Biography
Beyond her vocal and songwriting abilities, jazz polymath Betty O'Hara mastered an array of brass instruments that ranged from trumpet and cornet to piccolo-trumpet, flügelhorn, trombone, valve trombone, and the rare double-bell euphonium. Born in Earl Park, ID, sometime in the 1920s, she first picked up a trumpet at age nine and later appeared with groups such as the Hartford Connecticut Symphony. In the early 1960s she moved to southern California alongside her husband Barrett O'Hara, a bass trombonist, and soon established herself as a studio musician. By the late 1970s she had become a founding member of the Maiden Voyage Big Band, and in the early 1980s she joined forces with trumpeter/flügelhornist Stacy Rowles to create the Jazzbirds. During that same decade she contributed to the soundtracks of prime-time series including Hill Street Blues and Magnum P.I. She also released two independent solo collections—Horns Aplenty in 1985 and Woman’s Intuition in 1999—while adding her multi-instrumental voice to John Allred’s In the Beginning, Dick Cary’s And His Tuesday Night Friends and Catching Up, Rick Fay’s Endangered Species, and several compilation projects. After suffering two strokes in 1998, O’Hara entered a convalescent hospital and died at age 74 in Sherman Oaks, CA, on April 18, 2000, from stroke-related complications.
Albums