Freddie Hubbard

Born in Indianapolis in 1938, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard was one of the most skilled and in-demand figures of the post-bop era. His talent was quickly noticed: Hubbard played with Wes and Monk Montgomery as a teenager before he moved to New York in 1958, where he soon became an ubiquitous figure. In 1960 he signed with Blue Note Records, releasing a string of superb hard bop albums, but his versatility was most apparent in his work as a sideman. He replaced Lee Morgan as the trumpeter in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1961, sticking with the band until 1966 while also playing on avant-garde classics like Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz and John Coltrane’s Ascension and making essential contributions to Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch! and Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and the Abstract Truth. Hubbard’s greatest success came in the 1970s, when he made several electric-flavoured albums for CTI Records before forming the V.S.O.P. Quintet with former members of the Miles Davis Quintet—Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams—later in the decade. He continued to play and record solid hard bop through the 1980s. A 1992 lip injury slowed him down before he died of complications from a heart attack in 2008.