Fate smiled on Minnesota's jazz scene decades ago, when pianist James "Jimmy" Hamilton traveled to the state with his wife, ran out of money, and put down roots. Hamilton became a fixture in Twin Cities' jazz clubs, and his lessons on the fundamentals of music inspired thousands of Minneapolis teens — including one student with "big ears" who later became known as Prince.
Hamilton, dubbed a Minnesota jazz legend, died Dec. 31 after prolonged complications from stroke. He was 80.
Local jazz enthusiasts knew Hamilton as a pianist who started playing in the 1960s at the Poodle Club in Minneapolis, appeared with stars at the Carleton Celebrity Room in Bloomington, and anchored a jazz trio at the Lafayette Country Club in Minnetonka. Relatives recalled a loving family man whose emotions poured out through his fingers onto the keyboard, but also through his time with his two children and three grandchildren.
"James … never shied away from showing that he cared about people," said his daughter-in-law, Trena Hamilton. "He cried at our wedding before we even walked down the aisle. That was one thing that everybody loved about him; he showed emotion. That was always a wonderful thing."
Hamilton grew up an only child in Alabama after being adopted into a musical family that included an uncle who played clarinet in the Duke Ellington Orchestra. He studied music in the 1950s at Tennessee State, where a roommate helped him get a two-week gig playing baritone saxophone as a fill-in for the Ray Charles Band.
"I told my dad after two and a half weeks, 'I'm going to go back to Tennessee State and I'm going to stay until I graduate,' " Hamilton recalled in a Jazz Legends interview on Jazz88 radio last spring. "Boy I learned a lot about life being on the road with the Ray Charles Band."
Hamilton was introduced to the woman he would marry, Barrow, while giving music lessons in Tennessee to her younger siblings; they remained husband and wife for 54 years. They were traveling between Michigan State, where Hamilton was starting graduate school, and Denver when they stopped in the Twin Cities to see relatives and ended up staying for good.
Hamilton was a band teacher for 28 years in the Minneapolis Public Schools, where he inspired musicians with his focus on pitch and clarity and fundamentals, rather than just the mechanics of playing instruments. The band program at Central High School grew from around 20 to 300 musicians in his years there, he said in his interview.
