Lou Donaldson, Hard Bop and Soul Jazz Innovator, Passes Away at 98

“Lou Donaldson DSC0004a” by Marek Lazarski is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

On Saturday, Nov. 9, the jazz world lost a legend with the passing of Lou Donaldson. Donaldson was a bebop mainstay, a versatile collaborator and a prolific bandleader, with a bluesy, dulcet tone that earned him the nickname “Sweet Poppa Lou” and a place in the ranks of the NEA Jazz Masters and the most distinguished alto saxophonists of all time. In 70 years of performance, he cemented himself as one of jazz’s foremost ambassadors, seeing the genre through cultural transformations by blending notes of rhythm and blues and gospel into his hard bop style to pioneer the far-reaching subgenre known as soul jazz. Long after his heyday, his music continues to reach new audiences, due in large part to its widespread sampling in the golden age of hip-hop. Donaldson was 98.

“The Family of Sweet Poppa Lou Donaldson sadly confirms his death November 9, 2024. A private service will be held,” a post to Donaldson’s personal website reads. “Thank you for your support of Lou and his music throughout his career. Because of you, his legendary contributions to Jazz will live on forever.”

Louis Andrew Donaldson Jr. was born on Nov. 1, 1926, in Badin, North Carolina. His father, Louis Andrew Sr., sold insurance and worked as a preacher; his mother, Lucy, was a music educator and choral director who taught Lou’s siblings to play piano as children. Donaldson diverged from his family’s musical pursuits until he was 15, when his mother purchased a clarinet for him to lessen his struggles with asthma. Though neither were familiar with the instrument, Donaldson showed quick proficiency by studying a book and picked performance up in earnest from then on.

That same year, Donaldson graduated as the valedictorian of his high school and enrolled at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in 1942. Outside of the classroom, he continued to refine his skills by reading the sheet music of swing bandleaders like Benny Goodman, until he was drafted into the US Navy in 1945. While posted at Naval Station Great Lakes, he transitioned from the clarinet to the saxophone to suit the needs of the Navy Band, after a chance encounter with the bandmaster gave him a chance to show his chops.

“He said, ‘You’re the best clarinet player around here. Do you play saxophone, too?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ I hadn’t touched the saxophone!” Donaldson recalled in 2012 interview for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program. “He gave me [the saxophone] and said, ‘Take that back to the barracks, and come back two weeks later.’ So I took it back to the barracks and I started practicing. By the end of the two weeks, I could play the saxophone, enough to read the music.”

In the Navy Band, Donaldson played alongside other future jazz stars like Willie Smith, Clark Terry and Luther Henderson. He had his first encounter with jazz’s cutting edge while on weekend leave in Chicago, when he stopped by a club show from Billy Eckstein’s band for a chance to hear Charlie Parker, then a young up-and-comer whose rapid, virtuosic style was winning acolytes throughout the next generation. “That changed everything,” Donaldson told Smithsonian interviewer Ted Panken. “It made me want to pursue music as a profession.”

Upon his discharge from the Navy later in 1945, Donaldson returned to North Carolina A&T, shifting his focus to a musicological analysis of the sea change in jazz. For his graduate thesis in 1947, titled The Transition From Swing To Bebop, he dissected the alternate chords, flying tempo and artistic purpose that characterized the new wave, all while versing himself in the style by memorizing Parker’s solos and standards from records. In 1950, he put his talents to the test when he followed his future wife and manager Maker to New York to study at the Darrow Institute of Music.

Before long, Donaldson engrained himself in the New York scene, landing regular gigs at hotspots like The Top Club, the Baby Grand and Harlem staple Small’s Paradise supporting artists like Johnny Hartman and Arthur Prysock. As his tenderly lyrical, yet rapid-fire swing-tinted-bop sound turned the heads of fellow musicians and record companies alike, a 1952 show at Minton’s caught the eye of Blue Note Records boss Alfred Lion.

“He came up to me and said, ‘Oh, do you want to record for Blue Note?,’” Donaldson recalled. “Well, you know I’m going to tell him ‘yeah.’ He said, ‘But you’ve got to play like Charlie Parker. Can you play like Charlie Parker?’ I thought, ‘No, I can’t play like Charlie Parker, but I won’t tell him.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I can play like Charlie Parker.’ Heh-heh. And I got the date.”

Donaldson’s first recording was as a sideman on Milt Jackson’s Blue Note debut, alongside an ensemble of John Lewis, Kenny Clarke and Percy Heath—the first record cut by the newly minted Modern Jazz Quartet. Next, he joined The Thelonious Monk Sextet for a session including Max Roach and Kenny Dorham. His first 10” record as a bandleader came later that year with support from Gene Ramey, Art Taylor and longtime collaborator Horace Silver, who the saxophonist brought to Blue Note after connecting at his boxing gym. For his second leading date, Donaldson tapped Heath, Silver, Blue Mitchell (another co-sign) and Art Blakey.

