Jazz Trumpeter Jonah Jones Dies
Award-winning jazz trumpeter Jonah Jones, who began his career on a Mississippi riverboat and became a star playing with Cab Calloway, died Sunday. He was 90 and lived in Manhattan.
Born in Louisville, Ky., in 1909, Jones performed around the Midwest with artists and bands including Jimmie Lunceford, Stuff Smith, McKinney's Cotton Pickers and Lil Armstrong, the wife of Louis Armstrong.
His energetic solos with Smith's Onyx club band in the late 1930s earned him widespread attention, and he soon earned a spot playing with Calloway from 1941 to 1952.
Jones played Dixieland with Earl Hines and made a European tour in 1954, then began the work that won him fame beyond the world of jazz aficionados.
His covers of swing favorites and show tunes brought him a string of successful hits. He sold a million copies of his versions of On the Street Where You Live and Baubles, Bangles and Beads. Jones won a Grammy award in 1959 for the album I Dig Chicks.
After touring and recording through the 1980s, Jones retired from public performing in 1993, and gave his final public performance in November, when he sang during a benefit for the Jazz Foundation of America at the Blue Note in Greenwich Village.
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