PORT TOWNSEND — Bud Shank, former artistic director of Centrum’s Jazz Port Townsend program and a renowned alto jazz saxophonist whose career spanned 60 years, has died at his home in Tucson, Ariz.
He was 82.
Cause of death was listed as pulmonary failure.
While Shank had “some ongoing health issues,” according to JazzTimes.com, the Web site said a few days before his death last Thursday he had been in San Diego, recording a new album.
Funeral arrangements were pending.
Born May 27, 1926, in Dayton, Ohio, Clifford Everett “Bud” Shank tried his hand at a variety of woodwinds before settling on the saxophone.
He attended college in North Carolina and worked with saxophonist Charlie Barnet before moving to California in the late 1940s, where he played with trumpeter Shorty Rogers and then pianist Stan Kenton.
He was one of the early stars of Kenton’s Innovations in Modern Music band and was closely associated with the emergence of swinging “West Coast” jazz in the 1950s.
Working with guitarist Laurindo Almeida, Shank was also one of the first jazz musicians to explore Brazilian music.
In the late 1970s, a revitalized jazz scene saw Shank emerge with a new quartet, LA 4, which included guitarist Laurindo Almeida and bassist Ray Brown.
Always exploring new musical frontiers, Shank also played with India’s star sitar-player Ravi Shankar, Japanese kotoist Kimio Eto and London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Shank cut a number of albums for the international music label World Pacific from the 1950s to the ’70s.
In 2005 he formed the Bud Shank Big Band in Los Angeles.
He was scheduled to headline at the Tucson Jazz Society’s spring series of concerts later this month.
He was honored in 2008 by the Tucson group and the Los Angeles Jazz Society with their lifetime achievement awards.
“Shank’s cool but always strongly swinging sound has made him one of a handful of saxophone players with an instantly recognizable and always exciting sound,” the Tucson Jazz Society said in its award citation.
“Bud Shank has more than earned his status as a legend.”
Fired in 2004
In July 2004, Shank and nationally known Port Townsend poet Sam Hamill, program director of the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference Reading & Lectures Series, were abruptly given their walking papers by Centrum’s then-executive director, Thatcher Bailey, and the group’s board of directors.
Shank had been director of Jazz Port Townsend, a jazz workshop, for 21 years at Centrum, which is based in Port Townsend’s Fort Worden State Park.
Bailey said “a change in philosophy” led to the terminations.
Shank said he wasn’t upset that Centrum decided to make a change, but he’s angered by the way the change was handled.
“It’s not what they did, but how,” Shank said during a telephone interview with the Peninsula Daily News from Tucson.
“They sent me a letter saying my services were terminated. It’s not the best way to do things like that.”
‘Bud’s legacy is deep’
Gregg Miller, Jazz Program manager at Centrum, posted a memorial to Shank at Centrum’s Web site on Friday.
“It’s hard to overstate the impact he had on the [jazz] program,” Miller wrote.
“Bud believed strongly that the most important credential for our faculty was that they be outstanding performers, and that they could also communicate the magic of what they do through their teaching.
“The program grew tremendously under this model, and we continue to follow it today. Bud’s legacy here is deep.
“When I arrived at Centrum as Jazz Program manger in the fall of 1999, Bud immediately started working with me to plan the next summer’s program.
“It was clear from the outset that he was passionate about setting a high standard.
“As with playing jazz, he felt the workshop could be a lot of fun, but in order to be fun it had to be good. I learned a great deal from him, for which I’ll always be grateful.
“While he was always known as a top-level sax player, early in his career Bud became highly sought after for his extraordinary flute playing.
“Once, in the early 1990s, I asked him once why he no longer played the flute.
“Looking at his alto [sax] he was holding, he said:
“‘I came to a point in my life where I realized that if I wanted to be truly excellent at something I’d have to choose one thing to focus on, and I chose this.’
“The intensity with which he said that has always stuck with me.
“Bud was recording in San Diego just two days before he died, and his playing was great.
“He went out swinging, for sure.”
