The role of bass players in mainstream jazz is not to attract attention but to support and sustain. This was never better demonstrated than when Wilfred Middlebrooks, who has died aged 74, helped Ella Fitzgerald busk her way through a version of Mack the Knife that gained her a Grammy award. The album in question was Ella in Berlin, a live recording made before an audience of 12,000 people in 1960, and Ella's selection of the song was both spontaneous and seemingly ill-advised, according to Middlebrooks. "My heart sank," he said later. "I knew Ella didn't know the tune and nor did I." Despite several impromptu changes of key and a sense that, "Ella was about as lost as she can get and I was hanging on by a fingernail," her freewheeling performance - described as "hilariously inventive" by one critic - is still talked about today.
Middlebrooks was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the son of a bassist who played semi-professionally and a pianist mother. After early piano lessons, he began to dabble with the bass when only 12, encouraged by his grandmother, his obvious promise furthered by lessons with the principal bassist of the Chattanooga Symphony.
Overcome by wanderlust, the 15-year old Middlebrooks left home without a word, his father's bass in tow, to play with a touring carnival show. "First he knew was when I sent a card from San Antonio, Texas. He was going to come after me but I travelled too fast," Middlebrooks told me in 1961, adding that he was about to return the bass to his father after a lapse of a dozen years. The show travelled around the southern states and the young bassist said he learned a lot from his fellow musicians, including the veteran New Orleans trumpeter Punch Miller. He also fathered a couple of children while on the road but made sure, he told me, to stay in touch as they grew up.
When the show stopped off in New York in 1950, Middlebrooks moved over to ex-Basie saxophonist Tab Smith's swing combo, then very popular on the African-American club circuit. Smith toured extensively, the band's recordings revealing Middlebrooks's sturdy line and strong swing feeling. Drafted into the US Army in 1953 and stationed at Camp Stewart, Georgia, he played tuba in the marching band and string bass in the unit dance orchestra. Briefly back with Smith after being demobbed, he opted to settle in California and immediately began to get work with the city's best modern jazz outfits. His main employer was the distinguished reedman Buddy Collette, but Middlebrooks also performed in clubs and on record with instrumentalists like Frank Rosolino, Plas Johnson and Bill Holman.
After Fitzgerald's manager Norman Granz invited him, in 1958, to join her accompanying band, Middlebrooks stayed on the road with the singer for the next five years. Never free for long, they toured endlessly, including four visits to Britain, often in tandem with Jazz at the Philharmonic, Granz's other concert package. There was a slew of Fitzgerald albums, featuring her quartet led by alternating pianists Paul Smith and Lou Levy with Middlebrooks invariably on hand, until he felt he had to call it a day. "Ella simply wore people out," he said. "I was a young cat so I hung in there longer than most, but Ella even wore me out in the end."
Back in Los Angeles, Middlebrooks joined reeds innovator Eric Dolphy's band at Club Oasis, also playing for 13 years with pianist Smith at the Velvet Turtle in Redondo Beach, and recording frequently. He appeared on screen in the 1977 movie New York, New York, cast as - what else? - a bass player. When his jazz work dwindled, Middlebrooks entered the US Postal Service, a haven for many jazz musicians. After retiring in 1991, he resumed freelance playing, often returning to Chattanooga to teach children free at the city's African-American Museum.
Lauded for his "impeccable intonation, sensitivity and sympathetic nature", Middlebrooks is survived by his second wife Ernestine and three children from an earlier marriage.
· Wilfred Roland "Walkin' Willie" Middlebrooks, jazz bassist, born July 17 1933; died March 13 2008
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