Farmer, Arthur Stewart

▪ 2000

“Art” 

      American jazz musician (b. Aug. 21, 1928, Council Bluffs, Iowa—d. Oct. 4, 1999, New York, N.Y.), created trumpet solos with a singular devotion to lyricism and form and became one of the most versatile improvisers of his generation. While his flair for alternating flowing lines and contrasting phrases made him kin to the bebop masters Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Navarro, Farmer abandoned bop's dramatic high notes and virtuoso complexity to concentrate on pure melody. The warmth of his tone was especially important in his ballad playing; in the 1960s he switched from the trumpet to the less-brassy flugelhorn, and in the early '90s he played a self-designed instrument, the “flumpet,” a cross of flugelhorn and trumpet. Raised in Phoenix, Ariz., Farmer and his bass-playing twin brother, Addison, moved to Los Angeles when they were 16 years old. Farmer worked in a series of Los Angeles-based bands before touring in 1952 with the Lionel Hampton big band and moving to New York City the next year. There he began recording frequently with large and small bands, often with his rhythmically relaxed solos poised amid aggressive hard-bop groups; national prominence grew with his late-1950s memberships in the “hot” Horace Silver Quintet and the comparatively “cool” Gerry Mulligan Quartet. With composer-saxophonist Benny Golson, Farmer coled the Jazztet, a top hard-bop sextet of the early 1960s, before forming (1962) his own, more intimate quartet. In 1968 he moved to Vienna, joined a radio jazz orchestra, and spent the rest of his career performing around the world, often with pickup groups, sometimes reuniting with longtime friends, including (from 1982) the reorganized Jazztet.

* * *