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Program #324 (April 25 at 8:00pm)
Lionel Hampton was the first jazz vibraphonist and was one of the jazz giants beginning in the mid- 30s. He has achieved the difficult feat of being musically open-minded (even recording Giant Steps ) without changing his basic swing style.
Hamp started out as a drummer, playing with the Chicago Defender Newsboys Band as a youth. His original idol was Jimmy Bertrand, a 20s drummer who occasionally played xylophone. Hampton played on the West Coast with such groups as Curtis Mosby s Blue Blowers, Reb Spikes, and Paul Howard s Quality Serenaders (with whom he made his recording debut in 1929) before joining Les Hite s band, which for a period accompanied Louis Armstrong.
Growing up in Compton in the 1960s, Deborah Swan always looked forward to visits from her grandfather, Leon Hefflin Sr. A handsome, dapper man who wore a suit and a hat, Hefflin was a perpetual tinkerer. He had built her brother s bunk bed and created an aromatic tincture, Leon s Foot Ointment. He smoked a pipe and was very quiet. He never bragged about himself, Swan recalls. If he had been inclined to do so, he would ve had plenty to say.
Hefflin was a dreamer, a serial entrepreneur, a breaker of color barriers and the producer of the Cavalcade of Jazz, a trailblazing annual music festival that