Today would have been the 98th birthday of Johnny Griffin, the great tenor saxophonist known as “The Little Giant.”
The nickname fit. Griffin was not a big man physically, but on the bandstand he was enormous, with a huge sound, sharp wit, and one of the most formidable techniques in jazz.
He was born in Chicago in 1928, and came up through the city’s public school music system.
When my father, Ben Sidran, interviewed him in the 1980s, Griffin described his early musical training with the legendary teacher Captain Walter Dyett, who shaped generations of Chicago musicians.
“He was a strict disciplinarian,” Griffin said. “He could take these kids off the street and mold them into young people with dignity.”
Griffin wanted to play tenor saxophone, but the Captain had other ideas.
“He informed me that tenor saxophone was for me to play,” Griffin laughed. “I was only about four feet six… about seventy pounds.”
So he was made to study clarinet first, then oboe and English horn. They seemed like detours at the time. Later, he realized those instruments may have saved his life.
Drafted during the Korean War, Griffin was headed toward combat when an opportunity came to audition for an Army entertainment program. He joined a group of musicians, played well enough to impress the officers, and was reassigned to the band.
“They saw my records,” he said, “and I had played oboe, English horn… exactly what the bandmaster wanted.”
Then he added a harder truth.
“The other six young men that went with me went to Korea… and they all got killed.”
That experience may help explain why Griffin never confused jazz with something trivial. For him, music was tied to survival, dignity, and perspective.
When my father offered a definition “Jazz is made by and for people who have chosen to feel good in spite of conditions” Griffin answered immediately:
“Yeah. Yeah. That says it pretty much the way I see it. To me, that’s the basis of the magnetism that makes this music so accepted in all quarters of this planet.”
He said people everywhere could feel it, even if they knew little about America itself.
“Music actually is an international language.”
Later, like many American jazz musicians, Griffin found another kind of peace in France, where he lived for years. What he found there was something simple, but profound.
“I really learned how to relax,” he said. “I never knew how to relax in America.”
He described life in France, where no one seemed in a rush, where lunch could last hours, where people took time to talk, taste wine, and enjoy being alive.
“The graciousness of living,” he called it.
Johnny Griffin knew hardship. He knew hustle. He knew history.
But he also knew that joy could be cultivated. That feeling good was not naïve, but necessary. Joy is not the absence of struggle. It is what people create in the midst of it.
Feel good in spite of conditions.
And in times like these, it’s a small idea that looms large, its own kind of Little Giant.
Happy heavenly birthday Johnny Griffin.
Listen to Ben Sidran’s interview with Griffin from the 1980s.
