and Luxembourg. Despite health problems, he maintained a busy touring schedule until 2014.

In addition to winning 15 Grammy Awards (including a lifetime achievement award), having a star on Hollywood Boulevard and being inducted in both the Rock and Roll and Blues Halls of Fame, Mr. King was among the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors in 1995 and was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006, awards rarely associated with the blues. In 1999, in a public conversation with William Ferris, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mr. King recounted how he came to sing the blues.

“Growing up on the plantation there in Mississippi, I would work Monday through Saturday noon,” he said. “I’d go to town on Saturday afternoons, sit on the street corner, and I’d sing and play.

“I’d have me a hat or box or something in front of me. People that would request a gospel song would always be very polite to me, and they’d say: ‘Son, you’re mighty good. Keep it up. You’re going to be great one day.’ But they never put anything in the hat.

“But people that would ask me to sing a blues song would always tip me and maybe give me a beer. They always would do something of that kind. Sometimes I’d make 50 or 60 dollars one Saturday afternoon. Now you know why I’m a blues singer.”

Originally published at nytimes.com