Feature Interview with Art Hoyle

Feature Interview with Art Hoyle

Date Posted: July 25 2010

Written By: chicago jazz

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in his own words...Art Hoyle


Art Hoyle received his first trumpet on his eighth birthday in rural Oklahoma. He began playing in clubs and ballrooms at the age of fifteen in Gary, Indiana. After a four-year stint in bands in the U.S. Air Force, Hoyle joined the Sun Ra Arkestra in 1956. From 1957 to 1960 he toured the United States, Canada, Europe and North Africa with the Lionel Hampton Orchestra, then joined the CBS Staff Orchestra where he worked from 1962 to 1964.

Hoyle’s studio work has included work as both a voiceover talent and as a musician on TV, radio commercials and movie soundtracks. He has been a featured soloist with Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, Lena Horne, Peggy Lee, Quincy Jones, Henry Mancini, Louie Bellson, Oliver Nelson, Joe Williams, Nelson Riddle, Gene Ammons and many others.

Hoyle’s life is interesting beyond his considerable musical accomplishments, for in observing Hoyle’s professional career we see society’s underbelly during mid-century America, and how the courage of one individual made subtle contributions to the Civil Rights movement.


Chicago Jazz Magazine: Tell us about your early life.

Art Hoyle: I was born September 9, 1929 in Corinth, which is in the northeast corner of Mississippi, five miles from the Tennessee border, and close to the Alabama border as well. My father established the first black high school in Alcorn County, and was the school’s principal for the first nineteen years.

At that time, when you were finished with eighth grade you could start teaching blacks. If you wanted to go to high school, you had to go to Jackson College, which had a high school curriculum. I was born across the street from a Confederate cemetery, in Corinth. The Battle of Corinth was one of the major battles in the Civil War.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: What attracted you to the trumpet?

Hoyle: I really don’t know. I told my father I wanted a trumpet at eight. I had told him earlier, but he asked music teachers when I should start and they said at eight, when my body would be more developed, because trumpet is so physical. Two of my mother’s brothers were cornet players in rural Mississippi. Another thing happened: my mother and father divorced when I was one-and-a-half. We moved to Oklahoma when I was five, and she went to Langston University for graduate work, in order to qualify to teach in the state. And I walked in the band room one day, when I was five, and picked up a trumpet and played some notes. And they were all surprised that I got a sound out of it. That’s how it started.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Was your mother musical?

Hoyle: Yeah, she taught public school music, she read music and she taught me how to read music. She was my third grade teacher. And in third grade all the students thought I was her husband because of my deep voice. [laughs] I was born with a heavy voice. My mother said when I cried it sounded like a storm coming! But anyway, she taught in Stillwater. We wound up living in Muskogee, but left there when I was thirteen and moved to Gary, Indiana, where she had a brother who’s wife had just passed. He was one of Gary’s most prominent doctors, who held the record for the most babies delivered in one year—305—almost one a day! She told him that she was having a tough time disciplining me, and he said if we moved to Gary there would be good schools and all that.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Did you have any particular hardships during the Depression?

Hoyle: Not that I recognized; I just went along with it. My mother had a degree and made some money, and that helped a lot. I’m an only child. I came to Gary in ‘43, entering high school. In earlier years my father took me to private teachers. He taught summer school in Nashville, and there were great teachers there. He’d send me to a guy and I studied with him for two summers. There was a lot of group instruction, rather than individual teaching.

I didn’t have an individual teacher until I got to Roosevelt, which was then Roosevelt College. At first I went to Hampton Institute in Virginia, and my trumpet teacher there was a violinist from the Boston Symphony. When I got there he said, “You know more about the trumpet than I do”! I had been playing professionally in Gary since I was fifteen. I had a great teacher in Gary during high school named Ernest Bennett, who was from Oklahoma too. We both got to Gary at the same time. The previous band director at Roosevelt High School in Gary joined the military––it was World War Two. And the first replacement teacher comes in and the kids are sword fighting with clarinets and all that, and she left.

