Milton John Hinton (June 23, 1910 – December 19, 2000) was an American double bassist and photographer.
Regarded as the Dean of American jazz bass players, his nicknames included "Sporty" from his years in Chicago, "Fump" from his time on the road with Cab Calloway, and "The Judge" from the 1950s and beyond. Hinton's recording career lasted over 60 years, mostly in jazz but also with a variety of other genres as a prolific session musician.
He was also a photographer of note, praised for documenting American jazz during the 20th Century.
Early life in Mississippi (1910–1919)
Hinton was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, United States, the only child of Hilda Gertrude Robinson, whom he referred to as "Titter," and Milton Dixon Hinton. He was three-months-old when his father left the family. He grew up in a home with his mother, his maternal grandmother (a former slave of Joe Davis, the brother of Jefferson Davis), and two of his mother's sisters.
His childhood in Vicksburg was characterized by extreme poverty and extreme racism. Lynching was a common practice at the time. Hinton said that one of the clearest memories of his childhood was when he accidentally came upon a lynching.
Growing up in Chicago (1919–1935)
Hinton moved with his extended family to Chicago, Illinois, in late 1919, which created opportunities for him. Chicago was where Hinton first encountered economic diversity among African-Americans, about which he later noted, "That's when I realized that being black didn't always mean you had to be poor." It was also where he experienced an abundance of music, either in person or through live performances on the radio. During this time he first heard concerts featuring Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Eddie South, and many others.
Music was a fixture at home. His mother and other relatives regularly played piano. He received his first instrument – a violin – in 1923 for his thirteenth birthday, which he studied for four years. In addition to taking violin lessons, Hinton and his mother attended performances at the Vendome Theater every Sunday, featuring the orchestra of Erskine Tate with Louis Armstrong as a feature soloist.
After graduating from Wendell Phillips High School, Hinton attended Crane Junior College for two years, during which time he began receiving regular work as a freelance musician around Chicago. He performed with Freddie Keppard, Zutty Singleton, Jabbo Smith, Erskine Tate, and Art Tatum. Hinton soon taught himself to play the double bass because opportunities for violinists were limited. His first steady job began in the spring of 1930, playing tuba (and later double bass) in the band of pianist Tiny Parham. His recording debut on November 4, 1930, was on tuba with Parham's band on a tune titled "Squeeze Me." After graduating from Crane Junior College in 1932, attended Northwestern University for one semester, then dropped out to pursue music full-time. He received steady work from 1932 through 1935 in a quartet with violinist Eddie South, with extended residencies in California, Chicago, and Detroit. With this group he first recorded on double bass in early 1933.
The Cab Calloway era (1936–1950)
In 1936, Hinton joined the Cab Calloway Orchestra, initially as a temporary replacement for Al Morgan, while the band was on tour en route to a six-month residency at the newly opened midtown location of the Cotton Club in New York City. He quickly found acceptance among the band members, and he ended up staying with Calloway for over fifteen years. Until the Cotton Club closed in 1940, the Calloway band performed there for up to six months per year, going on tour for the remaining six months of the year. During the Cotton Club residencies, Hinton took part in recording sessions with Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Billie Holiday, Ethel Waters, Teddy Wilson, and many others. It was at this time that he recorded what is possibly the first bass feature, "Pluckin' the Bass" in August 1939.
Hinton appeared regularly on radio while in Calloway's band, either on bass in concerts broadcast from the Cotton Club, or as a cast member for the short-lived music quiz show "Cab Calloway's Quizzicale." These broadcasts brought national attention to the Calloway band and helped enable the successful national tours the band would schedule. They also gave listeners a chance to hear examples of jive talk, which Calloway would formalize through publications such as his Hepster's Dictionary, first published in 1938.
Calloway's band included renowned sidemen such as Danny Barker, Chu Berry, Doc Cheatham, Cozy Cole, Dizzy Gillespie, Illinois Jacquet, Jonah Jones, Ike Quebec, and Ben Webster. Hinton credits Chu Berry with elevating the overall musicianship of the Calloway band, in part by encouraging Cab to hire arrangers such as Benny Carter, to create new arrangements that would challenge the musicians. As Hinton put it, "Musically he was the greatest thing that ever happened to the band." Hinton was also heavily influenced by the musical innovations of Dizzy Gillespie, with whom he had informal sessions in the late 1930s, during breaks between sets at the Cotton Club. Hinton credits Gillespie with introducing him to many of the experimental harmonic practices and chord substitutions, that would later be associated with bebop.
In 1939 when Hinton returned to Chicago for his grandmother's funeral, he met Mona Clayton, who was then singing in his mother's church choir. The two were married a few years later and remained inseparable for the rest of Milt's life. (Mona was his second wife; the first was a brief relationship in the 1930s with Oby Allen, a friend he knew from high school.) He and Mona's only child, Charlotte, was born on February 28, 1947. Mona had begun traveling with the Calloway Orchestra in the early 1940s — the only musician's friend or spouse to do so. She helped musicians in the band manage their money, and she often insisted that they open savings accounts. For band members, she was a trusted confidant who was known for her discretion. When traveling with a toddler became too difficult, the Hintons bought a two-family house in Queens, and ten years later they purchased a larger single-family home in an adjacent neighborhood where they remained for the rest of their lives.
In addition to caring for their daughter, Mona handled the family's finances, and her attention to detail ensured the couple's financial security later in life. She kept track of Hinton's freelance work, scheduled interviews, coordinated public relations events, and often drove him back and forth to gigs (Hinton never drove as an adult, due in part to a car accident he was involved in as a teenager in Chicago). In the mid-1960s, Mona completed both a bachelor's and a master's degree and taught in the public schools for several years. In the 1970s, she began traveling with Hinton again and was regularly invited to join him at jazz parties and festivals where he performed. At the same time, she was active as a music contractor for Lena Horne and others. Mona was always well respected in the jazz community, and she and Hinton were viewed by many as role models; as the jazz historian Dan Morgenstern noted in an article from 2000, "If there is a closer couple, I'd be surprised."
After Cab Calloway (1950–1954)
By 1950, popular music tastes had changed, and Calloway lacked the funds to support a full big band. Instead, he hired Hinton and a few others to create a smaller ensemble, first a septet and later a quartet, which toured until June 1952, with trips to Cuba and Uruguay. After the Calloway ensemble disbanded, Hinton spent more time as a freelance studio musician in New York City. At first, the work was sporadic, and, as Hinton put it, "This was the one period in my life when I was worried about earning a living." He played as many clubs and restaurants as possible, a practice he would continue for the next several decades. He performed regularly at La Vie en Rose, the Embers, the Metropole, and Basin Street West, where he appeared with Jackie Gleason, Phil Moore, and Joe Bushkin. In the early 1950s, he performed with Count Basie for a brief time in the New York area.