National Endowment for the Arts fellowships allowed him to study with Sir Roland Hanna, and to work with Cannonball Adderley and his pianist, George Duke. He received his BA at Southern University, Baton Rouge, under the masterful tutelage of the clarinetist Alvin Batiste, mentor to many jazz and blues musicians, and went on to earn his master’s in vocal music at Michigan State University. Over the years, he mastered baritone horn, valve trombone, and drums, and when he was in high school, he began formal vocal training. By the age of 16, Butler was not only performing regularly but arranging and composing for the groups with whom he now worked nights while he continued to attend school days.Īlthough the piano was his first instrument, it was not his only. When she brought home Fats Waller, and he heard “Viper’s Drag,” that was the turning point, as he memorized LP after LP until he could get to a piano, in the neighborhood or back at school. With no piano in his home, he memorized every piano melody he found interesting on the LPs his mother bought from bargain bins in local stores. He could play in convincing vintage styles and sustain multileveled counterpoint, then demolish it in a whirlwind of genre-smashing virtuosity.”īlinded by glaucoma at birth, Henry Butler was admitted to the Louisiana State School for the Blind (now the Louisiana School for the Visually Impaired) at the age of five, and cycled back and forth between Baton Rouge during the school year and the Calliope Housing Project in New Orleans where he lived with his family.
He could also summon the elegant delicacy of classical piano or hurtle toward the dissonances and atonal clusters of modern jazz. “He commanded the syncopated power and splashy filigree of boogie-woogie and gospel and the rolling polyrhythms of Afro-Caribbean music. No one has ever captured man and musician so well in so few words. He was 69.īutler’s music was, and is, “encyclopedic, precise, and wild” (Jon Pareles, New York Times, 2018). His final tour was with his Jambalaya band (Bobby Bryan, Fred Cash, and Adrian Harpham, every one of whom he loved), in Beijing, China, and Melbourne, Australia, six weeks before he left us. Pianist, vocalist, composer, and fierce innovator Henry Butler transitioned July 2, 2018, in the Bronx, New York, as the result of metastasized colon cancer. He is so missed on the LunÀtico bandstand. Come join the New York City music community in tribute to the one and only, Henry Butler, who would have turned 71 this year.