April is Jazz Appreciation Month, a national observance created to spotlight the musicians who shaped America’s homegrown art form. In Mobile, that means looking back at the city’s own contributions to jazz history, including one of the most respected trombonists the genre has produced: Urbie Green.
Green was born in Mobile on August 8, 1926, and started out on piano before picking up the trombone around age 12, following in the footsteps of his older brothers. Though he later cited swing-era trombonists like Tommy Dorsey and Jack Teagarden as early listening influences, Green said his own playing style owed more to bebop pioneers Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Lester Young.
A Career Among Jazz’s Biggest Names
Green’s professional career took him through some of the most storied bandstands in American music. He played with Gene Krupa’s band in 1947 and joined Woody Herman’s Thundering Herd in 1950, and he later performed with Benny Goodman and Frank Sinatra. After Tommy Dorsey’s death in 1956, Green was chosen to lead the Dorsey orchestra, a mark of the esteem in which he was held by his peers.
Down Beat magazine’s International Critics Poll voted him New Star trombonist in 1954, and over the course of his career he appeared on more than 250 recordings and released over twenty albums under his own name, including “The Persuasive Trombone of Urbie Green” and “Twenty-One Trombones,” the latter produced with Enoch Light.
The “Green Monster”
In the 1970s, Green experimented with an amplified setup nicknamed the “Green Monster”: a King trombone fitted with a King Vox Amp pickup in the mouthpiece, run through an octave doubler and reverb unit. He used the modified horn on a number of notable recordings during the decade, working alongside Enoch Light and the Light Brigade, Dick Hyman, Maynard Ferguson, and Doc Severinsen.
Green’s ties to Mobile and his standing among jazz musicians nationally earned him induction into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame in 1995, cementing his place among the Port City’s most celebrated musical exports.