Wilbur De Paris

Wilbur De Paris in front of the Onyx , July 1947. Photo: William P. Gottlieb

(From left: Wilbur De Paris with Sammy Price (back), Sidney De Paris , Eddie Barefield and Charlie Traeger, Jimmy Ryan's (Club), New York, around July 1947. Photo: William P. Gottlieb .

Wilbur De Paris (born January 11, 1900 in Crawfordsville , Indiana , † January 3, 1973 in New York , NY ) was an American jazz trombonist, composer and band leader of Dixieland jazz .

Life

Wilbur De Paris learned alto horn at the age of seven and played with his father's band, which performed vaudeville shows. In the early 1920s he played for the first time in New Orleans on tour with "Mack's Merrymakers". In the early 1920s he also played with Stuff Smith and formed his own band in Philadelphia in 1925. In the 1930s he played a. a. at Noble Sissle , with whom he went to Europe for the first time in 1931, or Benny Carter and Teddy Hill , with whom he went on a European tour in 1937. From 1938 to 1941 he played with Louis Armstrong , whom he still knew from New Orleans, and in 1943 he founded his own band again, in which his trumpet-playing brother Sidney De Paris took part. Among other things, he played in the 1940s with Ella Fitzgerald and Roy Eldridge and from 1945 to 1947 with Duke Ellington .

He then founded the “New New Orleans Band”, which mixed traditional Dixieland jazz with swing influences and used sophisticated arrangements based on the model of Jelly Roll Morton's “Red Hot Peppers”. Like his brother, Wilbur De Paris had played (and recorded) several times with Morton and also brought Morton musicians such as clarinetist Omer Simeon and drummer Freddie Moore into the band. In addition to his brother, Doc Cheatham often played as a trumpeter, who, unlike Sidney De Paris, did without growl effects on the trumpet. Other band members were at times Zutty Singleton on drums, Don Kirkpatrick on piano and Eddie Gibbs or Lee Blair on banjo (Blair used to play with Morton). The "New New Orleans Band" was very successful in New York in the 1950s and began touring around the world in the late 1950s. In 1957 they represented the USA at the independence celebration of Ghana and in 1960 they played at the first jazz festival in Antibes . After the death of his brother in 1967, Wilbur De Paris only performed occasionally.

Wilbur de Paris is the composer of the New Orleans jazz classic "The Martinique".

literature

• Martin Kunzler : Jazz Lexicon . direct Media, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-89853-018-3 (1 CD-ROM).

Web links

• Biography (German; offline)