Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,398

This is the grave of Henry Grimes.

Born in 1935 in Philadelphia, Grimes grew up in a musical family. Both his parents played various instruments and their son would prove quite the musical whiz. His first instrument was the violin and then he played a variety of things before settling on the double bass as his instrument of choice. He got into Julliard. By the late 50s, he was a rising star in the jazz bass world. In 1958, Bert Stern documented the Newport Jazz Festival in a film that became Jazz on a Summer’s Day. Grimes was the bassist for six different acts at the festival–Benny Goodman, Lee Konitz, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Sonny Rollins, and Tony Scott. OK, if you can walk into a festival and play with an old-timer like Goodman and the leaders of modern jazz like Monk and Rollins, you are quite the star on the bass. When Charles Mingus decided he wanted a second bassist for awhile, he hired Grimes.

Grimes was a relentless innovator in these years and started moving into the avant-garde with the first way, after hearing people such as Ornette Coleman. By the late 60s, he was the bassist on albums by Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, and plenty of others. He released one album as a leader, in 1966. The Call is a very fine album featuring Grimes, Perry Robinson on clarinet, and Tom Price on drums.

Grimes moved to California in 1968 and then……completely disappeared. In fact, everyone assumed he was dead. He was not. He had pretty severe mental illness, was diagnosed as bipolar, and had been homeless on and off. He had just completely isolated himself from the world of jazz. In 2002, a jazz fan named Marshall Marrotte took it upon himself to investigate just what happened to this great bassist. Marrotte found him, barely hanging on. He had no money at all. He worked as a janitor in the single occupancy hotel where he lived in order to stay there. He had long ago sold his bass. He hadn’t played the instrument in thirty years. He didn’t even know that Albert Ayler had died 32 years earlier. The immediate story of his problems came from his strapping his bass on top a car when he moved to LA–which shockingly was not so good for the instrument! He did get some work out there initially but then couldn’t repair the bass. In fact, a lot of the jazz musicians of the avant-garde movement really struggled with mental illness by the 70s and 80s, so this story isn’t too unusual I am sorry to say, though this one is pretty extreme.

But while this might be the sad end to a lot of stories like this, in fact Grimes would once again become a major figure in the world of jazz. The great William Parker–epic bassist and in my view the most important figure in the jazz world in the last three decades–was ecstatic to hear that Grimes lived and he gave him one of his basses. Grimes basically became a project for the jazz world–get him cleaned up, get him a decent house, get him that bass (which required very special shipping and was very expensive to send across the nation; this wasn’t some bass just laying around but a real masterpiece of an instrument, maybe let’s not put it on the top of a car), get him back on stage and in the studio.

This project was extraordinarily successful. Parker’s Vision Festival, one of the great festivals of modern jazz music, embraced Grimes with open arms in 2003 and he played there frequently until his death. He moved back to New York and became a featured player with all the living legends–David Murray, David S. Ware, Rashied Ali, Marc Ribot. Cecil Taylor couldn’t believe his old friend was still around and so they started playing together again. Grimes published books of poetry he wrote while in LA over the years. He taught bass in New York and had residencies in colleges across the nation, including the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois, and Berkelee. He released seven albums as a leader after his rediscovery, as well as bunch of number of projects with others. He even married in 2007.

It was a pretty sweet story. The latter years weren’t too great though. He had to stop performing in 2018 due to Parkinson’s. He was in an assisted living facility in 2020 when Covid hit and……he was a victim of the pandemic. He was 84 years old.

Let’s listen to some Henry Grimes.

Well that will blow your face off this morning.

Henry Grimes is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other legends of jazz, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Charlie Parker is in Kansas City and Cannonball Adderley is in Tallahassee, Florida. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.