Remembering George Howard

George Howard

I first met George Howard with a great keyboardist by the name of Denzil "Broadway" Miller. Denzil and I co-wrote "Just call my Name" with Ken Curry for Allison Williams which I wrote about in a previous BLOG. George already had a few albums out on the Palo Alto Jazz label. I had heard of George but had never worked with him up to this point.

George and I became friends and I ended up singing on a few of his albums. George's albums were well received and ranked high on the Billboard magazine jazz album charts. George's third album, Dancin in the Sun, scaled the Billboard Jazz Album chart to number 1. Each of his next three albums also reached this height in the Jazz Album charts.

Dancing In the Sun

George was a great player. To me he was one of the best soprano saxophonist that ever lived. He got his start touring with the great Grover Washington Jr, back in the late 70s. Every time we were in the studio with George we had fun. He was a laid back, crazy personality type of guy, and of course this all came out in his music.

I remember once we recorded one of his albums out in Malibu at the beach, I don't remember exactly which album it was, but I remember he had this groove that was pretty funky and we started this chant on the record, "sounds like George, sounds like Howard to me", it fit the record well and that became our little saying every time we would see George.

There's A Riot Goin' On

After working on about 3 or 4 of George's albums I didn't see or hear from George for a few years. Then one day, back in 1998, I received a call from George asking me to come work on this album he was doing for the Blue Note label. George was re-doing instrumentally Sly & The Family Stone's There's A Riot Goin' On album which was released back in 1974. This was one of my favorite albums by Sly & The Family Stone so I was looking forward to working on this project. Alexandra Brown, Mortonette Jenkins and myself went down to record the backgrounds.

I still have Sly album on vinyl, but George had the CD. I asked where did he get the CD because I hadn't seen it on CD yet. George said, here you can have this copy I'm done with it. I still have that CD and every time I play that CD I think of George.

About 3 weeks after we recorded the backgrounds on this project Alexandra Brown called me to say that George was in the hospital with stomach cancer. Before I had a chance to see George at the hospital he died on March 20, 1998 at the age of 41.

He was a great player, a good friend and even though his music will live on, he is dearly missed. I'm happy that our lives crossed and that I was able to contribute, even to a small degree, some of my talent to help with his career.

Until Next Time - Phillip Ingram