Milt Larkin

Did You Know?

• He received the Jefferson Award for community service and performed regularly at the Annual Houston Jazz Festival and the Annual Juneteenth Blues Festival.
• Despite suffering from Alzheimer's disease, he performed flawlessly at his 84th birthday bash on October 10, 1994.

Biography

Milt Larkin was a self-taught trumpeter who got his professional start in Texas during the 1930s, playing alongside Chester Boone and Giles Mitchell. He formed his own band in 1936 and led it until 1943, touring the Southwest with stops in Kansas City, a show at New York’s Apollo Theater, and a nine-month stretch at Chicago’s Rhumboogie Café, where the group occasionally backed guitarist T-Bone Walker. The band’s lineup included future Lionel Hampton sidemen Arnett Cobb and Illinois Jacquet, as well as Eddie Vinson, who later joined Cootie Williams. Other members were Tom Archia, Cedric Haywood, Wild Bill Davis, Alvin Burroughs, Joe Marshall, and Roy Porter. Vinson and Cobb had been with the group since its start at Houston’s Aragon Ballroom in 1936. Though the band earned strong reviews, it never cut a record. That was partly because a national recording ban kicked in on August 1, 1942, just after the band reached Chicago, and partly because Larkin refused the low pay record companies offered Black musicians. After losing several players to the draft, Larkin disbanded the group when he himself entered the Army. From 1943 to 1946, he played in Sy Oliver’s military band, also picking up the trombone. He made his first recordings after leaving the service, cutting sides with various ensembles over the next ten years. In 1956, he moved to New York and led a septet at the Celebrity Club. He returned to Houston in the 1970s and retired.