Jazz Trumpeter Clark Terry Dies

Jazz trumpeter Clark Terry, whose seven-decade career as a leader of big bands and sideman spanned a golden era of 20th century jazz, has died at 94, his wife announced on Sunday.

"Our beloved Clark Terry has joined the big band in heaven where he'll be singing and playing with the angels," his wife Gwen said on his Facebook page. 

"He left us peacefully, surrounded by his family, students and friends."

Terry, who was honored in 2010 with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, was best known to the broader US public as a soloist on the house band of NBC's "The Tonight Show."

But he played with many of the marquee names of jazz, and flourished in a period of musical brilliance.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1920, he began playing in clubs in the early 1940s and then with US Navy bands during World War II.

After the war, he played with the Count Basie and Duke Ellington orchestras, and was part of the group that performed Ellington's score for Otto Preminger's "Anatomy of a Murder" in 1959.

Terry performed with Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Stan Getz, Thelonious Monk, Billy Strayhorn, Louis Armstrong, Yusef Lateef, Dizzy Gillespie and many others.

He was a mentor to big band leader, composer-arranger Quincy Jones and another legend, trumpeter Miles Davis.

Variety said he led or co-led more than 80 recording dates and played on more than 900 sessions by the time of his last one in 2004.

From the 1970s onward, Terry toured with the Oscar Peterson and his own Big B-A-D band.

Named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, he toured the Middle East and Africa as a cultural ambassador for the US State Department.

In 2011, he published the autobiography "Clark."