Milt Larkin

Milt Larkin (October 10, 1910, Navasota, Texas – August 31, 1996) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader and singer.

Larkin was an autodidact on the trumpet, and got his start playing in Texas in the 1930s with Chester Boone and Giles Mitchell. Between 1936 and 1943 he led his own band, touring the southwest United States, with gigs in Kansas City, and at the Apollo Theater in New York City, as well as a 9-month residency at the Rhumboogie Café in Chicago, on occasions coinciding there with, and backing, T-Bone Walker.

Personnel in the band included Arnett Cobb and Illinois Jacquet (both of whom went on to join Lionel Hampton),Eddie Vinson (who left to join Cootie Williams),Tom Archia, Cedric Haywood, Wild Bill Davis, Alvin Burroughs, Joe Marshall and Roy Porter. Vinson and Cobb had been with the band since its creation at the Aragon Ballroom in Houston in 1936. This ensemble won high praise but never recorded, on the one hand, because of the "recording ban" imposed on August 1, 1942, just after the band arrived in Chicago, and on the other hand, because Larkin wouldn't accept the low wages that record companies offered to black musicians.

Having already lost several members to the draft board, Larkin disbanded the group when he himself entered the Army. From 1943 to 1946, he played in Sy Oliver's army band, also playing on trombone. Larkin first recorded after leaving the service, recording with a number of ensembles over the next decade. In 1956, he moved to New York and led a septet at the Celebrity Club. In the 1970s he returned to Houston and retired.

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