Milton John Hinton (June 23, 1910 – December 19, 2000) was an American double bassist and photographer.
Regarded as the Dean of American jazz bass players, his nicknames included "Sporty" from his years in Chicago, "Fump" from his time on the road with Cab Calloway, and "The Judge" from the 1950s and beyond. Hinton's recording career lasted over 60 years, mostly in jazz but also with a variety of other genres as a prolific session musician.
He was also a photographer of note, praised for documenting American jazz during the 20th Century.
Biography
Early life in Mississippi (1910–1919)
Hinton was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, United States, the only child of Hilda Gertrude Robinson, whom he referred to as "Titter," and Milton Dixon Hinton. He was three-months-old when his father left the family. He grew up in a home with his mother, his maternal grandmother (a former slave of Joe Davis, the brother of Jefferson Davis), and two of his mother's sisters.
His childhood in Vicksburg was characterized by extreme poverty and extreme racism. Lynching was a common practice at the time. Hinton said that one of the clearest memories of his childhood was when he accidentally came upon a lynching.
After graduating from Wendell Phillips High School, Hinton attended Crane Junior College for two years, during which time he began receiving regular work as a freelance musician around Chicago. He performed with Freddie Keppard, Zutty Singleton, Jabbo Smith, Erskine Tate, and Art Tatum. During the Cotton Club residencies, Hinton took part in recording sessions with Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Billie Holiday, Ethel Waters, Teddy Wilson, and many others. It was at this time that he recorded what is possibly the first bass feature, "Pluckin' the Bass" in August 1939.
Hinton appeared regularly on radio while in Calloway's band, either on bass in concerts broadcast from the Cotton Club, or as a cast member for the short-lived music quiz show "Cab Calloway's Quizzicale." These broadcasts brought national attention to the Calloway band and helped enable the successful national tours the band would schedule. They also gave listeners a chance to hear examples of jive talk, which Calloway would formalize through publications such as his Hepster's Dictionary, first published in 1938.
After Cab Calloway (1950–1954)
By 1950, popular music tastes had changed, and Calloway lacked the funds to support a full big band. Instead, he hired Hinton and a few others to create a smaller ensemble, first a septet and later a quartet, which toured until June 1952, with trips to Cuba and Uruguay. After the Calloway ensemble disbanded, Hinton spent more time as a freelance studio musician in New York City.
Musicianship
Hinton was broadly regarded as a consummate sideman, possessing a sensitivity for appropriately applying his formidable technique and his extensive harmonic knowledge to the performance at hand. He was equally adept at bowing, pizzicato, and "slapping," a technique for which he first became famous while playing with the Cab Calloway Orchestra early in his career. He was also an accomplished sight-reader, a skill which he developed on the road with Calloway and honed during his several decades of studio work. As he described his technical diversity, "Working with Cab for sixteen years could have made me stale. You play the same music over and over, and after awhile you can do it in your sleep. Many guys liked it that way because it was easy. But when the band business got bad, they weren't prepared to do anything else. On the other hand, I was able to work on radio and TV and get all kinds of record dates. In a real way, practicing and discipline paid off." The Collection includes 35mm black and white negatives and color transparencies, reference and exhibition-quality prints, and photographs given to and collected by Hinton throughout his life. The work depicts an extensive range of jazz artists and popular performers in varied settings - on the road, in recording studios, at parties, and at home - over a period of six decades.
Beginning in the early 1960s, Hinton and Berger worked together to organize the photographs and identify the subjects of the photos. In June 1981, Hinton had his first one-person photographic exhibition in Philadelphia, and since then items from the Collection have been featured in dozens of exhibits across the country and in Europe.
Photographs from the Collection have also regularly appeared in periodicals, calendars, postcards, CD liner notes, films, and books. Hinton and Berger co-wrote Bass Line: The Stories and Photographs of Milt Hinton (Temple University Press, 1988), and with the addition of Holly Maxson, the three co-wrote OverTime: The Jazz Photographs of Milt Hinton (Pomegranate Art Books, 1991) and Playing the Changes: Milt Hinton's Life in Stories and Photographs (Vanderbilt University Press, 2008). Notable documentary films that have drawn upon the Collection include The Long Night of Lady Day (Billie Holiday), The Brute and the Beautiful (Ben Webster), and Listen Up (Quincy Jones). A Great Day in Harlem, a 1994 documentary about Esquire's photographic shoot of jazz legends in 1958, features numerous photographs by Milt as well as a home movie shot by Mona. In late 2002 Berger and Maxson utilized the Collection along with a number of original interviews with Hinton's friends and colleagues to produce the documentary film Keeping Time: The Life, Music & Photographs of Milt Hinton. It debuted at the London Film Festival, won the Audience Award at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003, and has been shown at film festivals both domestically and abroad.
Milt Hinton's Legacy
In 1980, in honor of Hinton's 70th birthday, his friends and associates worked to create the Milton J. Hinton Scholarship Fund, which was used to help support the musical studies of a variety of bass students over the next four decades. Today the fund is administered by the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, where it is used to provide scholarships to students attending the biennial Milton J. Hinton Summer Institute for Studio Bass. The institute is a continuation of Hinton's longstanding goal to educate and inspire future generations of musicians. As he noted when discussing one of his own bass teachers, "For [Dmitri Shmuklovsky], passing on his skill and knowledge to the next generation was a solemn duty. It was a mission that went beyond his music. And looking back, I know his greatest gift was to teach me this strong sense of responsibility. It's the reason I've always tried to help young people. If someone wants to improve, if they have a sincere desire to learn, I've always tried to be there to give them whatever I can."