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Jazz House Kids
Norman Simmons, a pianist, composer, arranger and educator whose multidimensional jazz career featured a series of high-profile associations with singers like Carmen McRae, Betty Carter, Joe Williams and Anita O’Day died on Thursday in Mesa, Ariz.
He was 91, and lived in Lakewood, N.J. The cause was multiple myeloma, singer Antoinette Montague, a close friend, tells WBGO. Norman Simmons, left, backing saxophonist Wardell Gray at the Beehive Lounge in Chicago, mid-1950s.
During a career spanning more than 65 years, Simmons specialized in a precise and nuanced style at the piano, with a keen sense of dynamic variation and harmonic color. For the first half of the 1950s he was a house pianist at the Beehive Lounge in Chicago, backing traveling greats like Wardell Gray and Lester Young. He was part of the band that played with bebop titan Charlie Parker in Feb. 1955, during Parker s final appearance in Chicago.