Jimmy Cheatham

James Rudolph Cheatham (June 18, 1924 – January 12, 2007) was an American jazz trombonist and teacher who played with Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, and Ornette Coleman.

In 1978, Cheatham was invited to lead the jazz program at University of California, San Diego and in 1979 he was appointed head of the African American and jazz performance program there. He retired in 2005.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, it was while serving in the United States Army during and just after World War II, that Cheatham played in the 173rd Army Ground Force Band.

Cheatham met his wife, Jean Evans, in 1956 in Buffalo, New York, when the local musicians' union chief called them separately to replace two musicians who could not make a job at the local Elks Ballroom. They married in 1959.

In the mid-1980s Cheatham formed The Sweet Baby Blues Band with his wife. The Sweet Baby Blues Band played Kansas City style blues. Cheatham's Sweet Baby Blues album won a French Grand Prix du Disque. Their album Luv in the Afternoon was voted blues album of the year in a 1991 critics poll in Down Beat magazine.

Cheatham also taught jazz at Bennington College in Vermont and at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin.

Cheatham's legacy is carried on by several students who went on to become, like him, prominent composer/performer/educators: flutist Nicole Mitchell, bassist Karl E. H. Seigfried, and drummer Vikas Srivastava.

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