Joe McQueen, the dynamic yet humble jazz saxophonist who made Ogden his home for 75 years starting in the days when musicians like Count Basie and Charlie Parker would play in the northern Utah city’s segregated nightclubs, has died.
He was 100.
“Bad” Brad Wheeler, a Utah radio host and longtime friend, noted McQueen’s death on Saturday in a Facebook post.
“We were definitely very special friends,” Wheeler wrote. “He made me feel like I was a part of his family and promised me before he passed that we would always be connected.”
In a separate Facebook post marking McQueen’s 100th birthday, Wheeler said the musician was “not afraid to tell you what you need to hear, and he’s not afraid to give praise to the Lord for everything in his life and yours. … Literally, there isn’t anything in the world that you can’t talk with Joe about.”
Lucretia McQueen said on Facebook that she was going to miss her cousin.
“You made your mark on earth and I [know] you will be playing that trumpet loud in heaven,” she wrote. “See ya when I get there.”
The railroad brought McQueen and his bride, Thelma, to Ogden on Dec. 7, 1945, when he came for a two-week gig and stayed for life. He gained an early reputation among jazz musicians on the train between Chicago and San Francisco, and some legends — names like Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles and Lester Young — stopped to play with him.
McQueen became so well-known around Ogden that white students would try to get into the black clubs to hear him. By the late 1950s, the white-only clubs wanted to hire him. Those clubs refused to admit McQueen’s black fans, and the musician told club owners they had to change their policies.
“I made it known if they were going to hire my band and not let black people come in, I wouldn’t be playing there,” the civil rights pioneer said in 2005. Many club owners, fearing a popular performer would get away, gave in.
The nonprofit music promoter Excellence in the Community paid tribute to McQueen and his legacy.
“Joe was the coolest cat in town,” the group wrote on Facebook, “and lived a life that we as musicians can all hope to live.”
Joe McQueen was born in Dallas on May 30, 1919, and grew up in Ardmore, Okla. His father left when he was a young boy; his mother died when he was 14, and he went to live with his grandparents.
"I didn't have it too easy when I was a kid," McQueen told The Salt Lake Tribune in 2005. "I was working two or three jobs sometimes and trying to go to school, too."
His cousin, Herschel Evans, had a brief run playing tenor sax with Lionel Hampton and Count Basie. When McQueen was 14, he saw Evans’ sax and picked it up. When he tried playing it, Evans was impressed. “He said I was a natural,” McQueen said.
McQueen played tuba and clarinet before settling on the tenor sax. Before long, he got work with big bands around the Midwest.
McQueen met Thelma in Ardmore on a dance floor during his band’s performance. They married June 10, 1944, four days after the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day.
In December 1945, just after the end of World War II, McQueen and Thelma were living in the Bay Area. McQueen’s band was hired for a two-week gig in Ogden. The story goes that the group’s bandleader gambled away the travel money, leaving the McQueens stranded. The story, McQueen told The Tribune in 2017, “got it all wrong.”
“I could've left and gone anywhere I want. You're not stranded if you got money. And I'm not bragging, but I had enough money I could've gone anywhere. I could've gone back to California. I could've gone to Oklahoma," McQueen said. "[Ogden] was just so different than anyplace I'd ever been. … So one thing led to another, we stayed here and we still like it."
Settling down in Ogden — “being on the road was just a pain in the a--,” he said in 2017 — meant that anytime the train brought a jazz star to town, they would play with McQueen.
"So Charlie Parker comes to town, he got off the train and some guys told him a band was playing across the street from the station," McQueen recalled. "He walks into the room, and I saw who it was and I almost fell over! He came down and played with us."
In 1969, McQueen, for years a cigarette smoker, was diagnosed with throat cancer. He had surgery, and quit playing for several years. He worked as a mechanic and thought about selling his sax. The railroads weren’t bringing musicians through town, Ogden’s 25th Street became home to a string of disreputable dive bars, and disco overtook jazz in popularity.
It took a new generation of younger Ogden musicians to talk McQueen into performing again. He signed up for the odd gig around northern Utah, playing classics like “Take the ‘A’ Train” and “Pennies From Heaven,” and telling war stories about his early days.
“I just play what I feel on a given night. I never play the same solo twice,” he said in 2005, adding that he carried around 5,000 songs in his head. “A lot of guys, if they can’t read it, they can’t play it. But once I get the tune down, I never forget it. It’s strictly a gift."
McQueen is survived by his wife, Thelma, and countless musicians who played with him or learned from him.
from The Salt Lake Tribune https://ift.tt/2rsACdU
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