Notable jazz artists who would've turned 100 years old in 2025

 

As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, jazz celebrates roughly its 125th, having emerged out of New Orleans as a mix of cultural styles near the dawn of the 20th Century.
By the 1920s, culturally referred to as the "Roaring Twenties," jazz had become a phenomenon. And many of its most prominent historical figures would be born in 1925 during both Prohibition and the big band swing era, and emerge during the 1950s, when the frenetic bebop style segued into a new decade of hard bop, cool and modal jazz, and bossa nova tributaries.

Roy Haynes (1925-2024). Literally a drummer for the ages, Haynes was recording and performing near full capacity into his 90s, coming up only four months short of 100 years old before dying last year. Born in the integrated Roxbury neighborhood in Boston, the self-taught Haynes became so busy as a professional musician in his mid-teens that he dropped out of Roxbury Memorial High School.
Shortly thereafter, the rising drummer started a career of star associations. During the 1940s, Haynes worked with Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Bud Powell. In the 1950s, that list expanded to include Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, Billie Holiday, and Thelonious Monk. Still working with Parker in 1952, Haynes politely declined Duke Ellington's offer to join his band, thinking that his style might not suit such an orchestral sound.
Truthfully, Haynes was more than versatile enough to percolate with such bebop legends, yet still provide supple accompaniment to Fitzgerald, Vaughan and Holiday, the holy trinity of female jazz singers. The drummer also started a long series of recordings under his own name in 1954, and released the late gem [i]Fountain of Youth[i] in 2003 when he was 79 years old. Never lacking in personality, he would often stand up and tap dance as part of his unaccompanied drum solos.
Haynes would also collaborate with John and Alice Coltrane, Chick Corea, Gary Burton, and Pat Metheny, among many others. Perhaps such dexterity was a reason he might not have the name recognition of jazz drumming greats from Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich to Max Roach and Tony Williams.
Yet Haynes lived long enough, performing and recording at a high level, to encompass the shifting jazz styles of those icons -- from swing and bebop to avant-garde and jazz/fusion. Playing with Vaughan through the '50s introduced many to his assertive snare drum and hi-hat cymbals, punctuating bass drum accents, and ride cymbal patterns. And importantly, unlike many of his associates and contemporaries listed here, his discipline allowed him to avoid the drug pitfalls that led to their untimely deaths well before the age of 99.

Oscar Peterson (1925-2007). A Canadian who overachieved in an American art form, the Montreal, Quebec-born Peterson's dazzling technique would result in his reputation as one of the greatest jazz pianists of all-time.
Influenced by disparate pianists like Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson and Nat King Cole, Peterson fused his early classical training with a love of traditional jazz, and his lengthy practice routines resulted in cascading solos before his age reached double-digits. By age 14, he'd won an amateur talent contest; by 1945, he'd become a fixture on multiple Canadian radio stations and turned down offers to join successful bands in the United States because his parents felt he wasn't ready.
Promoter Norman Granz started a long career association with Peterson when he included the pianist in one of his Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York City in 1949. Performing with bassist Ray Brown, and on a bill with other stars like Charlie Parker, Buddy Rich, Lester Young and Roy Eldridge, Peterson had arrived, both literally and figuratively.
The gifted pianist became a fixture through the 1950s on the worldwide Jazz at the Philharmonic tours presented by Granz, who would also become Peterson's manager through 1988. The Canadian's first American recordings were in 1950 for Verve, Granz's label, with bassist Brown, who'd be by his side for the next 15 years. Many of those would be in a trio format, first with drummer Charlie Smith, then former Cole Trio guitarist Irving Ashby. His replacements, guitarists Barney Kessel and Herb Ellis, yielded some of Peterson's most popular recordings and live appearances. Drummer Ed Thigpen replaced Ellis from 1959-1965, with no drop in either the trio's dexterity or popularity.
Peterson won eight Grammy Awards between 1975 and 1997, including one for the album [i]The Trio[i] (1973), yet another acclaimed trio effort with guitarist Joe Pass and bassist Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen. The '70s also had him recording with Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie and Stephane Grappelli. Peterson reunited his trio with Brown and Ellis in 1990, releasing two live albums that resulted in three Grammys, before a 1993 stroke that limited his playing ability through the rest of his life.

