Mundell Lowe

Jazz legend Mundell Lowe learned to play guitar from the age of six, growing up in and around Laurel, Mississippi, the son of a Baptist minister. He helped his father hoe cotton on his farm but had no aspirations to work on the land. Aged ten, he acquired his first six-string guitar and became hooked on jazz. Having listening to Charlie Christian, he knew at once which style to emulate. Three years later, he absconded from home and headed for New Orleans where he frequented the Bourbon Street jazz clubs. Although his father eventually caught up with him, Lowe ran away again -- this time to Nashville where he briefly joined the Pee Wee King band. In 1940, he graduated from school, had a stint with the orchestra of Jan Savitt and was in 1943 drafted for military service, posted at a camp near New Orleans. There, he had the good fortune to meet the resident entertainment officer, John Hammond Jr. Though assigned to Fort McPherson near Atlanta and posted to the Engineering Corps, Lowe's acquaintance with Hammond proved beneficial after his demobilization. In 1945, Hammond helped Lowe get a job with the Ray McKinley Orchestra (leader of the post-war Glenn Miller band). After that, Lowe worked in small combos, recording sessions and club dates with most of the big names of the genre, including Benny Goodman, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Ben Webster and Red Norvo. Between 1948 and 1965, Lowe was engaged as guitarist/arranger by the NBC Orchestra in New York and also acted as musical director on TV's Today Show. In 1965, he relocated to Los Angeles where the head of Screen Gems, Jackie Cooper, offered him work as conductor/composer of music for television. Lowe also subsequently branched out into music education. During the succeeding decades he was active as a teacher of film composition at the Grove School of Music in Studio City and at the Guitar Institute of Technology in Los Angeles. In 1983, he formed a small group called TransitWest which performed at the Monterey Jazz Festival and included among its personnel bass player Monty Budwig and flutist Sam Most. Mundell Lowe was inducted into the Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame and received a Lifetime Achievement prize at the San Diego Music Awards in 2008.