And then Dr. Foster came, who ended up the head of the music department at Florida A&M, and they did the same thing with him and he was gone. Then Mr. Bennett came from Oklahoma. He was a disciplinarian and knew how to handle the situation. He taught math at Tuskegee, to the Tuskegee Airmen, and had minored in music. He was the new band director there. During his summers while he was in college he played with the Jay McShann Band. He was a trumpet player, but he played all the instruments. He was a great influence and taught us so much.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Did he know your mother?

Hoyle: No, not at all. It was lucky for me that he gave me a lot of special attention. Three or four of us were interested in playing. And those of us who could read music well were playing in professional bands, because most of the grown men had gone to war.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Did you play any classical?

Hoyle: No, marches and overtures, just high school band material. We had a jazz band as well, and we played for our school’s dances and at other schools in Gary. In 1945, only one other school was integrated, which was Froebel, where my wife went. There was a strike at Froebel because they didn’t want blacks in their school if the other schools weren’t going to allow them. Frank Sinatra came to Gary in support of integration of the schools. He sang “The House I Live In” and spoke to students from all the schools in Gary at Memorial Auditorium.

He was instrumental in breaking the strike. Eventually all eight high schools were integrated. My wife was part of the greeting committee that met Sinatra at the airport. But in any event, Ernest Bennett was a big influence on me. Then I went to Hampton Institute for a year, and then to Roosevelt College, here. Renold Schilke was my teacher here. By that time I was nineteen and had been playing since I was eight.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Your mother being a teacher, was she the one who pushed you to go to college?

Hoyle: No, my whole family did––a house full of college graduates. Both my mother and father were college graduates, and my uncle was a doctor. It was assumed. He wanted me to be a doctor because his son hadn’t done it. His grandson is in residence at Rush Presbyterian right now.

I was playing freshman football and playing in the band, and he said, “You have to make up your mind. It’s one or the other.” My mother wanted me to stay involved with music. So Schilke had me play something for him, and then gave me some assignments from the Arban book. He assigned me things that he thought would improve areas that were weak in my playing, and after a while we were playing duets. It was great; he was always very supportive.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: You had been playing gigs since you were fifteen, but when did you actually know you were destined to be a full time musician?

Hoyle: Well, I wanted to do that. But my cousin-who-didn’t-become-a-doctor played saxophone and piccolo and all that in high school. He had an extensive collection of Duke Ellington and all the jazz greats, and he’d bring music from California where he was stationed. That’s where I first heard Lucky Thompson. I would lie on the floor in front of the record player at night and listen.

That’s how I learned the language of jazz––by listening and copying solos. I got involved by listening to other masters. That’s what I encourage any young players to do in my master classes. Anyway, I dropped out, because there was a threat of me being drafted because they had no ROTC at Roosevelt. I wound up joining the Air Force rather than the Army, because I thought they would surely send me to Korea. This was in 1951. I did basic in upstate New York at Sampson Air Force Base; I stayed there for twenty weeks.

Then I was at Wright-Patterson for five weeks. From there, they sent me to San Antonio to Kelly Air Force Base, and I stayed there for two years and had a great time. That’s where I met John Gilmore, who was later instrumental in getting me into Sun Ra’s Band when I came home. He was playing clarinet in the Air Force Band, and playing jazz jobs on tenor in town. There were a lot of good musicians in that Air Force band. He got me some of those jazz jobs off the base. I played piano on some of them. One of the most memorable times, we played with a lady who was in her eighties who played drums.

We were in an area where the streets weren’t paved and the piano was caked with clay. So I had to remove the front of the piano. I would play a chord on the keys and reach in and pull the hammers back myself! That was a lot of fun. [laughs]

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Didn’t you end up at an Air Force base in the Deep South?

Hoyle: Yeah, that’s right. I went from there to Warner Robins, Georgia. There were so many bases in the San Antonio area that they were cutting back on the military budget, so they disbanded our band, and I got orders to go to Iceland. Anna Rosenberg was the Assistant Secretary of the Army, and sent out a directive that said no blacks would be sent to Iceland, Saudi Arabia or Great Falls, Montana, because blacks were treated badly in those areas.

So they sent me to Georgia, and I stayed there for the last eighteen months of my military life. It was harrowing, but I made it through somehow. They were afraid to send me off the base, because it was just after the Supreme Court had passed Brown v. the Board of Education, and everyone in Georgia was pretty angry about integration.

