Artist: Benny Golson

Benny Golson is an American bebop/hard bop jazz tenor saxophonist, composer, and arranger. He came to prominence with the big bands of Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie, more as a writer than a performer, before launching his solo career.

Golson is known for co-founding and co-leading The Jazztet with trumpeter Art Farmer in 1959. From the late 1960s through the 1970s Golson was in demand as an arranger for film and television and thus was less active as a performer, but he and Farmer re-formed the Jazztet in 1982. 

Many of Golson's compositions have become jazz standards including "I Remember Clifford", "Blues March", "Stablemates", "Whisper Not", and "Killer Joe". He is regarded as "one of the most significant contributors" to the development of hard bop jazz] and was a recipient of a Grammy Trustees Award in 2021. 

While a student at Benjamin Franklin High School in Philadelphia, he played with several other promising young musicians, including John Coltrane, Red Garland, Jimmy Heath, Percy Heath, Philly Joe Jones, and Red Rodney. He later attended Howard University. After graduating from Howard University, Golson joined Bull Moose Jackson's rhythm and blues band; Tadd Dameron, whom Golson came to consider the most important influence on his writing, was Jackson's pianist at the time. 

From 1953 to 1959, Golson played with Dameron's band and then with the bands of Lionel Hampton, Johnny Hodges, Earl Bostic, Dizzy Gillespie, and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, with whom he recorded the classic Moanin' in 1958. 

Golson was working with the Lionel Hampton band at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1956 when he learned that Clifford Brown, a noted and well-liked jazz trumpeter who had done a stint with him in Dameron's band, had died in a car accident. Golson was so moved by the event that he composed "I Remember Clifford" as a tribute to a fellow musician and friend. 

From 1959 to 1962, Golson co-led the Jazztet with Art Farmer, mainly playing his own compositions.  Golson then left jazz to concentrate on studio and orchestral work for 12 years. During this time, he composed music for such television shows, Ironside, Room 222, M*A*S*H, The Partridge Family and Mission: Impossible. He also formulated and conducted arrangements to various recordings, such as Eric Is Here, a 1967 album by Eric Burdon, which features five of Golson's arrangements, conducted by Golson. 

During the mid-1970s, Golson returned to jazz playing and recording.