Lou Donaldson, an alto saxophonist who played a crucial role in both the development of hard bop and its evolution into soul jazz, died on Saturday in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was eight days past his 98th birthday.
His death was announced by his family on his website. The cause of death has not been disclosed, Donaldson had reportedly been struggling recently with pneumonia.
“Sweet Papa Lou,” as he was known, had as distinctive a sound as ever graced the alto sax: vinegary, gritty, swinging and soulful, redolent of the territory bands he grew up with in small-town North Carolina. When he applied that sound to the new concept of bebop — collaborating with innovative peers like Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, Horace Silver and Clifford Brown — he helped lay the groundwork for the earthier, more populist approach that became known as “funky” hard bop. That aesthetic is already nascent on “Lou’s Blues,” from Donaldson’s first recording as a leader in Nov. 1952.
Donaldson delved deeper into that mode as his career progressed. A period working behind organist Jimmy Smith led him to incorporate Smith’s organ-guitar-drums rhythm section into his own bands in the 1960s. This, combined with simpler riff tunes conveying strong blues and gospel influences, formed the basis for the soul-jazz fusion that Donaldson helped to make jazz’s mainstream lingua franca in the mid-to-late ‘60s.
Donaldson’s contribution to the new genre culminated in 1967 with “Alligator Bogaloo,” which began as a throwaway jam to fill out a studio session. A soulful riff over a funky beat — with Donaldson paired in the front line with cornetist Melvin Lastie, and powered in the rhythm section by organist Lonnie Smith, guitarist George Benson and drummer Idris Muhammed (then still known as Leo Morris) — the tune became a surprise hit for Blue Note Records that autumn, and then the title track for a successful album.
Donaldson followed “Alligator Bogaloo” with another crossover hit, 1968’s “Midnight Creeper” — based on an eerily similar groove, with nearly identical personnel — and spent the remainder of his career in that idiom (although he sometimes returned to the old-school bebop he’d first fallen in love with in the 1940s). Beginning in the 1990s, his recordings became a favorite source of samples for the hip-hop industry.
Donaldson was unapologetic in his pursuit of commercial success: “Hell, the people bought it so we made it,” he told Larry Appelbaum of his music in 2009. Indeed, as the years passed Donaldson was increasingly unapologetic about much more than his commercialism. He cultivated a reputation for hard-earned, unvarnished truth-telling in interviews and other appearances, gleefully excoriating musicians young and old, and skewering sacred cows with abandon.
He was particularly open in his disdain for the direction jazz was taking in the 21st century. “No jazz. There’s not any jazz,” he said in a 2019 profile on NPR Music’s Jazz Night in America. “The only jazz I hear is when some old people play it.”
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Louis Andrew Donaldson, Jr. was born Nov. 1, 1926 in Badin, N.C., the second of four children to L.A. Donaldson Sr., a preacher and aluminum factory worker, and Lucy Wallace Donaldson, a schoolteacher. His mother also taught piano, of which Lou Jr. wanted no part because, as told Jazz Night: “If students missed a note she had a little switch. She’d hit ‘em across the hand, and I said ‘not me.’” Yet when young Lou memorized and sang back the lessons he heard her students playing, his mother recognized his talent and bought him a clarinet.
He took that instrument with him to North Carolina A&T University in 1944, and then to the Navy in 1945. He joined the Great Lakes Navy Band in Chicago and heard Charlie Parker in Jay McShann’s band — upon which he threw his clarinet away and bought an alto saxophone, determined to emulate the genius he’d just witnessed.
In 1949, Donaldson moved to New York to study at the Darrow Institute of Music and pursue playing jazz. He quickly gained a solid reputation on the scene, and in 1952 signed a contract with Blue Note Records, making recordings under his own name and serving as an unofficial house alto player on sessions by vibraphonist Milt Jackson, Thelonious Monk and Clifford Brown.
Donaldson began working regularly with Smith in 1957, which led to his assimilating the organist’s approach to groove in his own music. By ‘62, Donaldson’s ensemble configuration usually mirrored Smith’s: saxophone, trumpet, organ, guitar and drums. Donaldson’s band became an incubator particularly for organists: in addition to Dr. Lonnie Smith, John Patton, Billy Gardner and Leon Spencer all came through its ranks in the ‘60s and ‘70s, as did Kyle Koehler and Akiko Tsuruga in this century.
After the back-to-back hits of “Alligator Bogaloo” and “Midnight Creeper,” Blue Note Records reoriented its sound around Donaldson’s; he remained with the label through the mid-‘70s. He spent much of the 1980s and ‘90s working primarily on the European festival circuit, becoming a popular booking on jazz cruises in the late ‘90s.
It was also in the ‘90s that hip-hop DJ and producer Pete Rock started making frequent use of samples from Donaldson’s music, incorporating the horns from his 1970 track “Pot Belly” into a 1992 remix of House of Pain’s “Jump Around.” Even more popular was Donaldson’s 1967 cover of Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe”: Idris Muhammad’s drum beat from the tune is one of the most sampled elements in all of hip-hop, undergirding notable tracks by A Tribe Called Quest, Lauryn Hill, Kanye West, Eminem and others.
Donaldson went into semi-retirement in Florida in the 2000s, though he frequently emerged to play sold-out club and festival gigs over the next 20 years. He became a popular participant in interviews and panels, for his no-holds-barred opinions. He was inducted as an NEA Jazz Master in 2013, and retired fully from performance in 2018.
His last public appearance was at a 97th birthday tribute concert hosted at Dizzy’s Club in New York on Oct. 30, 2023. A similar tribute was held at the club this year, and while he wasn’t in attendance, the evening’s emcee, Champian Fulton, phoned Donaldson from the stage — interrupting a baritone saxophone solo by Jason Marshall, one of a dozen musicians jamming on “Alligator Bogaloo.” She put him on speakerphone, so he could greet the crowd (with some casual profanity; “I’m not gonna repeat that,” Fulton says) and they could sing “Happy Birthday,” before jumping merrily back into the groove.