And I was the only black in the band at that time, so I would play only on the base. And every time the band went off base I would be charge-of-quarters, answering phones or whatever. I was playing first trumpet at that time. The warrant officer, who was in charge of the band, wrote a letter to the inspector general and said they needed to send me to another base, and the inspector general responded that I would go everywhere the band went.

The first time I played off the base was for a dedication for a new medical clinic in Gray, Georgia. It was across the playground from a high school, and the speaker was Herman Talmadge, who was then the Governor of Georgia. And he made a big speech, saying that blood would run in the streets if they attempted to integrate the schools in Georgia. And blood-curdling screams were coming from the crowd.

And I’m sitting six feet from the audience, in first chair! And when they all went across the playground to cut the ribbon, I went back to the bus. A well-dressed gentleman came on the bus with cookies and finger sandwiches and punch, and told me, “I don’t want you to think we all feel that way.” That blew me away––it was a very emotional thing. And it assured me. We covered five different states, all in the South of course. It was quite an experience. We played on television every Monday night on a jazz program, so people knew who I was.

When I was getting ready to leave, the man who ran the music store, who was also on the board of education, offered me a job to be band director at an all-black high school there. I told him I didn’t have a degree and he said, “That’s all right, we’ll take care of that.” But instead, I joined Sun Ra’s band. John Gilmore recommended me to Sun Ra, so I came back in October of 1955, and joined his band in December of 1955 and stayed there until early 1957. We did a number of recordings that sold pretty well all over the world.

As happenstance would have it, John Gilmore, Julian Priester and Richard Evans, who teaches at Berklee School of Music now, were in that band. They left and joined Lionel Hampton’s group. Richard Williams got sick while they were touring Europe, and they were looking for a trumpet player. They recommended me to Lionel Hampton, and he called me and said he was coming to Gary and was wondering if I would audition.

I did, and I got the job. This was 1957. We did sixteen weeks all over Europe. And late in the tour, we went to North Africa. We played in Oran, which was the capitol of French Algeria. When we were there they were fighting the French to drive them out of Algeria.

We flew from Paris to Oran, and then took a train to Algiers. Halfway through the trip we passed a supply train that had been blown off the tracks. It was upside-down with steam coming out. Some of the Algerian guerillas got on our train with bandoliers and they said, We knew you guys were coming into town––you have nothing to worry about. So we are getting ready to get off the train––out on the coast at the station––and some guy says, “Is Art Hoyle still in the band?” In Algiers! He was a distributor for RCA/Victor records in all of North Africa, and he was a Sun Ra fan.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: So you go from the Air Force Band to Sun Ra’s band. That must have been quite a culture shock. Was there anything that could have prepared you for that?

Hoyle: Just playing jazz. Being in the Air Force playing all the time and gigging around San Antonio.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: But you were dealing with one of the biggest, most bizarre personalities in jazz, and playing avant-garde music to boot.

Hoyle: Yeah. Sun Ra wouldn’t impose any of his doctrines on me. He was very well read, but I had done some reading as well. I started reading at three and I always loved to read. He wouldn’t go into a lot of the stuff with me like he did with the other guys. For starters, he claimed he was born on Saturn! He was a great P.R. man, though. He even had some of the guys passing out flyers in subways and buses to promote our gigs.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Was part of your resistance also due to your religious upbringing?

Hoyle: Yes, I was raised Baptist. When I was getting ready to leave New York to come home, about three days before I was going to leave, I ran into John Gilmore. The Sun Ra Band had been living in Montreal, and they had just come to New York and were auditioning at Basin Street East.

I ran into Gilmore at Birdland, and he brought four members to my hotel at two o’clock in the morning. The lady across the hall heard the rattling of chains and opened the door to see what the noise was. She saw band members wearing helmets with lights on, like miners, and Sun Ra had a big gold sunburst across his chest.

And when she opened the door, she jumped back. She thought it was a bunch of Martians! [laughs] But I was glad to see everybody, and he came and we talked and all that. He had this notebook that had the equation for eternal life, and he was trying to explain that to me. He had it all figured out.

