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Phil Urso, 'cool jazz' master of tenor sax

By Bill Gallo, Special to the Rocky

Published April 9, 2008 at 5:44 p.m.
Updated April 9, 2008 at 11:56 p.m.

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Phil Urso had two of the best ears in jazz, a fellow musician said.

Phil Urso had two of the best ears in jazz, a fellow musician said.

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Inside the jazz fraternity, Phil Urso was regarded as one of the great tenor saxophonists.

Miles Davis, who handed out compliments like they were $1,000 bills, once told him that he played the most beautiful harmonies of anyone he'd ever worked with.

When Mr. Urso was on tour in 1957 with the Birdland All Stars, he and saxophone legend Lester Young would sit in the back of the band bus, drinking gin and trading ideas. Young started calling him "Little Prez" because Mr. Urso's solos, like his own, had become masterpieces of understatement - whispery, thoughtful, romantically shaded.

"Among his peers, including guys like Gerry Mulligan and Zoot Sims, he was number one," his brother, Joe, recalls.

Trumpeter Tony Rodriguez, an alumnus of the Woody Herman and Ralph Marteri big bands, said his old friend had two of the best ears in jazz.

"He could harmonize anything," Rodriguez noted. "Third, fourth, fifth parts. Anything. And you should have heard him play piano. Genius."

Mr. Urso died Monday at the Bear Creek Rehabilitation Center in Morrison after a long illness. He was 82. Services will be at 2 p.m. Friday at St. Jude's Catholic Church, 9405 W. Florida Ave.

Born Oct. 2, 1925, in Jersey City, N.J., Philip Urso first played clarinet. When he moved on to tenor saxophone, he eschewed the flashy, hard-driving style then in vogue for a dry-martini approach.

In the postwar years, he paid his dues in the reed sections of the Jimmy Dorsey and Claude Thornhill bands, then replaced Stan Getz in Woody Herman's lead tenor chair. But it was Mr. Urso's "cool jazz" collaborations, in the 1950s, with trombonist Bob Brookmeyer and the famously troubled trumpet player Chet Baker, that solidified his reputation.

"He wasn't as well-known as he should have been," said his daughter, Stephanie Urso. "But he was all music. He played for the love of music, never to promote himself."

The family has a longtime Denver connection. In 1935, Mr. Urso's late parents opened an Italian restaurant on Blake Street, the Waldorf Inn. In 1946, Mr. Urso returned to metropolitan New York to get his career as a jazz musician and composer into high gear, but he settled in Denver for good in the late 1960s. He played periodic club dates at El Chapultepec, Josephina's, The Hornet, The Fourth Story and other venues, made occasional recordings and appeared at jazz festivals.

A public television documentary, A Night With Phil Urso, has enjoyed several reruns on Channels 6 and 12, but many of his recordings are out of print. The 1955-56 sides he made with Baker on the Pacific Jazz label are career-defining, but his brother Joe's favorite is a 1951 solo on Early Autumn, with the Herman band.

On Jan. 4, 1969, in Denver, Mr. Urso married the former Licia "Bruna" Marchi, an immigrant from northern Italy.

"Musicians are different people," she said. "Their minds work differently than other people, and it took me time to understand that, to know that he was a genius. He was also a wonderful husband. He became a family guy."

Mr. Urso's daughter says she never knew what stature her father had - he never talked about it - until she was 18 and first went to hear him in a club.

"I had no idea," she says. "Before that, all I knew was that he went to work at night."

Said Joe Urso: "Phil had the kind of life that the rest of us can barely understand. When you and me are in bed, sleeping, the musicians are out there playing, studying, moving the music forward. It's something we can never really grasp."

But those who attend the funeral will get a taste of it. After Mass, Phil Urso's musician friends will play a jam session in his memory.

Comments

  • April 10, 2008

    6:07 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    lebeaux writes:

    My name is Eugene LeBeaux-Rueff. Phil Urso called me "LeBeaux". I first met him when he came to play with my band "Solar Energy" at the Bull and Bush on sunday nights in 1971. He was just a marvelous musician and a very good friend and we played together many times over the next years. Phil had a great attitude about music and life and his wonderful musicianship will always be an inspiration. He was one of a kind and will be deeply missed.

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