Houston jazz legend Harry Sheppard dies
Houston jazz legend Harry Sheppard, a vibraphone virtuoso who played with Billie Holiday and Benny Goodman, dies at 94.
Harry Sheppard’s first act featured collaborations with Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins and other jazz legends. His second act was set far from New York, where the vibraphonist played for decades. In Houston, Sheppard became a beloved fixture for nearly four decades.
Sheppard outlasted the jazz legends with whom he collaborated, and he outlasted many of the Houston venues that hosted him. The local legend who accidentally sunk roots in this city in 1984 died Tuesday morning at age 94, according to his family.
He leaves behind a pair of legacies: a New York career that took place during a golden era of jazz. There he learned from Lionel Hampton and played with some of the most notable artists of the 20th century. At age 38 he began a long second act in Houston, where he was known as more than a virtuosic vibraphonist.
“There was nobody like him,” said Randall Jamail, who produced several of Sheppard’s albums, helping the musician restart his career in the 1980s. “Aside from the musicianship, which was phenomenal. He was such a great spirit.”
Friends and collaborators spoke as much about that spirit as his music.
"He was a real artist, and he could apply himself in so many different situations," said flutist Bob Chadwick, who played with Sheppard for nearly four decades. "He was a master improvisor, and to be a master improvisor you have to know your environment and you have to be in the moment. . . . And he was always about the audience. Situations like restaurants require great sensitivity, the volume especially. The trick Harry had was that he could get more intense at a lower volume. He was a magical player."
Sheppard nurtured that spirit from his affinity for working with his instrument. “For me,” he told the Chronicle, “I try to give people the pleasure that I get out of playing.”
On Holiday
To estimate the number of gigs Sheppard played in Houston would be folly. He didn’t just feel like a fixture in this city. Instead he felt like he’d been cloned and dispersed around Houston, with numerous standing gigs over the years at various venues, along with private functions, jazz lunches and brunches. Where an audience might convene, Sheppard was there, mallets in hand. He could play to any crowd favoring any style of jazz. Befitting a musician who lived to 94, Sheppard’s roots reached from big band to New York’s progressive loft scene in the 1970s. He served as a form of living history, while also fueled by a perpetual creative restlessness.
By the '80s, that scene had lost some of its sway. A family crisis brought him to Houston — he thought temporarily. Instead he became an iconic Houstonian.
Sheppard was born in Worcester, Mass., on April 1, 1928. He had the good fortune to be eight years younger than his brother, Harvey. So when Sheppard wasn’t even a teenager, his brother would drag him out of the house in the late 1930s and early 1940s to hear jazz bands play around Worcester.
Both brothers started off as drummers, according to Sheppard, who played some gigs as a teenager before he enlisted in the Navy. After his discharge, he attended the Berklee College of Music, where he gravitated toward the vibes.
One of the few students he taught, vibraphonist Jalen Baker, recalled Sheppard saying he had learned from the big band legend Lionel Hampton.
“He gave me five or six lessons and never charged me,” Baker says. “But he also loved to pass down stories. So he talked about studying with Lionel Hampton, who was basically the godfather of his instrument. I don’t know how kind Hampton was, but if there was anything bad there, it didn’t rub off on Harry. He was the nicest person.”
By the late-1950s, Sheppard was living and performing in New York, where he accrued a remarkable scroll of credits.
Jamail recalls in the '80s Sheppard playing him a VHS tape with some old footage from a New York TV program circa 1958 that would air after the nightly news.
“It was this hilarious clip with a booze cart getting rolled through and then I looked closely and it’s Harry,” he said. “I said, ‘Goddamn, Harry, is that you playing with Billie Holiday?’”
In addition to gigging with the legendary singer, Sheppard also recorded at least one session with Holiday in 1958.
Sheppard told the Chronicle he was as much a fan as a collaborator with some of the artists he joined. A full accounting of his sessions and performances doesn’t exist. But even a small sample of his doings suggests an artist in the middle of a remarkable musical period.
As jazz changed, Sheppard changed with it, working in fusion and the avant garde scene that developed in New York in the 1970s and finding ways to electrify his instrument. As he’d tell the Houston Post years later when he recorded as a session leader, “All my tunes have space where there are no rules.”
Bassist and frequent collaborator David Craig said Sheppard granted the same freedom to his collaborators. After hearing about Sheppard’s death, he said he viewed a clip of them performing with Chadwick.
“There was none of that, ‘Hey man, just play the bass,’” Craig said. “Whatever you wanted to play, he was right there with you. In this clip, when I start to solo, he’s so conversational with me. And with hindsight, I didn’t realize then how great it was. Now I see it and think, ‘That’s now gone.' He never told me what to play or how to play. He embraced what was happening.”
Tragedy and a move
Sheppard didn’t intend to move to Houston. He came here when his daughter was diagnosed with cancer in 1984. He assumed he’d return to New York after her death but chose not to, instead taking gigs around Houston.
Jamail calls that era “a great time for jazz here, with four or five rooms in the city where live jazz was played.”
The two met at a non-profit Macrobiotic Center of Houston.
“One day this elfin guy walked in and asked if he could help,” Jamail said. “Much later he told me he was a vibraphone player; I didn’t think much of it. Eventually I learned about his time with Doc Severinsen and the loft scene in New York. I realized we had a master hanging out with us here in Houston.”
Sheppard invited Jamail to one of his gigs at Blue Moon, where he'd been hired by Chadwick to play, initiating a creative partnership that ran 37 years.
Jamail was at the time an attorney with a formidable interest in music, but he was soon to launch the Houston-based Justice Records. He asked Sheppard to record a little outro on the vibes for another artist’s demo.
Justice Records would became a base of operations for Sheppard’s next act. The music Sheppard recorded for the label represented the various creative lives he’d lived, though he started, fittingly, with a record inspired by his daughter. “Viva Brasil” was gentler than some of the music Sheppard was known for playing. He recounted that she’d said, “Dad I love your music. But it’s not my music. Why don’t you make something that I can dance to.”
A year later, he put out “This -A-Way That-A-Way” in 1991, an album with progressive fusion vibe. “Points of View,” from 1992, may have been the best representation of Sheppard’s vision as a band leader, representing the breadth of his far-ranging tastes and his affinity for improvisation.
Those records offered documentation of a phenomenal talent. They don’t quite represent the ubiquitous figure Sheppard cut on stages around Houston. He’d land a weekly gig, and if the club shuttered, he’d find another. He could be found at markets and parties, a world class performer sharing his great love for jazz. He was a regular contributor to Houston’s Free Radicals, a band with tastes as wide-ranging as Sheppard’s.
Baker remembered fondly a solo show Sheppard performed a few years ago at Discovery Green downtown. Sheppard outfitted his vibraphone with a percussion patch and proceeded to take a sort of drum solo on his instrument.
“Just by himself, he lifted the room,” Baker said. “Everybody was so into it. He played so much here, but I think he was still an underrated performer. He had this sense, he knew what people wanted to hear. And more than that, he knew how they wanted to feel.”
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