I don’t think it worked! [laughs] He was a great musician, though. We were playing as a quintet opposite the Compass Players, which later became Second City, in which Mike Nichols, Elaine May and Shelly Berman were members. One night he played “Stardust.” It was one of the most brilliant renditions I’ve heard.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: From a performance standpoint, you must have had to make some adjustments in your thinking and playing.

Hoyle: Not particularly. It was how I always played––it was just reading the music. But his music didn’t take into consideration the physical limitations of the instrument. There were wide intervals that brass players don’t normally play. We practiced everyday for five hours a day in Pat Patrick’s living room on the South Side of Chicago––who’s son is now governor of Massachusetts. We needed five hours; otherwise we would never have been able to play the music.

And we’d play dances at the Robert’s Show Lounge, out on South Parkway, for a group called the Rounders––No Squares Allowed, every Sunday afternoon. The organization was made up of postmen and policemen and milk truck drivers and beer deliverymen––guys like that. They loved jazz. The music was very accessible, and people danced to it. They were very well attended.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Describe the difference of the atmosphere of touring with Sun Ra and touring with Lionel Hampton.

Hoyle: We never toured with Sun Ra, all our jobs were around here. We “traveled” to the West Side of Chicago. [laughs] We never played out of town the whole time I was there. One of the interesting things that happened was we were playing at Budland which was downstairs in the Pershing Hotel.

We were opposite Dinah Washington. In her group she had Johnny Acie on piano, Peck Morrison on bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums. And they would do a set, and then Sun Ra’s band would do a set, or vice-versa. When I came to work one night there were a bunch of people outside the hotel, and they said Clifford Brown and Richie Powell had just got killed. They were supposed to open the following night at the Blue Note with Max Roach and Sonny Rollins. That night Max Roach and Sonny Rollins came into the club and Dinah Washington sang “Goodbye.” It was a very, very touching, moving moment. That was one of the more memorable things that happened.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: When you toured with Lionel Hampton how many pieces were in the band?

Hoyle: Seventeen, sometimes one or two less, depending upon if someone got fired or left, or they were looking for someone. The band stayed pretty much intact.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: You are on a couple of Hampton’s best recordings.

Hoyle: Yeah. Perhaps the most memorable one was when we added Cat Anderson, Donald Byrd and Charlie Persip to the band. We had two drummers on that one, called Hamp’s Big Band. The session was in New York. Later we were playing the Latin Quarter in Philadelphia, and we spent an entire day taking pictures for the album cover. And then they didn’t use the pictures. The album turned out well, though!

Chicago Jazz Magazine: What prompted you to leave Hampton’s band?

Hoyle: Well, I was offered more money by Lloyd Price. He wanted to do a more classy act––pop tunes and standards––and get a little bit removed from the rhythm and blues thing. Three of us left the band to join Lloyd: drummer Wilbert Hogan, Wade Marcus on trombone, and me. With Lionel Hampton we had been playing at the Palace in San Moritz and Gstaad, in Switzerland. We also played a job at the Rockefeller Estate in New York for Winthrop Rockefeller’s sixty-second birthday. Each member got a bottle of Mumm’s champagne as a gift.

By comparison, the first job with Lloyd Price’s band was a job out in one of the burroughs: a rock-and-roll show with all these big rock stars; and kids were screaming and tearing aerials off cars. I said, What have I gotten myself into? That was a mess. I stayed with Lloyd Price for a year-and-a-half. We did sixty-seven one-nighters from New York to Los Angeles and back. There were two busloads of musicians, including Bo Diddley and Jimmy Reed, the Shirelles, the Coasters, Big Joe Turner and others.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Why did you leave the band?

Hoyle: My wife kept asking, When are you coming home? Well, after giving notice to Lloyd Price I went to a rehearsal with Slide Hampton when he had his octet. He had a guy from the MJT Plus Three, Willie Thomas. They had Walter Perkins, the great tenor player, George Coleman…all these great players. I was offered a six-week tour: two in Cleveland, two in Pittsburgh and two in Philadelphia, and I said, “No, I told my wife I’m coming home.” And in those days they had those jam sessions in lofts.

