Flying Home — Illinois Jacquet Tenor Saxophone Transcription

Music by Benny Goodman & Lionel Hampton · Recorded 26 May 1942 · Two choruses · Tenor solo only

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Illinois Jacquet — Biography

Hired to Sound Like Someone Else

Jean-Baptiste Illinois Jacquet was born in Broussard, Louisiana in 1922, to a Creole father and a Sioux mother, and moved to Houston as an infant. His father Gilbert was a part-time bandleader, and Jacquet grew up playing in the family band — on alto saxophone, alongside his brother Russell on trumpet and Linton on drums.

At fifteen he joined the Milton Larkin Orchestra, a Houston dance band that never made a commercial record but turned out an extraordinary number of players. Among his bandmates there were tenor saxophonist Arnett Cobb and the alto player and blues shouter Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson. That band is where the Texas tenor sound was effectively incubated, and it explains a great deal about what happened in 1942.

Jacquet also carried a story from those years about a night in Kansas City when a young Charlie Parker watched him play. They jammed afterwards, and Jacquet's recollection was that their styles were so alike that when Parker played, he thought he was hearing himself.

In 1939 he moved to Los Angeles, where he met Nat King Cole and sat in with his trio. Cole introduced him to Lionel Hampton, who was assembling a big band. Hampton wanted him — but there was a condition, and it is the best detail in the whole story: Jacquet had been offered the chair as Arnett Cobb's substitute, and he was told to switch from alto to tenor and play like Cobb. The man who was about to invent the honking tenor solo got the job on condition that he imitate somebody else.

After Flying Home made him famous he left Hampton in 1943, worn out by having to bring the house down with the same solo every night, and joined Cab Calloway's orchestra — appearing with them in the Lena Horne film Stormy Weather. In 1944 he returned to California and formed a small group with his brother Russell and a young Charles Mingus, and appeared in the Academy Award-nominated short film Jammin' the Blues alongside Billie Holiday and Lester Young. He was featured with Count Basie in 1945–46, toured for years with Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic, and in 1981 surprised everyone by forming a big band that lasted two decades. He also played the bassoon, one of very few jazz musicians ever to do so. He died in New York City on 22 July 2004, aged 81.

Flying Home — The Tune Before 1942

Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton & a Nervous Flight

The tune was not new in 1942, and Jacquet's record was not its debut. It was its rescue.

Hampton's own account is that the melody arrived while he was waiting to board an aeroplane for the first time, flying with the Goodman band from Los Angeles to Atlantic City. He whistled to calm his nerves; Goodman asked what the tune was; Hampton said he didn't know, and they might as well call it Flying Home. It is a lovely story and every article about the tune repeats it. It is also worth noting that Hampton was a famously unreliable narrator of his own history, and the documented dates sit slightly awkwardly against the anecdote. Take it as a good story rather than a citation.

What is documented is that the earliest surviving performance is a radio broadcast from 19 August 1939 by the Benny Goodman Sextet, with Hampton on vibraphone and Charlie Christian on electric guitar — one of the earliest recorded appearances of the amplified guitar in jazz. The sextet cut it in the studio that autumn and played it at John Hammond's Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall on Christmas Eve.

By 1942 it had been well worked over. Will Bradley recorded it in February 1940 in a Fletcher Henderson arrangement; Hampton cut it himself six days later with a tentet; Charlie Barnet recorded it the same year. Hampton had performed it hundreds of times. The riff was, if anything, going stale — which is precisely why he decided to try it again with his new seventeen-piece band and hand it to his nineteen-year-old tenor player.

The Record — Decca, 26 May 1942

Lionel Hampton and His Orchestra

The session took place in New York on 26 May 1942 for Decca. The arrangement is usually credited to Hampton's pianist Milt Buckner, though some accounts give it to Hampton himself.

The band was Lionel Hampton on vibraphone; Ernie Royal, Eddie “Gogo” Hutchinson, Mannie Klein and Jack Trainor on trumpets; Fred Beckett, Sonny Craven and Harry Sloan on trombones; Marshall Royal and Ray Perry on altos; Illinois Jacquet and Eddie Barefield on tenors; Jack McVea on baritone; Milt Buckner on piano; Irving Ashby on guitar; Vernon Alley on bass; and Lee Young on drums.

The record itself is tightly built. Hampton takes a short vibraphone introduction, the band states the melody for sixteen bars, Hampton takes the bridge, and the ensemble plays a riff to close the chorus. Then Jacquet enters and plays for two full choruses — by some distance the longest solo on the record. After he finishes there is a chase sequence between Hampton and the high-note trumpet specialist Ernie Royal to take it out.

It was a hit. It was popular enough that in 1944 Hampton recorded a sequel, “Flyin' Home #2”, this time featuring Arnett Cobb — the man Jacquet had been hired to imitate, now in Jacquet's old chair. The tune went on to become the theme song of all three men.

Ella Fitzgerald later scat-sang the melody on a 1945 Decca recording, and the tune has stayed in the repertoire ever since. But it is the 1942 side that people mean when they say Flying Home.

About the Solo

Two Choruses That Changed the Tenor Saxophone

Flying Home is a 32-bar AABA taken at a swung 180 beats per minute. The recording is in A♭ concert; this transcription is written in B♭ for tenor saxophone and F for alto. Jacquet plays two complete choruses, 64 bars in all, beginning at letter A and with the second chorus starting at letter B.

