Herb Geller

Herb Geller built a long career as a mainstay of the Los Angeles jazz community during the 1950s, yet his playing reached new heights around the turn of the century. He first appeared with Joe Venuti’s Orchestra in 1946, then headed to New York three years later to join Claude Thornhill’s band. Returning to Los Angeles in 1951, he married the gifted bop pianist Lorraine Walsh. Throughout the early fifties he remained a central figure on the local scene, performing alongside Billy May in 1952 as well as Maynard Ferguson, Shorty Rogers, Bill Holman, and Chet Baker, among many others; he also participated in a 1954 jam session with Clifford Brown and Max Roach and led his own quartet that featured his wife from 1954 to 1955. After Lorraine Geller’s unexpected passing in 1958, the alto saxophonist chose to depart the United States in search of relief from his loss. Between 1958 and 1961 he worked intermittently with Benny Goodman, spent time in Brazil, and settled in Berlin in 1962. For the next three decades he held positions in German radio orchestras, performed with various European big bands, and steadily refined his craft, although he remained largely overlooked back home. Beginning in the early 1990s and continuing into the 2000s, Geller visited the United States more frequently and cut tribute albums to Al Cohn and Arthur Schwartz for the Hep label. Earlier in his career he had led sessions for EmArcy, Jubilee, and Atco during the 1950s; later recordings appeared on Enja, Fresh Sound, and VSOP. He died in Hamburg, Germany, on December 19, 2013, at the age of eighty-five.