BOBBY HACKETT
HOMETOWN | Providence
INSTRUMENTS | Trumpet, cornet, guitar
BIO | Hackett rose from modest origins — he was one of nine children of a blacksmith, his first cornet was purchased for $5 at a pawn shop — to play alongside the royals of 20th-century jazz: Tony Bennett, Dizzy Gillespie, Glenn Miller, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong. When he died in 1976, The New Yorker wrote, "His gifts were of an almost unearthly purity. His playing threw angelic shadows . . . His solos were models of clarity and order and grace. Each had a molded prefigured design, a Greek Revival rightness."
FUN FACT | According to legend, a young Hackett once filled in for a missing trumpeter at a Cab Calloway gig in Providence.
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