Bill Barber, a musician who helped refashion the jazz tuba from its predictable oom-pah passages to suit the complex melodies and rhythms of Miles Davis and other postwar jazz modernists, has died in Bronxville, N.Y.
Mr. Barber, 87, died June 18 of congestive heart failure.
A fixture of many early jazz bands, the tuba was largely reduced to a jazz relic by the early 1930s as sound technology improved.
Yet a core of post-World War II arrangers, notably Gil Evans, admired the tuba’s tone color possibilities.
The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz credited Mr. Barber, who took a central role in Evans’ experiments in sound with trumpeter Davis, as probably the first tuba player “to take solos in a modern jazz style and to participate in intricate ensemble passages.”
Harvey Phillips, an emeritus music professor at Indiana University wrote this year in the journal of the International Tuba Euphonium Association that Mr. Barber “is a legend to me and many others for having pioneering the interpretive styles and phrasing of the tuba in modern American jazz.”
