Watching Gerald Wilson, who has died aged 96, direct an orchestra was an experience in itself. He was balletic, his shock of white hair a trademark, darting this way and that, as he cued sections and controlled dynamics. "I choreograph the music as I conduct. I point it out, everything you're here to listen to," he explained. In a long life that embraced virtually every aspect of African-American music experience, Wilson was active as a jazz trumpeter and an arranger before forming a number of big bands, eventually concentrating on composition and blossoming as an educator. It's no exaggeration to say that he was a jazz phenomenon, a beacon for aspiring musicians and an innovator, ever open to new possibilities.
Wilson was from Shelby, Mississippi, where his father, a blacksmith, played the clarinet and trombone, and his mother taught music. Wilson's sister was an excellent classical pianist and his elder brother also played "nice jazz on the piano", he told the journalist Kirk Silsbee. Already adept at the piano and entranced by the bands that passed through Shelby on their way to and from New Orleans, his head turned by the music of Duke Ellington, the young Wilson opted for the trumpet. He moved to Detroit when he was 16 and gained entry to the prestigious Cass Technical high school, where the tenor saxophonist Wardell Gray was one of his classmates.
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