If you’ve gone out to hear jazz in the past 65 years or so, chances are you’ve heard Art Hoyle – even if you didn’t know it.
The exceptional trumpeter and nimble vocalist played practically every club and concert hall in the Chicago area since the mid-1950s, though usually in someone else’s band. From the Jazz Showcase and Orchestra Hall downtown to the long-gone rooms such as Roberts Show Club on the South Side and Mill Run in Niles, Hoyle was a first-call musician for jazz bands, brass ensembles and vocalists such as Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald and Sammy Davis Jr.
He died June 4 at Methodist Hospitals Southlake Campus in Merrillville, Ind., at age 90 of Alzheimer’s disease, said his wife, Ruth Hoyle.
Chicago trumpeter Pharez Whitted recalled long ago hearing of Hoyle’s prowess from Whitted’s uncle, the admired trombonist-arranger Slide Hampton.
“Before I moved to Chicago, my uncle Slide told me, ‘Look up Arthur Hoyle – he’s the baddest man in town, and he’s someone you need to know,” said Whitted.
“He reminded me of ‘Sweets’ (Edison),” a keenly sensitive trumpeter who played in Count Basie’s band and famously backed Frank Sinatra on record. Hoyle, added Whitted, “could play behind any vocalist. Beautiful. He was a true jazz musician. It was soul, it was expression, it was the blues, it was poetic.”
And it was fluid. Meticulously crafted lines flowed from Hoyle’s trumpet and fluegelhorn with the ease and naturalness of speech.
“I like to say that Art had a switch on (his) back,” said Chicago trumpeter Bobby Lewis, who played alongside Hoyle in uncounted bands and studio sessions. “You just switch it on, and it would start playing jazz immediately. He was the epitome of a great jazz player. … He never composed anything that I knew of. Art didn’t need to write. All he needed to do was play.”
He did so prolifically and in a range of jazz idioms, from traditional to bebop to avant-garde. Anyone who could tour with swing master Lionel Hampton’s big band and play in visionary Sun Ra’s Arkestra, as Hoyle did in the 1950s, clearly could transcend technical and aesthetic boundaries.
Born Sept. 9, 1929, in Corinth, Miss., Hoyle received his first trumpet at age 8 and came to Gary, Ind., with his divorced mother when he was teenager. He played in the high school band and “all around the clubs in Gary in those days,” said Ruth Hoyle.
The jazz nexus of Chicago inevitably beckoned, and during Hoyle’s studies at Roosevelt University in 1949, he began attending jam sessions presented by emerging impresario Joe Segal.
“If you were a student, you could hear the big-time players play,” Hoyle told me in 2008. “It was so exciting.”
Hoyle further honed his skills during service in the Air Force, where he played in military bands. By the mid-’50s, he was back in the Chicago area working for bandleader Red Saunders, then Hampton, Sun Ra and uncounted others. Following a period in New York from 1957 to 1961, he returned to the Chicago scene while living in Gary.
“I don’t know what made him most proud, but I was proud that he was able to help integrate the Chicago musicians unions,” said Ruth Hoyle of institutions that had been segregated by race until the mid-’60s. “They used to say that black fellows couldn’t read music. Art could read music very well.”
Indeed, “In studio work, you go in never having seen the charts before, and you played them a couple times through, and then you start recording,” said trumpeter Lewis, who worked studio sessions with Hoyle. “Art’s reading skill were way up there.”
The sheer breadth of jazz ensembles in which Hoyle flourished attested to that and other gifts. He played alongside trumpeters Lewis, George Bean and Russ Iverson in Forefront, which traveled to Montreux, Switzerland, in 1976; and again with Lewis and others when the band EARS went to Japan in 1985. Hoyle co-founded the Fletcher Basington Orchestra – celebrating repertoire of Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie and Duke Ellington – with Richard Wang in the early 1990s; and Hoyle worked in the versatile Ensemble Stop-Time, based at Columbia College’s Center for Black Music Research, in the late ’90s.
“He was a model,” said trumpeter Whitted. “You knew you couldn’t be him, but, man, I wanted to be like him.
“Today, everybody is so concerned with technique, which he had. But that wasn’t what you thought about when you listened to him play. It was just the story that he told when he played.”
To Hoyle, Chicago remained the center of the jazz universe.
“I’ve traveled a lot,” he told me in 2008, “and I still find that jazz in Chicago is healthier than in most cities.
“I never lacked for work.”
Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.
