Lammar Wright, Jr.

The family that plays trumpets together...well, what do they do? Stays rump-fit together? Sautés crumpets together? A legitimate poet should no doubt be consulted to provide the ultimate rhyme scheme, but for factual information the career of the Wright family of Kansas City is the obvious place to look. Lammar Wright Sr. was a big-band trumpeter who stayed with the hysterical band of Cab Calloway for nearly two decades. Two of the male offspring he fathered, Lammar Wright Jr. and Elmon Wright, were also trumpeters. All three were into jazz, although the younger generation took advantage of opportunities that came along in R&B, rock & roll, doo wop, and other genres that hired session musicians. The fact that these are obscure figures despite quite large discographies and associations with leading musical stars might have something to do with the incredible confusion between the junior and senior "Lammarelatives." Many recordings left off the identifying abbreviation; live recordings or airshots can be mystifying, since on at least a few occasions father would substitute for son, and vice versa. At 16, Lammar Wright Jr. was performing professionally with the Lionel Hampton band, meaning that he must have started with local bands at least a few years earlier. The adolescent start has led to some important losses, such as the performer's childhood and the sanity of discographers trying to figure out who is playing on a record, father or son. Normally a somewhat wider gap separates recordings by a junior and senior, meaning much less squinting at other details for a reasonable clue. But by entering the music scene in the early '40s, Wright Jr. put his feet on a track that would lead to revolutionary musical developments. While Wright Sr. played with Calloway; Wright Jr., on the other heighdy-heighdy-heighdy-ho, played with Dizzy Gillespie, who had been forced to scat right out of the Calloway band for playing weird notes during his solos. Gillespie, obviously quite knowledgeable when it comes to trumpets, knew he had the Wright stuff when he found this family, and also hired Elmon Wright for his trumpet section. Wright Jr. also gravitated toward the steady work available from a variety of cooking R&B artists such as the raucous Wynonie Harris and the regal Esther Phillips. The trumpeter shows up on some records by the Coasters and Otis Redding and is without a doubt part of the uncredited studio bands on many other similar recordings from the '50s and '60s. This type of work was certainly desirable as it became harder and harder for big bands to work, but Wright Jr. didn't seem to mind grabbing a section seat in such an outfit when it was available. After wiping out the rest of his teenage years with Hampton, he moved onto the Charlie Barnet big band for several years. He later even had a brief association with Stan Kenton, whose modernistic charts were obviously influenced by some of the Hampton band's more eccentric traits. Wright Jr. eventually settled on the West Coast, where he died in the early '80s. ~ Eugene Chadbourne