Jimmy Smith (1925-2005). An outlier among the musicians listed here in more ways than one, Hammond organist Smith is not only the lone player who needed to plug his instrument in, but the only one whose birthdate is disputed (many sources list it as 1928).
The ahead-of-his-time Smith has electrified every Hammond organist since, including in the blues and rock genres. He took the grinding sound of the B3 organ from novelty to eventual primary status in jazz through the 1950s, then helped to establish the soul-jazz niche into the 1960s. The Pennsylvania native had previously studied piano at the Hamilton School of Music and Ornstein's School of Music in the late 1940s, before switching to Hammond and taking a year of practice to hone his influential sound.
Already adept at stride piano -- having won contests in the style in his childhood -- Smith cut the tremolo off on the organ to emulate the great horn players and pianists of the era: from Coleman Hawkins, Don Byas and Arnett Cobb to Art Tatum, Bud Powell and Erroll Garner. Without many non-church influences on his electric instrument, Smith's creative approach and signature sound would result in him becoming perhaps the most influential Hammond organist of all-time.
Smith's series of Blue Note releases between 1956 and 1963 included collaborations with guitarists Wes Montgomery and Kenny Burrell and saxophonists Stanley Turrentine, Jackie McLean and Lou Donaldson, and Smith's 1957 appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival introduced him to a wider audience.
A decade of recordings on the Verve label between 1963 and 1972 included multiple big band efforts with arrangements by Oliver Nelson and Lalo Schifrin, plus a live album with a sextet lineup that would gain notoriety more than 20 years later. [i]Root Down[i] (1972), featuring Smith's composition "Root Down (And Get It)," would be sampled by hip-hop trio the Beastie Boys for their own song "Root Down" on their 1994 album [i]Ill Communication[i].
A late Smith career highlight, the bluesy 2001 Verve recording [i]Dot Com Blues[i], featured all-star guests B.B. King, Etta James, Dr. John, Keb Mo', and Taj Mahal.

Gunther Schuller (1925-2015). A Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, French horn player, conductor, educator, author and historian, Schuller is nonetheless likely best-remembered as the leading proponent of the "Third Stream" movement -- a term he coined in 1957 to describe a hybrid of jazz and classical music.
It was Schuller who bravely introduced jazz into the curriculum of the New England Conservatory, a staunchly classical institution, as its president from 1967-1977. He'd previously started playing French horn with the New York Philharmonic at age 15, then became a young principal horn player with the Cincinnati Symphony and Metropolitan Opera orchestras in 1943 and 1945, respectively.
Schuller veered toward jazz primarily because of elegant composer/pianists Duke Ellington (even composing a [i]Symphonic Tribute To Duke Ellington[i] in 1955) and John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Schuller's 1955 work [i]Twelve By Eleven[i] featured a chamber orchestra doing the practically unthinkable -- improvising like jazz musicians. His first of several books, [i]Horn Technique[i], was published in 1962 and remains a standard educational tool.
Constantly pushing perceived boundaries, Schuller took what he learned teaching at the Yale School of Music (1964-1967) to the New England Conservatory, a school forever energized and changed following his decade of leadership. Jazz itself also changed in Schuller's wake from that era. The genre's musicians, particularly pianists and horn players, are now more likely to study and perform challenging classical pieces to hone their technique as both players and composers.
The New England Conservatory Ragtime Ensemble, under Schuller's leadership, won a 1973 Grammy Award for its interpretations of Scott Joplin material on [i]The Red Back Book[i]. His Pulitzer Prize came in 1994 for his orchestral [i]Of Reminiscences and Reflections[i], followed by [i]The Black Warrior[i] (1998), his oratorio based on Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letters From the Birmingham Jail." Schuller would earn a Jazz Masters fellowship for advocacy in 2008, and the Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding contributions to his field in 2015, the year of his death.

