Life
Navarro was born in Key West, Florida, to Cuban-Black-Chinese parentage. He began playing piano at age six, but did not become serious about music until he began playing trumpet at age of thirteen. He was a childhood friend of drummer Al Dreares. By the time he graduated from Douglass high school he wanted to be away from Key West and joined a dance band headed for the midwest.
Tiring of the road life after touring with many bands and gaining valuable experience, including influencing a young J. J. Johnson when they were together in Snookum Russell's territory band, Navarro settled in New York City in 1946, where his career took off. He met and played with, among others, Charlie Parker, one of the greatest musical innovators of modern jazz improvisation, but Navarro was in a position to demand a high salary, and did not join one of Parker's regular groups. He also developed a heroin addiction, which, coupled with tuberculosis and a weight problem (he was nicknamed "Fat Girl") led to a slow decline in his health and death at the age of twenty-six.
Among others, Fats Navarro played in the Andy Kirk, Billy Eckstine, Benny Goodman, and Lionel Hampton big bands, and participated in small group recording sessions with Kenny Clarke, Tadd Dameron, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Coleman Hawkins, Illinois Jacquet, Howard McGhee, and Bud Powell.
In Charles Mingus' somewhat counter-factual autobiography Beneath the Underdog, Navarro and Mingus strike up a deep friendship while touring together. Navarro was hospitalized on July 1 and died in the evening of July 7, 1950. His last performance was with Charlie Parker on July 1 at Birdland.
Navarro was survived by wife Rena (née Clark; 1927–1975) and daughter Linda (born 1949), who currently lives in Seattle, Washington. And his sister Delores (Born 1932) who resides in Key West still.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Our life seems not present, so much as prospective; not for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint of this vast- flowing vigor.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night ... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“Innocence is lovely in the child, because in harmony with its nature; but our path in life is not backward but onward, and virtue can never be the offspring of mere innocence. If we are to progress in the knowledge of good, we must also progress in the knowledge of evil. Every experience of evil brings its own temptation and according to the degree in which the evil is recognized and the temptations resisted, will be the value of the character into which the individual will develop.”
—Mrs. H. O. Ward (1824–1899)