Freddie Hubbard 1938-2008

Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard playing in concert.
Freddie Hubbard

The great jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard died yesterday in California. Peter Keepnews wrote an obituary at the New York Times.

Wikipedia has Freddie Hubbard’s discography.

Over the past 35 years, I was fortunate to see Freddie Hubbard perform many times. The first was in the early ’70s, when I took this photograph at a concert in San Francisco.

I was always partial to the trumpet, maybe because two of my friends, Bruce Baxley and Eugene Madsen, both played. I took lessons with a rental trumpet when I was a kid, but at Christmas, it came down to a trumpet or a bike, and the bike won.

When I moved to the mecca of jazz, New York City, the first thing I bought when I sold a photograph was a Yamaha Flugelhorn, a YFH-631 (now the 631G). My friend, Tim Luey (I think mistakenly), told me a fluegelhorn was easier to play than a trumpet. One year, while attending Comdex in Las Vegas, I bought a Bach Stradivarius at a pawn shop. Both of them are in the closet.

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