Obit: Claude 'Fiddler' Williams

Subject: Obit: Claude 'Fiddler' Williams
From: GUEST,Mary Katherine
Date: 26 Apr 04 - 08:39 AM

Jazz violinist Claude 'Fiddler' Williams dead at 96

DATELINE: KANSAS CITY, Mo.

(AP)Jazz violinist Claude "Fiddler" Williams, who was part of
Kansas City's thriving music scene during the swing era of
the 1930s and enjoyed new-found popularity in his later
years, is dead at 96.

Williams died early Sunday at Research Medical Center, The
Kansas City Star reported. His wife, Blanche, said he'd been
hospitalized there since April 5 with double pneumonia.

Mrs. Williams, who married the musician in 1991, said he
would love to be remembered "as a passionate, passionate
violinist."

"He loved his music," she said. "And he loved making people
happy and feeling his music. He wanted them to feel it. He
lived for his music."

"He was a good musician," pianist Jay McShann, another
pioneering Kansas City jazz performer who like Williams was
originally from Muskogee, Okla. "He enjoyed playing."

His wife said Williams had continued as an active musician,
and until he was taken ill his schedule had included a
masters class in California in August and a music camp in
New Jersey in August and September.

"He said that as long as his fingers still worked he would,"
she said.

To celebrate his latest birthday, Williams went with
relatives to a restaurant in Kansas City's Country Club
Plaza area, bringing his fiddle along and joining in with
the band.

"They gave him a very warm welcome," said his wife. "Claude
stood up for most of the songs, and that's an accomplishment
in itself."

"I'm doing pretty well," Williams said then. "I can still
work with my fingers a little bit."

Williams, who played the guitar, mandolin and bass as well
as the violin, first came to Kansas City in 1928, joining
the Twelve Clouds of Joy band led first by Terrence Holder
and then Andy Kirk. He also played later with a band led by
Alphonso Trent, which Williams said was "the first black big
band allowed to play at white clubs in Oklahoma."

In the 18th and Vine Street area of Kansas City, there were
many night clubs featuring jazz music, after-hours jam
sessions and "battles of the bands" that drew many musicians
to the area to learn and show what they could do.

"Musicians would come from as far away as Texas and Chicago
to learn how to do it," Williams said. "We showed them the
right way to do it and straightened up their playing."

After hearing him play in Chicago, Count Basie hired
Williams to play both guitar and violin with his band.

"Count came up looking for me because the guys in Kansas
City told him about my playing," Williams said.

But when Basie moved his band to New York, Freddie Green
replaced Williams as the guitarist, something which Williams
was later to say turned out to be a good thing.

""If I had stayed with Count, I would have been playing that
ching-ching rhythm for 40 years," he once said.

Williams once told an interviewer for Down Beat that hearing
trumpeter Louis Armstrong play a diminished chord in Tulsa
one time inspired him to learn about changes and chords.

"All the cats wanted to jam with me because they knew they
would hear changes, something different, not just jazzin'
the melody," he said. "That's because I mostly jammed with
trumpeters and saxophones."

Williams played with various Kansas City bands until moving
in 1940 to Michigan with George Lee, another well-known
Kansas City musician.

"We put together a band of the common laborers there,"
Williams said. "It finally broke up when several of the boys
had to go into the service."

Williams worked as a welder by day and musician at night,
coming back to Kansas City in 1952.

In 1988 he was featured in the Broadway revue "Black and
Blue," focusing new attention on his skills, and in the
early 1990s he was inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of
Fame. He became a popular attraction at nightclubs and music
festivals around the country and overseas, where he always
had a strong following.

Williams was among the performers at events during President
Clinton's second inauguration in 1997. That same year he
performed at the grand opening of Kansas City's American
Jazz Museum, a show that was later televised nationally.

He suffered a broken leg in an auto accident in 2000, and
shortly after that, his wife said, he was diagnosed with the
early stages of Alzheimer's disease, but he still continued
to perform regularly.

Musician Bobby Watson remembered that at one performance not
long after the accident when he was supposed to play sitting
down, "he just kicked that stool back and turned the place
out."

"I've just always admired his strength, his longevity and
youthful attitude," Watson said Sunday. "He never stopped.
He was always pushing it."

A visitation and memorial jazz session has been tentatively
scheduled for next Sunday, with the funeral the following
day at St. Louis Catholic Church.

Subject: RE: Obit: Claude 'Fiddler' Williams
From: GLoux
Date: 26 Apr 04 - 09:17 AM

I saw him once on the NCTA Masters of the Violin tour and was blown away...to me, he was the epitome of "cool"...a sad loss, indeed.