Butch Warren’s 75th birthday anniversary was a month ago. The bassist was born Edward Rudolph Warren, Jr. in Washington, D.C. on August 8, 1939. Herbie Hancock, who with Warren and Billy Higgins comprised a Blue Note house rhythm section in the early sixties, said “[Warren] and Higgins were always tearing it up…The crowd loved to hear them play…You could always depend on Butch for the ‘groove’.” Do the Math blogger and pianist Ethan Iverson describes him as “the man who took Paul Chambers, Wilbur Ware, and ‘D.C. slick’ and made his own canonical voice of the low undulating line.”
Warren arrived on the New York scene in 1959 after spelling the AWOL bassist in Kenny Dorham’s combo at the Bohemian Caverns in the District. He won the permanent job with the trumpeter, and over the next three years appeared on many of the most popular and critically acclaimed Blue Note releases by KD, Hancock, Sonny Clark, Dexter Gordon, Jackie McLean, Donald Byrd, and Joe Henderson. When John Ore quit Thelonious Monk’s quartet in 1963, he urged the pianist to hire Warren, and Butch spent the better part of the next year touring with the pianist, who was then at the height of his fame. Here they are in Japan with Charlie Rouse and Frankie Dunlop in a brilliant performance of “Evidence.”
What with the vagaries of the business and the prevalence of drug use, it wasn’t uncommon for players of Warren’s generation to make a quick impression, then disappear, some to an early grave, others to prison, still others to a different profession altogether. Warren’s career came to a sudden stop in 1964; his last recorded performance was on It’s Monk’s Time in March 1963. What followed were decades of inactivity due to mental illness and drug addiction, with occasional periods spent in prison and mental institutions. Warren’s poignant story was revealed in this 2006 article reported by Marc Fisher in The Washington Post.
He was also profiled for this NBC News feature, which includes rare footage and interviews with Warren, who recalls being drawn to the bass by its smell and shape. Thelonious Monk, Jr., Blue Note producer Michael Cuscuna, and Warren’s D.C. caretaker and advocate, pianist Peter Edelman, help fill in the story.
Warren enjoyed renewed attention for a few years before his death from lung cancer last October. He recorded two CD’s worth of original compositions, some that he’d written decades ago (several of his tunes were recorded on Blue Note sessions back in the day), and a new work entitled “Barack Obama,” which Matt Wilson has also recorded. Here it’s played by Butch and a quartet of French musicians in Angers, France in 2010.