Jazz Condition -- UPI Arts & Entertainment

The fans at Saratoga racetrack were celebrating the closing weekend of the season at horseracing's upstate New York mecca when the information started filtering around via word of mouth that Lionel Hampton had passed away.

The racetrack might seem an odd spot for a jazz giant to be remembered, but Hampton was a huge fan of horse racing and often performed in the backyard picnic grounds at Aqueduct racetrack back in the 1970s. Hampton was also one of the last living jazz musicians whose appeal transcended all age groups and genres.

His band could appeal to retirees nostalgic for the glory days of the big bands, as well as hard core blues fans and lovers of roots rock's energy and adherence to the big beat.

"He was pure excitement," said James MacNamara, who took a moment from his racing form to reminisce about Hampton. "What I remember about his shows is that he'd never get off the stage. He loved to play and he would keep going long after others would have given up."

As I'm writing this, WKCR-FM, the Columbia University station that is the official voice of New York's jazz scene, is in the middle of a three-day tribute to Hampton. The wealth of material at the station's disposal includes a number of terrific radio performances from 1940 by the Benny Goodman sextet that featured Hampton's vibraphone intertwining with Goodman's sultry clarinet and the innovative guitar picking of Charlie Christian.

WKCR is presenting Hampton as a lucid soloist whose harmonic sense is astonishingly modern. One of Hampton's features, "Stix Appeal," is subtitled "My Daddy Rocks Me" and gives you a sense of how advanced Hampton's sensibility was.

Hampton's instincts as a bandleader were legendary. He surrounded himself with talented musicians and worked harder than any of them at putting on a rip-roaring show. He would constantly switch off between vibraphone and drums during his sets, throwing in wild acrobatics, juggling his sticks and throwing them into the audience, and tap dancing at will.

At the end of shows, he would lead the band members into the audience, dancing as they went.

No histrionic gesture was too outrageous for this wild bunch. Once, at a concert on a barge in Washington, D.C., Hampton's band played such a frenzied version of his signature tune, "Flyin' Home" that the five front-line saxophonists finished up their rave-up by jumping, with their instruments, into the Potomac.

Gladys Hampton, his wife and manager, convinced Hamp to overcome his fear of flying in order to make a series of European gigs by describing how the band could return to (then) Idlewild Airport with the whole band playing "Flying Home."

Johnny Griffin recalls being hired by Hampton and showing up for the gig with his alto saxophone only to find that Hampton wanted him to play tenor, which became his signature instrument.

Griffin was just out of school when he got a call to join Hampton's band in 1945. He showed up at the Regal Theater in Chicago with his alto for what turned out to be a live audition playing alongside Arnett Cobb. Griffin was told he had the gig and to show up the next weekend to play the RKO Theater in Toledo, Ohio.

In the book "Talking Jazz: An Oral History," Griffin told Ben Sidrin: "Well that Friday when the band was opening up, I was walking out to the stage with my alto, you know, and Gladys Hampton met me and said 'Johnny, where you going with that alto?' I said 'Well I'm gettin' ready to go play!' 'Yeah, but you're playing tenor saxophone in this band.' Which was a big surprise to me. I mean, it was the first I'd heard of it.

"But I was playing alto more or less like a tenor anyway, because I was growlin' on it like a Ben Webster, and kinda sounded like Prez, or whatever, at the time, you know. So I immediately left, 'cause there was nothing to be found in Toledo, Ohio, this being the year 1945, and the war was going on, you know, 'cause nobody was making instruments, all those factories were making weapons.

"And so I left for Chicago and found an old Conn and rejoined the band like two days later. And that was the start of me playing tenor."

Toward the end of his life Hampton was a conspicuous figurehead in Republican politics, but his political life was always intricately tied to his roots. Back in the 1950s he actively supported Adlai Stevenson, but that didn't prevent him from playing for Dwight Eisenhower's ball after the election.

"I want to bill myself," said Hamp, "Lionel Hampton -- stumped for Stevenson and stomped for Ike!"