Benny Golson gets his due

'FIFTEEN cents," a teenaged Benny Golson answered when his mother asked how much money he'd made at the night's gig.

It was the late '40s in North Philly, and the young tenor saxophonist and his friends, then-alto saxophonist John Coltrane and pianist Ray Bryant, had been hired to play a neighborhood concert with the promise of taking home all the money from the door.

"We played that night and about three people showed up," Golson recalled with a laugh. "I got 15 cents, enough to get back home.

"And when I went home, my mother said, 'How did you make out tonight?'

"I said, 'Fantastic,' but I was talking about the music, not the money."

In the jargon of the day, "cents" was often used as slang for "dollars," so Golson's mother was excited until she realized her son was speaking literally.

"I said, 'Mom, I don't care about the money. I just want to play the music.' She looked at me and said, 'You'll change.'

"She was right. Later, when I had to answer to the rent man, it was different."

Still, speaking from his home in Germany, one of three residences he maintains (he and Bobbi, his second wife and companion of almost 49 years, also share a house in Los Angeles and an apartment in New York), Golson has obviously managed to do his mother proud.

On Friday, the 78-year-old saxophonist, bandleader, composer, and sometime actor will be honored with the Mellon Jazz 2007 Living Legacy Award in ceremonies at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Last year's honoree, saxophonist Oliver Lake, will perform at this sold-out event.

"I'm wondering if anybody made a mistake," a humble Golson said of the honor. "I remember those days practicing there in Philadelphia with John Coltrane and Jimmy Heath and those guys. We never knew what was going to happen."

It's no mistake, assured Alan Cooper, executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, which presents the award. "Benny Golson is an outstanding jazz artist with a phenomenal record, both as a performer and as an educator, so he rose to the top this year."

The Jazz Living Legacy Award, established in 1994, annually recognizes an artist "who has established and distinguished him or herself as a performer over a period of years," Cooper said, "but also someone who has a commitment to jazz education, to the perpetuation of the art form."

Born in 1929, Golson grew up near 17th and Diamond streets with two uncles who played the piano. "Not very well," Golson said, "but I thought they were geniuses."

"Most people in those days had a piano in their house, but they had doilies and photographs on them - nobody ever played them. It was like a piece of furniture," Golson recalled. "But in my house, my two uncles played, and I would look at these keys when they finished and wonder, how in the world did they do that?"

Soon, 9-year-old Benny's mother noticed the boy picking out songs on the keyboard - "one note at a time with one finger" - and signed him up for piano lessons. But when he was 14, he heard Arnett Cobb playing "Flying Home" with Lionel Hampton's band, and his fate was sealed.

Golson recalls jam sessions happening in North Philly almost daily back then, which was where he met and began playing with Coltrane, Bryant and the Heath Brothers, among others.

Things changed again when bebop erupted onto the scene.

"I was trying to play like Arnett Cobb on 'Flying Home,' " Golson said. "That kind of boot-'em-up tenor style. And John was playing like [longtime Duke Ellington sideman] Johnny Hodges. Then a couple of years later we heard Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and, man, our whole lives changed that evening."

At his mother's insistence, Golson attended Howard University in D.C., where he got his first experience as a composer writing pieces and arrangements for an off-campus jazz band. After leaving Howard in 1951, he joined singer/saxophonist Bull Moose Jackson's band, where he met pianist Tadd Dameron, who greatly influenced his compositional style.

Over the course of his career, Golson would come to be known for his compositions, with several of his pieces - "I Remember Clifford," "Killer Joe," "Whisper Not," "Along Came Betty" - becoming standards in the jazz repertoire.

His first break came when his old friend Coltrane brought Golson's tune "Stablemates" to the attention of Miles Davis, who recorded it in 1955.

"I had a love affair with melodies," Golson said of his developing style. "No matter the tempo, I had to hear a melody in my mind. And that came from listening to people like Brahms and Chopin and Puccini, those guys - I call them 'guys,' because they're like one of the boys."

Through the 1950s, Golson played with bandleaders from Lionel Hampton to Dizzy Gillespie to Art Blakey, before teaming with trumpeter Art Farmer to form the Jazztet, which they co-led for three years. Golson revived the group in the 1980s and is forming a new version now.

After the Jazztet disbanded, Golson went to Hollywood, where he met with considerable success scoring for movies and television.

"It was a form of expression that I wanted to embrace," he said. "It's another world. But I got tired of it and came back to jazz."

In 2004, Golson stepped in front of the cameras, playing himself opposite Tom Hanks (who Golson now refers to as his "e-mail buddy") in Steven Spielberg's 2004 film, "The Terminal."

Golson is looking forward to January 2009, when the Kennedy Center will honor his 80th birthday with a series of performances of his jazz and classical pieces.

He's also recently completed an autobiography he's whittling from 1,200 to 300 pages.

Not that Golson spends much time looking back.

He quoted Hank Jones as saying, "The horizon is always ahead: Whoever says, 'Well, here we are at the horizon'? There's no such thing. It's always just beyond. Creativity is rarely satisfied. And creativity never retires, and that's where I am." *