Last Years
Shortly after appearing at the New Orleans Jazz Festival in 1969, Clayton underwent lip surgery, and had to give up playing the trumpet in 1972. He was able to resume playing in 1977 for a State Department sponsored tour of Africa, but had to permanently stop playing in 1979, though he still worked as an arranger. He began to teach at Hunter College, CUNY from 1975–80 and again in the early eighties.
The semi-autobiography Buck Clayton’s Jazz World, co-authored by Nancy Miller Elliott, first appeared in 1986. In the same year, his new Big Band debuted at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, and Clayton toured internationally with it, contributing 100 compositions to the band book.
Buck Clayton died quietly in his sleep in 1991.
Read more about this topic: Buck Clayton
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“It is now many years that men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the arts: the New Englander and the New Hollander, the Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and Robin Hood, Goody Blake and Harry Gill; in most parts of the world, the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally require still a few sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food. Neither could I do without them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Good Heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.”
—Molière [Jean Baptiste Poquelin] (1622–1673)