Rudy Jackson

Rudy Jackson served as clarinetist for Duke Ellington until Barney Bigard took his place. While growing up in Chicago with musician parents, he began serious study of the instrument during high school and had started working professionally by 1918. Early jobs included stints in Carroll Dickerson’s Orchestra and alongside King Oliver from 1923 to 1924. After additional work with traveling shows and another period with Oliver in early 1927, he joined Ellington’s Washingtonians for the latter half of that year. He introduced a piece he claimed to have composed, which Ellington titled “Creole Love Call,” only to discover later that the number was in fact Oliver’s “Camp Meeting Blues.” General unreliability prompted Ellington to dismiss him. Between 1929 and 1933 Jackson performed intermittently with Noble Sissle’s Orchestra, including engagements in Europe, and made repeated trips abroad that took him to India and Ceylon with Teddy Weatherford. He remained in India through most of World War II before returning to Chicago, where he stopped performing and spent his last twenty years out of the public eye. Rudy Jackson never headed a recording session under his own name.