File Photo: Jazz Musician Clark Terry (Agence France-Presse)
Jazz trumpeter Clark Terry, the playful soloist and teacher whose seven-decade career spanned a golden era of jazz, has died at 94, his wife announced on Sunday.
"Our beloved Clark Terry has joined the big band in heaven where he'll be singing and playing with the angels," his wife Gwen said Facebook.
"He left us peacefully, surrounded by his family, students and friends."
Terry was one of the most recorded artists in jazz and played with a who's who of greats. But he also found a vocation in the education of younger musicians and, unlike many acclaimed artists, was famous for not always taking himself seriously on stage.
He reached a broader audience in 1960 when he joined "The Tonight Show," becoming the first African-American to become a regular in a band on a major US television network.
Terry said that television network NBC had been facing calls to be more inclusive and contacted him while he was performing in Paris in a show that was on the ropes.
"We had to be models, because I knew we were in a test... We couldn't have a speck on our trousers. We couldn't have a wrinkle in the clothes. We couldn't have a dirty shirt," Terry later said in an interview for an oral history archive for the Smithsonian museums.
Terry, in the same interview, said that jazz solos for him were like painting and that he subconsciously imagined colors.
"Different tones on the instrument have a connotation of tones of colors to me. I always like to think of my favorite colors, which is blue and white and red," Terry said.
Late in his career, he also took up the paintbrush, saying: "Almost invariably, if you are a good creator of a solo, you can create a painting."