Julian Euell obit

Julian Euell, R.I.P.

 

He was not on the list.

Julian Euell passed away on June 3rd. He was 90. As a bassist in the 1950s he performed and recorded with John Coltrane, Mal Waldron, Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Jackie McLean, Randy Weston, Gigi Gryce, and many others. In the 1960s he directed the arts program for HARYOU-ACT where he hired such artists as Romare Bearden and touched the lives of such young men as Larry Willis and Kareem Abdul Jabar. In the 1970s he was Assistant Secretary for Public Service at the Smithsonian where he oversaw all the jazz programs including the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz that Martin Williams produced. In the late 1980s he directed the Oakland Museum in California and then returned east in the early 1990s to direct the Louis Armstrong House. In his later years he would return to the bass to sit in at Washington, DC area clubs. Along the way he studied at Juilliard, earned a bachelor's from NYU and a PhD from George Washington and help raise five children.

Euell first began playing bass in 1944, and served in the Army from 1945 to 1947. He played with Sonny Rollins, Jackie McLean, and Art Taylor in 1947 but quit music from 1949 to 1952, working in a post office. In 1952 he studied under Charles Mingus and then attended Juilliard from 1953 to 1956, studying with Stuart Sankey, and Frederick Zimmermann. He also took classes at New York University between 1951 and 1954, and received a bachelor's in sociology from Columbia University; In 1954-55 he taught there. His musical associations at the time included Elmo Hope (1952), Benny Harris (1952–53), Charlie Rouse (1953–54), Joe Roland (1955), Freddie Redd (1956), Gigi Gryce (1956–57), and Phineas Newborn (1957). After this he began doing social work in New Jersey and was less active as a performer, though he continued playing with Mal Waldron (1958–60), Randy Weston (1959), Abbey Lincoln (1959–60), Charles Mingus, and Kenny Dorham.

In the 1960s Euell worked in Harlem directing an arts program (1962–66) and then returned to school, receiving a Ph.D. from George Washington University in 1973. He was Assistant Secretary for Public Service at the Smithsonian from 1970 to 1982, and was partly responsible for the institution's increasing interest in jazz history. From 1983 to 1988 he directed the Oakland Museum History-Arts-Science and from 1991 to 1995 was director of the Louis Armstrong House. He returned to semiregular performing in the 1980s and 1990s.