Born James Louis Johnson in Indianapolis, Indiana on January 22, 1924, J.J. Johnson was a jazz trombonist, arranger, and composer. Initially operating as a Dixieland and swing musician, Johnson gravitated towards bebop and was one of the earliest trombonists to do so. His musical training began at the age of 9, when he began learning to play piano. He switched to trombone at the age of 14 and began playing with leaders like Clarence Love and Snookum Russell at the beginning of the 1940s. In 1945, he joined Count Basie’s big band and played and toured with him for a year, exiting the band in 1946. Later that year, he began playing bebop when he received encouragement from the genre’s co-inventor Dizzy Gillespie. In the following years, Johnson played with a variety of bebop musicians including Illinois Jacquet, Max Roach, Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, Oscar Pettiford, and others. In 1954, he joined forces with Kai Winding as The Jay and Kai Quintet, achieving great success over the next two years. The duo split amicably, and Johnson pursued a career as a bandleader. J.J. Johnson fronted quartets and sextets but his recordings with his quintet are considered some of his best. While the group’s members would change quite frequently over the years, some of the musicians who played with the J.J. Johnson Quintet include Bobby Jaspar, Bud Powell, Elvin Jones, Hank Mobley, Horace Silver, Max Roach, Nat Adderley, and Sonny Rollins. The quintet made their first appearance in the late 1940s with several single releases credited to the Jay Jay Johnson Quintette, Jay Jay Johnson and His Modern Jazz Quintette, and the Jay Jay Johnson Quintet. By the mid-1950s, the group’s name had finally settled as the J.J. Johnson Quintet when they signed with Columbia and released the albums J Is for Jazz (1956), Dial J.J. 5 (1957), and J.J. in Person! (1958). The quintet then released singles and EPs for Phillips, Fontana, and Impulse! In 1961, Savoy Records released the album J. J. Johnson’s Jazz Quintets containing sessions performed by different line-ups in 1946, 1947, and 1949. By the end of the ‘60s, jazz musicians saw a downturn in interest and paying gigs and J.J. was no excuse. He moved to California and composed music for movies and television throughout most of the ‘70s. In 1988, his wife suffered a stroke, and he cancelled all work in order to take care of her. In 1992, he returned to recording and live performing. Four years later, he came off the road and focused on composition. Suffering from prostate cancer, J.J. Johnson took his own life on February 4, 2000. Many of the J. J. Johnson Quintet’s recordings have been compiled over the years including Complete Recordings (2009), a two CD compilation featuring all the tracks he recorded with Belgian saxophonist Bobby Jaspar.