Cal Tjader (1925-1982). Non-Latin bandleaders don't often succeed in Latin music in general; Latin jazz in particular. Which is part of what eventually made vibraphonist Tjader, born in St. Louis, Missouri to Swedish-American parents who were touring vaudeville performers, unique.
Tjader's family settling into the San Francisco peninsula town of San Mateo, California during his childhood would play a pivotal role. It was there that the vibraphonist first met and worked with iconic pianist Dave Brubeck and saxophonist Paul Desmond in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and later joined pianist George Shearing's quintet. The blind British pianist made frequent tour stops in New York City, introducing Tjader to the Latin jazz bands led by percussionists Machito and Tito Puente.
The effects would prove profound. After leaving Shearing's group, Tjader formed his own recording unit, releasing more than 20 albums on the Fantasy label between 1954 and 1962 alone -- with musicians including pianists Eddie Palmieri and Vince Guaraldi, saxophonists Stan Getz and Paul Horn, and percussionists Mongo Santamaria, Willie Bobo and Armando Peraza. The Cal Tjader Modern Mambo Quintet also proved to be the stars of the second Monterey Jazz Festival in 1959.
After signing to the Verve label in 1963, Tjader enjoyed his biggest hit in 1964 with a retitled Dizzy Gillespie/Chano Pozo composition called "Soul Sauce." The tune, which Tjader had started playing in San Francisco nightclubs 10 years earlier, found its footing in New York radio. The Midwesterner who'd moved to the West Coast, then found a largely East Coast groove, had finally come full circle.
Fruitful through the '50s and '60s, Tjader veered into jazz/fusion in the 1970s before returning to Latin jazz for his final several releases on Concord Picante, a subsidiary label of Concord Records. One, [i]La Onda Va Bien[i] (1979), won a 1980 Grammy Award for "Best Latin Recording" before Tjader died two years later from a heart attack at age 56. He's since become a much-sampled artist by hip-hop groups like A Tribe Called Quest, who used his song "Aquarius" (from his 1968 release [i]The Prophet[i]) as a recurring theme on their 1993 album [i]Midnight Marauders[i].

Mel Torme (1925-1999). Arguably the most versatile of the artists listed here, Torme was an acclaimed vocalist, composer, pianist, drummer, actor and author.
Born in Chicago to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Torme would become best-known for the smooth, mellow timbre of his singing voice, resulting in the nickname "The Velvet Fog." An early bloomer, he sang professionally at age 4; performed in vaudeville while 6, appeared on radio while 8, and composed his first hit, "Lament To Love" for trumpeter Harry James, at 15.
At 16, Torme was hired as the drummer for a band led by Chico Marx, of the famed Marx Brothers. A move to Los Angeles with his family preceded Torme's motion picture debut in 1943 in [i]Higher and Higher[i], a musical also featuring Frank Sinatra. Still a teenager, Torme also earned stardom as lead singer of vocal group The Mel-Tones. That fame allowed him to eventually share stages and recording studios with clarinetist Artie Shaw and vocalists Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan.
A compositional partnership with songwriter Robert Wells started in the mid-1940s and yielded hundreds of tunes. "The Christmas Song," written by the duo in 1946, became a classic hit for Nat King Cole. Yet Torme's Hollywood success (his hit song "Blue Moon" emerged from appearing with Mickey Rooney in [i]Words and Music[i]) helped make him a crooning commercial star for his recording label, Capitol Records.
In 1949,Torme got more artistic control over his release [i]California Suite[i], which featured more of his jazz sensibilities on 11 original songs and resulted in critical and financial success. But it also caused "The Velvet Fog" to change direction. Torme left Capitol in 1952, signing later with the smaller imprint Bethlehem Records, which stressed creative control by its artists. Now able to vamp and scat-sing, he found his niche there on recordings like [i]It's a Blue World[i] (1955) before Bethlehem folded in 1957. Torme resurged as musical director for [i]The Judy Garland Television Show[i] in the 1960s; paired with pianist George Shearing in the 1970s (winning Grammy Awards together in the early 1980s), and authored books about Garland and drummer Buddy Rich before the consummate all-around artist suffered a stroke in 1996.

Notable others: Saxophonist Gene Ammons (1925-1974), vocalist June Christy (1925-1990), vocalist Earl Coleman (1925-1995), pianist Michael "Dodo" Marmarosa (1925-2002), saxophonist/flutist James Moody (1925-2010), saxophonist Art Pepper (1925-1982), and saxophonist John Haley "Zoot" Sims (1925-1985).