The Jazzcat

Lucky Thompson, a legendary tenor and soprano saxophonist who took his

place among the elite improvisers of jazz from the 1940's to the 1960's

and then quit music, roamed the country and ended up homeless or

hospitalized for more than a decade, died on Saturday in Seattle. He

was 81.

His death was confirmed by his son, Daryl Thompson; the cause was not

announced. Mr. Thompson was living in an assisted-care facility at the

Washington Center for Comprehensive Rehabilitation in Seattle.

Mr. Thompson connected the swing era to the more cerebral and complex

bebop style. His sophisticated, harmonically abstract approach to the

tenor saxophone built off that of Don Byas and Coleman Hawkins; he

played with beboppers, but resisted Charlie Parker's pervasive

influence. He also played the soprano saxophone authoritatively.

“Lucky had that same thing that Paul Gonsalves had, that melodic

smoothness,” one of his contemporaries, the saxophonist Johnny Griffin,

said in an interview. “He wasn't rough like Ben Webster, and he didn't

play in the Lester Young style. He was a beautiful balladeer. But he

played with all the modernists.”

Mr.

Thompson was born Eli Thompson in Columbia, S.C., on June 16, 1924, and

moved to Detroit with his family as a child. After graduating from high

school in 1942, he played with Erskine Hawkins's band, then called the

'Bama State Collegians; the next year he moved to New York as a member

of Lionel Hampton's big band.

After six months with Hampton, while still very young, he swiftly

ascended the ranks of hip. He played in Billy Eckstine's short-lived

big band, one of the first to play bebop, which also included Charlie

Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. He joined the Count Basie Orchestra in

1944.

In 1945 he left Basie in Los Angeles, and in 1945 and 1946 he played

on, and probably created arrangements for, record dates for the

Exclusive label, including those by the black cowboy star and former

Ellington singer Herb Jeffries. When the Charlie Parker-Dizzy Gillespie

sextet came through Los Angeles, Mr. Thompson was hired by Gillespie as

a temporary replacement for Parker. Mr. Thompson was also on one of

Parker's most celebrated recording sessions, for Dial Records on March

28, 1946.

Fiercely intelligent, Mr. Thompson was outspoken in his feelings about

what he considered the unfair control of the jazz business by record

companies, music publishers and booking agents. Partly for these

reasons, he left the United States to live in Paris from 1957 to 1962,

making a number of recordings with groups including the pianist Martial

Solal. After returning to New York for a few years, he lived in

Lausanne, Switzerland, from late 1968 to 1970. He came back to New York

again, taught at Dartmouth in 1973 and 1974, then disappeared from the

Northeast, and soon from music entirely.

Friends say he lived for a time on Manitoulin Island in Ontario and in

Georgia before eventually moving west. By the early 90's he was in

Seattle, mostly living in the woods or in shelter offered by friends.

He did not own a saxophone. He walked long distances, and was reported

to have been in excellent, muscular shape.

He was hospitalized a number of times in 1994, and finally entered the Washington Center for Comprehensive Rehabilitation.

His skepticism about the jazz business may have kept him from a career

recording as a bandleader – “Tricotism,” from 1956, and “Lucky

Strikes,” from 1964, are among the few albums he made under his own

name – but he left behind a pile of imposing performances as a sideman.

Among them are recordings with Dinah Washington in 1945, Thelonious

Monk in 1952, Miles Davis in 1954 (the “Walkin' “ session, a watershed

in Davis's career), and Oscar Pettiford and Stan Kenton in 1956. His

final recordings were made in 1973.

In addition to his son, Daryl, of Stone Mountain, Ga., Mr. Thompson is

survived by a daughter, Jade Thompson-Fredericks of New Jersey; and two

grandchildren.

Part of Mr. Thompson's legend came from the fact that he was rarely

seen in public; at times it was hard for his old friends to find him.

But the drummer Kenny Washington remembered Mr. Thompson's showing up

when Mr. Washington was performing with Johnny Griffin's group at Jazz

Alley in Seattle in 1993. Mr. Thompson listened, conversed with the

musicians, and then departed on foot for the place where he was staying

– in a wooded spot in the Beacon Hill neighborhood, more than three

miles away.