24 Facts About Buddy Collette

William Marcel "Buddy" Collette was an American jazz flutist, saxophonist, and clarinetist.

Buddy Collette was a founding member of the Chico Hamilton Quintet.

William Marcel Collette was born in Los Angeles on August 6,1921.

Buddy Collette was raised in Watts, surrounded by people of all different ethnicities.

Buddy Collette lived in a house built by his father in an area with cheap, plentiful land.

Buddy Collette began playing piano at age ten, at his grandmother's request.

When he was fifteen, Buddy Collette became a part of the Woodman brothers' band, along with Joe Comfort, George Reed, and Jessie Sailes.

At the age of 19, Buddy Collette started taking musical lessons from Lloyd Reese, who taught Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, and many others.

The second dance band, the Topflighters, was led by Buddy Collette, who had been playing with Les Hite's band in 1941 before enlisting.

Buddy Collette recalls that Marshal Royal didn't realize who he was and wasn't that interested in Dixieland, so Buddy Collette was able to get him into the Topflighters and subsequently arranged songs to highlight Humphrey's talent.

Buddy Collette helped merge an all-black musicians' union with an all-white musicians' union.

In 1949, Buddy Collette was the first black musician to be hired by a nationally broadcast TV studio orchestra, on You Bet Your Life, hosted by Groucho.

Increasingly successful in the late 1940s, Buddy Collette was called upon frequently for collaborations and recordings on alto saxophone with musicians such as Ivie Anderson, Johnny Otis, Gerald Wilson, Ernie Andrews, and Charles Mingus.

Buddy Collette went on to form a short-lived yet cooperative band in 1946 with Mingus called "Stars of the Swing".

Buddy Collette was a musical director for the jazz band program at Loyola Marymount University.

Buddy Collette eventually made the board of Local 767 along with Bill Douglass in the vice-president's position.

In 1955, Buddy Collette became a founding member of the unusually instrumented chamber jazz quintet, led by percussionist Chico Hamilton.

The quintet was notable for having cellist and pianist as the band's centerpiece, leading Buddy Collette to refer to Katz as "the first jazz cello player".

Later that year, Buddy Collette collaborated with Horn in his own flutist ensemble, the "Swinging Shepherds", a four-flute-lineup.

In 1996, when the Library of Congress commissioned Buddy Collette to write and perform a special big-band concert to highlight his long career, he brought together some old collaborators to perform with him, including Chico Hamilton.

Buddy Collette died in Los Angeles of heart failure at the age of 89.

Buddy Collette joined the faculty at California State University, Pomona campus in 1992 where he was a conductor of the jazz and combo band.

Buddy Collette held important faculty positions at CSULA, CSULB, California State University Dominguez Hills, and Loyola Marymount University.

Buddy Collette was designated a Los Angeles Living Cultural Treasure by the city of Los Angeles in the late 1990s, and, in the early 2000s, he was composing music for JazzAmerica, a band of teen jazz virtuosos he co-founded.