Back in the 1960s, before jazz fusion became a household term, drummer Redd was thumping beats that had both the kick of funk and the subtleties of jazz, performing a range of surprisingly popular instrumental tunes. Holt died in Chicago on May 23. he was 91 years old.
According to his son Reginald, the cause of death at the hospital was a complication of lung cancer.
Holt had his biggest hit as a drummer with pianist Ramsey Lewis’ trio, whose original line-up also included bassist Eldee Young.
In 1965, nearly ten years after the band’s first record, they released: “The ‘In’ Crowd” The title track of this live album was a cover of a recently popular song by R&B singer Dobby Gray.
The Lewis Trio’s version replaced Mr. Gray’s and topped the Billboard R&B chart and reached number five on the Billboard Hot 100. Their “‘In’ Crowd” won the 1965 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance by a Small Group or Soloist. .
The group found a winning formula of repeating catchy melodies like pop tunes over and over, adding bluesy rhythms and leaving room for improvisation. In late 1965 they released the album Hang on Ramsey! The album included two of his bluesy instrumental covers of pop songs that were also released as singles.The Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” “Wait a minute, Sloopy.” The song that the McCoys made a #1 hit in 1965. The trio performed their respective songs to roars of encouragement from the live crowd.
However, the success proved to be the doom of the group. In 1966, following disagreements over artistic direction and funding, Mr. Holt and Mr. Young left Lewis to form the Young Holt Trio, later renamed Young Holt Unlimited. (Lewis replaced Holt with Maurice White, who later founded Earth, Wind & Fire.)
Holt and Young continued to make music in a pop-friendly atmosphere.their 1968 single “Soulful Strut” With its funky, danceable groove, the song is a combination of Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It On The Grapevine” and the Diana Ross & The Supremes co-release “I’m Gonna Make You Happy”. It reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100, behind only Love Me. Temptations.
(“Soulful Strut” sounded much like an instrumental version of soul singer Barbara Acklin’s late-’60s single “Am I the Shark Girl?” Mr. Young and Holt Some questioned whether he actually performed the song, which Reginald Holt said was told by Carl Davis, the producer of both songs, that his father and Aklin said, Young did indeed play “Soulful Strut,” and his father laughed when asked about it.)
Another Young Holt single, “wack wack” With a monotonous male voice repeating the word “slap” like a duckling, the song expressed the jovial spirit of Mr. Holt’s style of jazz.
Isaac Holt was born May 16, 1932 in Rosedale, a town on the Mississippi River in northern Mississippi. His nickname was given to him in his youth, after his light-toned skin. His father, Willie, worked in a lumberyard, and his mother, Mary (Gilliam) Holt, was a housewife who taught crochet and sometimes worked as a nursing assistant.
As a boy, Red was taken to a traveling minstrel show by his father, and was particularly struck by the sight of one-legged tap dancer Peg Leg Bates moving to the rhythm of a trap drummer.
“From the moment I got home, I was banging on her pots and pans and buckets,” Holt told the Journal and Courier of Lafayette, Indiana, in 1992. “That’s how it all happened.”
The family moved to Chicago as part of the Great Emigration. Red grew up in the city and spent most of the rest of her life on the South Side. He served in the Army from his 1954 to his 1956.
As a teenager, he played with some of the biggest names in Chicago jazz and was in the local jazz seven-piece Clefs. When several members were drafted, only Holt, Young and Lewis remained. They formed a trio and called themselves “The Gentlemen of Jazz”, but changed their name after being advised it made more commercial sense to name the group after the pianist’s name. .
In later years, Holt played in his band, Holt Unlimited, and occasionally played reunion shows with Young and Lewis.Young died Passed away in 2007, Lewis passed away last year.
Mr. Holt married Marylian Greene in 1954. In addition to her son Reginald, she survives with two other sons, Isaac and Ivan. brother Benjamin. 8 grandchildren. and ten great-grandchildren.
Holt continued to perform regularly on Friday nights in Chicago until the pandemic began, and loved talking to high school students about his craft.
In 1977, he told the Journal-Herald of Dayton, Ohio, “Kids are hip. They have open heads.”
