Fats Navarro

Fats Navarro had everything: a big, burnished trumpet sound, flawless technique, and a melodic gift that made his bebop solos feel inevitable rather than frantic. Among the trumpet players who followed Dizzy Gillespie into the new music, Navarro was the one with the most beautiful tone, and arguably the cleanest execution of all.

He came up through the big bands, then dove into the bebop scene in New York in the late 1940s, recording with Bud Powell, Tadd Dameron, and the other architects. On those sides his playing is poised and warm, never showing off, always saying something. The nickname was Fat Girl, teasing his weight and high speaking voice, but on the horn there was nothing soft about him.

Then it ended almost before it began. Heroin and tuberculosis wrecked his health fast, and he died at 26, his weight collapsed, his promise barely tapped. It’s one of the cruelest of jazz’s many early deaths.

His influence outran his short life. Clifford Brown, the next great trumpet voice, took Navarro as a model, and through Brown the lineage runs forward to nearly every trumpet player since. He left only a few years of records, but they’re luminous.