Now at the epicenter of the bebop boom, Donaldson rubbed shoulders with the titans of the new guard, forming friendships with everyone from Sonny Stitt to Parker. “So we played a couple of tunes, ‘I Got Rhythm’ or something,” the saxophonist recalls of his first gig alongside Bird at Smalls Paradise. “I played, and he leaned over to me and said, ‘Man, what was that you played on that thing? That was some nice stuff’ It was stuff I had copied off one of his records. So I said to myself, ‘Is he pulling my leg, or is he really sincere?; That’s when I realized the guy was a genius. He didn’t really remember.”

On Feb. 21, 1954, Donaldson made history when he assumed the spotlight with Clifford Brown, Curly Russell, Silver and Blakey for a set at New York’s hallowed Birdland jazz club. The performance, released as A Night at Birdland by the Art Blakey Quintet, is now regarded as a landmark live entry for the legendary drummer and one of the first recorded instances of a new style building on the sound of the ‘40s avant-garde with a grittier sonic palette.

“Well, that was hard bop,” Donaldson said of the paradigm shift. “It was hard swinging. See, when you accelerate the energy and the sound, you’re playing hard bop. It’s hard to do that. And the way I play, if he upped the sound, you had to up your playing, and that made you press a little more, so you’re playing like hard bop… it’s the volume and the beat.”

In a place and time where the music was not easily disentangled from the drug culture that it fostered, Donaldson adamantly abstained from any and all vices. His rejection of drugs and alcohol–spurred in part by his asthma and the well-known threat of police–was total, and while others encouraged drug use for creativity, he saw the erratic personalities of addiction as a hindrance to performance. The saxophonist held a low opinion of artists that he saw living for the next fix and famously spoke his mind without pause.

This break from many of his contemporaries gave Donaldson an outsider perspective in the recording industry. Shortly after featuring on A Night at Birdland, the artist departed from Blue Note, fed up with the backstage culture (I said, “Look, Alfred, that’s it. I’m not going to record another record with a junkie. Forget it.”) In 1957, he returned to the label with a new hand-picked band and a new vision.

A key entry in his first string of albums arrived with 1958’s Blues Walk, featuring congas from Ray Barretta—then a definite rarity in small-group jazz. With deep-pocketed and hard-swinging bluesy arrangements that bolster powerfully emotive lines from the saxophonist, Donaldson’s fifth full-length is often regarded as his defining release. The mix of hard bop, ballads and blues throughout the tracklist is emblematic of the artist’s understanding of himself as an entertainer first, with an obligation to create music that connects with his audience.

“What I used to do,” Donaldson reflected, “If I was going to make a date, two weeks before I made it, I’d play the tunes in the club to see what kind of response I got, and the ones I didn’t get a response to, I didn’t record, and I was home free. Because everything I made during that time, sold.”

In the ‘60s, as US audiences began to turn away from jazz and leading jazz artists leaned further into the avant-garde, Donaldson reengaged listeners by pioneering a new radio-friendly sound. With contemporaries like Silver and Mitchell, he seasoned his compositions with rhythm and blues and his gospel background, just as he stripped away the technical complexity of bebop. The conga was key to a toe-tapping, danceable backbeat, and the Hammond organ–which he first figured alongside in late ‘50s collaborations with Jimmy Smith–became a signature for his sound.

Donaldson explored new dimensions in the emergent form of soul jazz for the latter half of his 27-album run with Blue Note, which helped him to connect with a wider audience and sustain jazz as a viable and vital musical form through changing cultural currents. His commercial success peaked with the slick, prowling funk of 1967’s Alligator Bogaloo, which cracked the US R&B Top 20 and peaked at No. 141 in the Billboard 200. In the company of collaborators like Grant Green, Baby Face Willette, Wayne Shorter, Big John Patton, Freddie Hubbard, Ron Carter and a frequent rhythm trio of George Benson, Idris Muhammad and Dr. Lonnie Smith, Donaldson put forward a new musical language that never strayed far from the blues sound that he prized above all.

“They play what they’re playing,” Donaldson said for the Smithsonian, dishing out one of his signature acerbic takes on his peers. “But the blues is a different thing. And if you can’t play blues, you can’t play jazz, period. Now, if you can play it and don’t play it, you’re still not playing jazz—period.”

Donaldson left Blue Note in 1975, then bounced around between labels for a decade before retiring from recording in 1999. He played out regularly through 2017. With the rise of vinyl culture, his distinctive soul jazz recordings have enjoyed a new life as prized relics of the analog age. This revival has been further charged by the popularity of his groove records among hip-hop cratediggers, with tracks like “Ode to Billie Joe” and “Pot Belly” providing the breakbeats for such classics as A Tribe Called Quest’s “Hot Sex,” Main Source’s “Just a Friendly Game of Baseball,” Dr. Dre’s “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat,” Deltron 3030’s “Time Keeps on Slipping” and Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks,” among more than 350 others. 

Donaldson was not solely a witness, but an active participant in jazz’s countless transformations. By his contributions to the genre, he helped to bring the music he loved to new generations in brave new forms. In the tremendous volume of work that he created, the immeasurable impact of his innovations and his unforgettable, larger-than-life personality, Sweet Papa Lou lives on.