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The correct answer is Arnett Cobb!
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photo by Brian McMillen/CC BY-SA 4.0
Arnett Cobb at Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society; Half Moon Bay CA 1979
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Sometimes known as the “Wild Man of the Tenor Sax” because of his uninhibited stomping style, Arnett Cobb replaced Illinois Jacquet in Lionel Hampton’s band in 1942, where he stayed until 1947. His solo on Hampton’s theme song “Flying Home 2” generated a great deal of enthusiasm for his playing. You can listen to it here.
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Cobb wrote the words and music for the jazz standard “Smooth Sailing” (1951), which Ella Fitzgerald recorded for Decca on her album Lullabies of Birdland. You can listen to it here.
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In the liner notes to Cobb’s 1976 album The Wild Man From Texas, Stanley Dance writes that Cobb “likes to play ballads in a breathy subtone, phrasing the melody so that it swings, and then increasing the rhythmic emphasis as his improvisation develops chorus by chorus. If he gets carried away by emotional stress, he will often return to the melody and exit with a quiet theme statement, just as one of his idols, Ben Webster, liked to do. In between, there may well have been some outrageous quotations, apparently delivered deadpan unless you caught the twinkle in his eye.”
You can listen to “The Nearness of You” from that album here.
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photo by William Gottlieb/Library of Congress
Lionel Hampton and Arnett Cobb at the Aquarium; New York, 1946
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Click here for Cobb’s Wikipedia page
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