And at one of these sessions I met Patti Bown, who was playing with Quincy, they were great friends from Seattle, and she said, “We’re going into Basin Street East––three weeks with Peggy Lee and two weeks with Billy Eckstine.” And I said, “No, I told my wife I’m coming home in a few minutes.” I’d been saying that for five years! So I turned both those jobs down––with all the best players who were doing all that kind of work in New York!

So I came home. My wife wanted to get out of the classroom because the kids were getting so outrageous. So she went to get her masters in Library Science to get out of the classroom, but you have to work off your sabbatical for two years. She had one year to go. Our dream was to move to New York after that one year. But when I got home, I got a job with Red Saunders at the Regal Theater. While with Red at the Theater, Quincy Jones was coming to the Regal and Johnny Pate was the contractor for Quincy and his Orchestra.

Most of the musicians were from New York, but he needed to contract trumpets for that engagement. John Howell was hired to play lead trumpet for the show. John had played with Stan Kenton, Woody Herman and Billy Eckstine, and was one of Chicago’s leading studio players. The week-long show featured Billy Eckstine, Freda Payne, Coles & Atkins––Cholly Atkins taught all the guys in Motown those steps, one of the classiest acts in Vaudeville––and Nipsey Russell was the comedian and emcee.

I was playing fourth trumpet, and fourth trumpet doubles the lead, but an octave lower––so it’s very important to the lead trumpet player. And John was very impressed with my phrasing and intonation. He recommended me to the contractors with all the studio work downtown. John said to the contractors, “I want this guy in the studio with me. Some of the guys you’re hiring are relatives or friends or ex-army buddies, and they can’t play!”

It was political. So I started playing downtown, doing radio and television commercials. When I first got into the studio, Bruce Swedien, the head engineer came out of the booth and said, “Now I can hear the fourth trumpet!” He’s the guy who designed the soundboard for Michael Jackson’s Thriller. He’s a fantastic engineer.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Didn’t you also work for CBS?

Hoyle: Yes. This was during the height of the civil rights movement, in 1962. The president of Local 10, the white union, asked Red Saunders, advisor to the president of the union, for some black musicians that he felt were qualified to work for the CBS staff orchestra. And he recommended Truck Parham, Frank Derrick and me. Shortly thereafter, nine of us joined the Local 10.

That was in 1962, and it took a few years for the unions to merge. I was the first one to work downtown––at that time blacks didn’t work downtown full-time. Anyway, I worked at CBS from 1962 to ’64. During the first year, CBS aired a local contest for singers. The winner would be on the Ed Sullivan Show.

And John Frigo’s wife won! But in general, there wasn’t much work for the orchestra, because most of the national shows came from New York or Hollywood, so they discontinued the orchestra during the second year. In fact, there was so little work thatsome of the string players lived in Florida and flew up for the gigs! [laughs] I took a big pay cut to leave the studio and go to CBS.

I was making a lot of money playing jingles and playing in the clubs and hotels at night. When I took the job at CBS it paid about 200 dollars a week, and we were frozen––we couldn’t do anything but that and record sessions. We couldn’t play jingles or play at the hotels or clubs, unless you left the jurisdiction of the union. So I started going on the road with Ralph Marterie’s band. I was the first black in that band, playing lead again.

We were in Indianapolis, and during the first set Ralph came back to me and said, “Do you realize you are the Jackie Robinson of my band?” and I said, “I kind of got that feeling.” He was a good guy: real supportive and a great person, and we became good friends.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: At the time, were you aware that everywhere you were going you were breaking new ground?

Hoyle: Absolutely, that’s why I was doing it. My best friend’s college roommate was Sam Greenlee, who wrote The Spook Who Sat By The Door, an important book at that time about white firms hiring blacks and having them sit in front so everyone could see them. And we were in his room listening to Charlie Parker With Strings, because that was what was new then––this was 1949. I didn’t realize I’d be the “spook who sat by the door” in so many instances.

Chicago Jazz Magazine: Was Jackie Robinson an inspiration for you musically?

Hoyle: I guess I didn’t exactly think about it in those terms. They were just opportunities to do something. I had given up a lot of money for political reasons. John Howell would ask me, “Why did you do that?” It was an opportunity to break the racial ceiling. He and I had become good friends working together all the time, playing with Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee, Lena Horne. I left all that to take the CBS job, just because of what it was.

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