Biography
Ford Leary launched a brief performing life in the middle of the 1930s inside New York City and closed it inside Bellevue Hospital toward the end of the following decade. He remains the sole trombonist of any prominence to expire while still a patient at that notorious facility, although those who cannot stand the instrument might prefer that every player of it be confined there. In 1949 he entered Bellevue after enduring prolonged physical decline. Recovery from a serious back injury consumed no less than two years and abruptly ended an emerging phase of his professional path. That same phase had included his first real success on stage, appearing as an actor in the Broadway production Follow the Girls.
His earliest steady employment came with Bunny Berigan’s orchestra, one of the stronger engagements he secured while hustling for freelance work in New York City. The sluggish pace of such efforts is captured in Ray Charles’s memoir Brother Ray with the observation “That’s some slow sh*t.” Subsequent stints took him through the orchestras of Larry Clinton in 1938, Charlie Barnet in 1940, and Mike Riley in 1941. The next year one-armed trumpeter Muggsy Spanier recruited him for a large ensemble Spanier had just assembled.
His earliest steady employment came with Bunny Berigan’s orchestra, one of the stronger engagements he secured while hustling for freelance work in New York City. The sluggish pace of such efforts is captured in Ray Charles’s memoir Brother Ray with the observation “That’s some slow sh*t.” Subsequent stints took him through the orchestras of Larry Clinton in 1938, Charlie Barnet in 1940, and Mike Riley in 1941. The next year one-armed trumpeter Muggsy Spanier recruited him for a large ensemble Spanier had just assembled.