Memphis jazz great Harold Mabern has died
Memphis jazz great Harold Mabern, a product of the city's fertile high school music scene who became a master of soulful "post-bop" piano, has died. He was 83.
He was known for playing with such legends as Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins.
Mabern's death was announced Thursday by his current record label, Smoke Sessions Records, based in New York, where Mabern lived much of his adult life. A cause of death was not announced.
Attending Douglass and then Manassas High School (which was famed for its music program), Mabern belonged to an unparalleled generation of Memphis jazz musicians that came of age in the 1950s.
Although Mabern studied music at a Chicago conservatory, "I say that I got my knowledge from the university of the streets," he told the Knoxville News Sentinel in a 2012 interview. "You don't have to go to school to learn how to play this music."
At: https://www.commercialappeal.com/story/news/2019/09/19/memphis-jazz-great-harold-mabern-dies/2380287001/
Harold Mabern, 1936 - 2019.