A native of Philadelphia, Red Rodney began his music career at age 15, and he ended up performing in numerous big bands before being inspired by the new bebop sounds of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Red ultimately ended up playing with "Bird" for two years, and many of his fans will recall that the red-headed trumpeter, the only white sideman playing with Parker at the time, was able to help Parker's band get around laws in some of the southern states which forbade mixed bands by pretending to be an albino! That's right, he would often pretend to be "Albino Red," a blues singer.
William Gottlieb's portrait of Charlie Parker and Red Rodney, watching Dizzy Gillespie, Margie Hyams, and Chuck Wayne -- Downbeat, New York, N.Y., ca. 1947].
Red Rodney's career was derailed when he got into drugs and he wound up going to prison several times during the fifties and sixties, where during one stint in Terminal Island prison he was incarcerated along with Charles Manson. Red had also executed many successful cons which would sometimes land him in prison for extended stays, but he would always earn parole.
In the 1960s, Red would eventually make his home in Las Vegas, where he began working in the orchestra pit bands at the Flamingo and other Strip casino showrooms during the 60's, befriending celebrities like Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra, heavyweight prize-fighter Sonny Liston and Vegas mob boss Johnny Roselli.
Red eventually returned to jazz in the 1970s, appearing on Johnny Carson's "The Tonight Show," and numerous other TV shows. He played the jazz circuit, working his way thru the club scene up and down the west coast. He played with other jazz musicians, including Charlie Rouse, and another old friend, jazz musician Ira Sullivan, with whome he'd recorded with in the 1950s. They formed a new group and began recording again in New York, leading to several new albums, including Live At The Village Vanguard , which became a modest hit. Red’s career rebounded, spurred by the interest of new, younger jazz fans.
In the mid-80's, Red Rodney consulted on Clint Eastwood's Bird, a film bio-pic about legendary jazz musician Charlie Parker, playing his own trumpet solos for the film's soundtrack. During that decade, Rodney was inaugurated into Playboy's Jazz Hall of Fame. In 1990, Downbeat readers voted him in the magazine's Hall of Fame, voting him Best Acoustic Jazz Group leader and putting him second behind Wynton Marsallis -- a former student of his -- as best trumpet player.
Red flew to Europe three times a year to tour. In 1992, he played with the Rolling Stones' drummer Charlie Watts in England, and performed live for the last time in 1993 for President Bill Clinton at the White House, for a television special. By 1993, he had recorded more than 20 albums over his career, including four with Charlie Parker and two with Dexter Gordon. A studio album he had recorded with Sullivan, Spirit Within, was awarded a Grammy in 1982, and Red was also nominated for two other Grammys. He was touring up to 50 weeks a year and took time off to teach jazz music to college students.
In his last years he continued to enjoy a renewed career until his death from lung cancer (due to a 4 pack a day habit), on May 27, 1994, which prompted a memorial from jazz musicians who displayed lit candles in the windows of jazz clubs from New York to San Francisco. His son Mark Rodney, also a musician --there's a photo in the Pics section of Ira Sullivan, Mark and his dad Red -- received numerous letters of sympathy and condolences from Red's fans, friends and admirers, including letters from President and Mrs. Clinton, actor-director Clint Eastwood, and Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts phoned and sent flowers.
William Gottlieb's portrait of Georgie Auld and band, with Red Rodney (center), New York, N.Y., ca. Aug. 1947
A COLLECTION OF RED RODNEY QUOTES:
"The moment I heard Charlie Parker,I understood everything. Sitting there, I'll never forget the emotion I had."
"I think he could play a tomato can and make it sound good." - Red on Charlie Parker's immense talent
"One time I saw him eat three jazz critics in a single sitting. He washed them down with two bottles of Mexican beer -- they were kind of dry and stringy." - Red on Charlie Parker's voracious appetite
"‘I think that a lot of the good things in the music were because of drug use. The tempos where guys really played on them ... The tunes with the great changes in it ... When a guy is loaded and at peace, he ... could tune out the honking of the world. And, 'Hey man, I just figured this out,' and we'd try it that night, and it was great." - Red Rodney on drug use and playing high
"It's important to develop a repertory of standards to keep audiences happy when you play commercial jobs. Since you're background and they're not really listening anyway, you can get away with improvising if you play tunes they know. If you play standards, they will accept whatever you do with them. "- Red Rodney
"The melody never lies".- Red Rodney
""...I always felt that Bird didn't really play with the knowledge of chord changes. His instinct was so great, and his ear was so great and his ability on his horn was so great that he really didn't have to know. But I caught him a couple of times. I asked him, 'Where does the bridge go?' Like on 'The Song Is You'. And he said 'B flat seventh". And I looked at him, like 'what'? And I saw that Al Haig was laughing. And I thought, 'Wait a minute, is he putting me on or what?" And it happened two or three more times on different tunes, and it was always 'B flat seventh'. You know, it might have been F sharp minor seventh or something, and I said, 'Oh oh, maybe he doesn't know'. [...] But what's the difference? He never played wrong. He always played beautifully." (p. 48-9)
At the end of interview (p. 54): "I said that I suspect he didn't know the changes, formally. He didn't know that B flat minor seventh went to E flat into A flat. He didn't know that. I think. I'm not sure I'm right... Yes, I am sure I'm right, because many times I asked him where we were, what chord that was and he always gave me that off-the-wall answer." above quotes by Red Rodney were taken from interview with Ben Sidran, from his book Talking Jazz, An Oral History, pp. 45-54
"Playing at a jazz festival is like an all-star baseball game. When you put all stars together who haven't played together, it's never really that good. That's what I wish concert promoters would learn. For instance, the promoter at a major East Coast jazz festival is taking Ira Sullivan and me by ourselves this year, and we're going to have to use one of the festival's rhythm sections. I don't know who they are yet. They're all going to be stars with big names, but it's not going to be the same as playing with your own group." - Red Rodney
"Ira Sullivan and I are still really bebop players, but we've embraced the newer modal-like forms and have molded our individual styles of playing towards them. The young people in our group also help us with this. We're playing original tunes with today's patterns, changes, modes and feelings. - Red on his later recordings with Ira Sullivan
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