Milt Hinton describes himself

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Milt Hinton discusses his prolific recordings

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Milt Hinton discusses his start with bass

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Q: “How did you start on bass Milton? How did you get into the instrument?”

A: Milt Hinton: “Oh, I started. I think I might have told you sometime ago. About 1929, I guess, it was when Al Jolson made the first sound movie, 'The Jazz Singer'.”

Interviewer: “Right.”

Milt Hinton: “Before that, in Chicago and I guess all over the States and all over the country, every theater had orchestras in them. Big orchestras that played for the sound of the movie. And pay overtures and whatnot and they all have violin players and string players. And in my community, the Black community in Chicago on the South Side, we had at least six or eight orchestras, big orchestras. And then I've been seeing this … Eddie South was in one of these orchestras … And I was just spying now, of course ... My mother inspired me to play with these orchestras. Well, I started taking music lesson with a violin lessons in 1923. So by 1929, I'm pretty well on my way and then I won a scholarship and that sort of thing. And here, all of sudden, all of the orchestras in the theaters were out. I mean, no musician had no ... String players were all out. Of course, all of the horn players got jobs because Chicago was full of nightclubs.”

Interviewer: “Yeah.”

Milt Hinton: “So all of the horn players began to get good jobs, but the string players, all the violin players, were starving to death and here I am ready to go to war. And I looked around and all my peers, the kids that I went to high school with, were getting jobs and Al Capone opened … the big famous gangster in Chicago.”

Interviewer: “Yeah.”

Milt Hinton: “He opened a nightclub called The Cotton Club and he hired all of these young guys right out of my class, Ray Nance and all of us with Lionel Hampton were in there, Nat Cole. We all went to the same high school together and here, these guys were going to get work and I'm still with this violin and I couldn't get a job. I'm still delivering newspapers and one day, I saw one of my friends, closest friends, bought a Ford car with disc wheels and here I am with this newspaper sack on my back and that's when I decided I have to change instruments. And of course, I thought with a string, I change on string to string, so I saw bass violins were really beginning to come in because before when they came up from New Orleans, they were using bass horns.”

Interviewer: “Right. Sure.”

Milt Hinton: “But now, they're using bass violins and they didn't have enough guys around playing them. So I said, "Well, easy fourths become fifths only inverted. The violin is twos and fifth. The bass is twos and fourths and the strings, the strings are he same except backwards," and I said, "Well, I think I can handle this."

Interviewer: “Yeah.”

Milt Hinton: “And that's how I started to get with the bass. I stood around until some bass players that didn't show up one night, that happened with somebody and it finally gave me a job.”