The first chorus is the more conventional of the two, and you can hear where Jacquet came from in it. The phrasing is relaxed and melodic, with triplet figures and a light, swinging placement that owes a lot to Lester Young. If you only heard this chorus you would file it as a very good young swing tenor player and move on.

The second chorus is a different proposition entirely. At letter B, Jacquet stops playing lines and starts playing one note. He hammers out a dotted-quarter and eighth figure on a single repeated pitch, accented on every attack, and holds it for nearly six bars before breaking into a phrase — then does the whole thing again eight bars later. It is roughly twenty-two consecutive attacks on the same note, twice, at 180 beats per minute.

On paper it looks like almost nothing. Musically it is the moment the tenor saxophone stopped being a melodic instrument and became a rhythmic and physical one. That single repeated note is the direct ancestor of every honking R&B tenor break of the next fifteen years — and of the whole approach you can hear later in Al Sears on Castle Rock or Earl Bostic on Earl Blows a Fuse.

Around that central idea the score is full of the small expressive details that make it sound the way it does: scoops into the front of notes, falls off the ends of phrases, ghosted notes, and triplet runs used as connective tissue rather than display. The accents in the second chorus are relentless, and they are the point — this is a solo built out of attack and placement rather than note choice.

One more thing worth knowing before you learn it. This solo stopped being an improvisation almost immediately. It became part of the arrangement. Every tenor player who followed Jacquet in Hampton's band was required to reproduce it note for note, including Arnett Cobb and Dexter Gordon, and it became a standard part of a saxophonist's advanced education. It is one of very few jazz solos that everybody plays the same way — which is a good argument for learning it exactly as written before you start making it your own.

The Texas Tenor Sound — How to Play It

Honks, Scoops, Falls & Riding a Single Note

Jacquet is the founding example of what became known as the Texas tenor style — the blues-drenched, big-toned approach that came out of Houston and the Southwest territory bands. Ted Gioia characterises it as honking, shouting and riffing, riding high on a single note or barking out a guttural howl. Cannonball Adderley put it more economically: a moan within the tone.

Here is what that actually requires on the horn.

1. The honk. A honk is not just loud. It comes from three things happening together: a fast, well-supported air stream; a lower lip relaxed enough to let the reed vibrate freely; and a firm, definite tongue attack at the front of the note. Players who try to get it by blowing harder end up sharp and thin. Practise on a comfortable low or mid-range note and listen for weight rather than volume.

2. Repeated notes. The letter B passage is the hardest thing on the page, and it is not about fingers at all. Practise it away from the transcription: pick one note and play the dotted-quarter and eighth figure for eight bars straight, aiming for identical weight on every single attack. Any unevenness is instantly audible because there is nothing else to listen to. Get it metronomically solid at a slow tempo before you take it near 180.

3. Scoops. Arrive at the note from underneath. Start slightly flat with a looser embouchure and firm up into the centre of the pitch as the note speaks. Used sparingly it gives a phrase a vocal, blues-shouter quality; used constantly it just sounds out of tune.

4. Falls. Let the note begin properly in tune, then relax the embouchure and let the pitch slide away downward as the air tails off. A fall is a controlled release, not a fumbled ending.

5. Ghost notes. Notes marked with a cross are half-swallowed — keep the fingering, back off the air, let the tongue close down on the reed. Ghosting is what gives a blues line its internal rhythm; the notes you suppress define the ones you accent.

6. The growl. Jacquet's sound has grit in it, and the growl is produced by humming or singing a pitch in your throat while you play. It belongs on top of a good sound, not instead of one. Build the honk and the attack first, then add the rasp.

7. Time feel. At 180 with a swing feel there is no room to be approximate. Jacquet sits right on the beat with real weight behind it — he is not laying back the way Lester Young does on a ballad, and he is not rushing. Play along with the record until your placement matches his.

If you would like feedback on any of this — honking and growling are much easier to fix with someone listening than from a written description — saxophone lessons are available in South East London and online. You can also browse the rest of the free saxophone transcriptions on this site.

The Legacy — Cobb, Gordon & the Honkers

What Two Choruses Started

The immediate consequence was Arnett Cobb, who replaced Jacquet in Hampton's band in 1942 and took the feature on “Flyin' Home #2” two years later. Cobb pushed the style further still and earned the nickname “the Wild Man of the Tenor Sax”. Dexter Gordon also passed through the chair and played the solo. Buddy Tate, King Curtis and David “Fathead” Newman carried the Texas tenor sound onward into R&B, soul and rock and roll.

The wider consequence is most of the rest of this site's transcription catalogue. The honking, riff-driven, crowd-pleasing tenor that Jacquet introduced in 1942 is the direct ancestor of Al Sears on Castle Rock in 1951, of Earl Bostic's Hurricane Blues, and of the blues-shouting alto of Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson — who was standing next to Jacquet in Milt Larkin's band in Houston before any of it happened.

Norman Granz did a great deal to spread it too, building his Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts around exactly this kind of high-energy tenor playing throughout the 1940s and 1950s, with Jacquet as one of his principal attractions.

For a sense of what the style grew out of rather than into, the Lester Young transcriptions are the obvious companion listening — you can hear Young's melodic logic underneath Jacquet's first chorus before the second one departs for somewhere else entirely.