Herbie Mann, 1930 - 2003: Versatile jazz flutist helped create 'world music'

SANTA FE, N.M. — Herbie Mann, the versatile jazz flutist who combined a variety of musical styles and deeply influenced genres such as world music and fusion, has died. He was 73.

Mann, who had battled prostate cancer since 1997, died late Tuesday, according to a friend, Sy Johnson. A funeral home in Santa Fe said it was making arrangements with Mann's family.

Mann had moved to Santa Fe in the late 1980s after spending most of his life in his native New York City.

Mann always performed different styles, then combined them. He did bebop and cool jazz, and toured Africa, Brazil and Japan listening for new music.

"I just think he was a wonderful Pied Piper of jazz, drawing our attention to what's happening around the world and the country," said Johnson, a New York City composer who had known Mann for some 40 years. He called Mann "a guy who loved music of all kinds and was eager to explore it all."

Family of Mann, a group formed in 1973, played world music before it was called by that name. Mann's best-selling "Memphis Underground" was a founding recording of fusion.

If a genie offered Mann anything he wanted, he said in a 1995 Associated Press interview, he would choose a big band, including three rhythm sections for straight-ahead jazz, Brazilian music and soul.

"I'd be able to play all that music; I wouldn't have to play any one thing all the time," he said. "And I would always like to try to evolve the music to another step. Once you reach the point where you play it perfectly in a genre, to me it gets boring. Then I want to try to evolve by combining things."

When he left Atlantic Records in 1979 he started producing his own records, and later he launched his own label, Kokopelli. In all, he made more than 100 albums as leader.

Album titles reflect Mann's versatility: "At the Village Gate" (1962); "African Suite" (1959); "Brasil, Bossa Nova & Blues" (1962); "Latin Mann" 1965; "Memphis Two Step" (1971); and "Eastern European Roots" (2000).

"As much as I love music, I never really thought it was my life. I thought it was the vehicle I used to express my life," he said.

Born Herbert Solomon in Brooklyn in 1930, he started his career when he was 15, playing in groups at Catskill Mountain resorts for the summer. He studied saxophone but preferred flute. In the 1950s, after three years in the Army playing with the Army Band in Trieste, Italy, Mann toured France and Scandinavia.

He credited visits to Africa and Brazil in the early 1960s with changing his musical outlook.

He returned and recorded with Brazilian musicians, including Antonio Carlos Jobim and a 19-year-old Sergio Mendes.

At 70, he put out a CD called "Eastern European Roots."

"I've played Cuban music, but I'm not Cuban," he told the Rocky Mountain News. "I've played Brazilian music, but I'm not Brazilian. I've played jazz, but I'm not African-American. What I am is an Eastern European Jew. I love all the music I've played, but I wanted something that is mine. ... I had been writing this music for years, but I never thought there was a place for me to play it."

"I'm playing better than I've ever played," Mann said in the 1995 AP interview. "As far as I'm concerned, almost everything I've done in the past has been on the surface or just a hair below. Now I'm getting serious."

His last live gig was May 3 at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, where he received a standing ovation.

Mann is survived by his wife, Susan Janeal Arison; sons Paul Mann of San Francisco and Geoff Mann of New York City; daughters Claudia Mann-Basler of Espanola, N.M., and Laura Mann of New York City; his mother, Ruth Solomon of Hallandale, Fla.; and a sister, Judi Burnstein of Niceville, Fla.