Biography
Red Callender remains the sole musician who declined membership in both Duke Ellington's Orchestra and the Louis Armstrong All-Stars while sustaining an exceptionally active and consistently profitable career as a studio player across innumerable sessions. After a brief period of freelance work in New York, he relocated to Los Angeles in 1936 and made his first recording the following year with Louis Armstrong. Early in the 1940s he performed with the Lester and Lee Young band before assembling his own trio. Throughout the decade Callender appeared on dates with Nat King Cole, Erroll Garner, Charlie Parker, Wardell Gray, and Dexter Gordon, among many others, and he is both visible and audible delivering a bebop bass solo in the 1946 film New Orleans, a production set in the city's 1915 music scene. Following an interval leading a trio in Hawaii, he returned to Los Angeles and became one of the first Black musicians to secure regular employment in the commercial studios. On the 1954 Crown LP Speaks Low he ranked among the earliest modern jazz soloists on tuba, an instrument he continued to double on in subsequent years. His composition "Primrose Lane" reached the Top Ten in 1959 in a recording by Billy Wallace. Callender stayed active until his death, with later highlights that include sessions with Art Tatum (1955-1956), a performance alongside Charles Mingus at the 1964 Monterey Jazz Festival, work with James Newton's avant-garde woodwind quintet on tuba, and regular membership in Cheatham's Sweet Baby Blues Band. His mid-'80s autobiography Unfinished Dream remains both informative and colorful.
Albums
