Jazz musicians often enjoy making difficult things look easy, and the saxophonist, flautist and gleefully eccentric vocalist James Moody, who has died aged 85, was particularly good at it. In his case though, the camouflage was a skilful diversion, a smokescreen for immense talent.
Moody's riotous flimflam of hilariously daft anecdotes, nonsense songs and circumlocutory tales never went stale, mirroring an originality and character as an improviser that started well and got better and better. The Henry Mancini tribute he recorded in 1997 was as good as any album he made in a career that had begun nearly 50 years earlier, and his Live at the 2007 Monterey Jazz Festival recording was worthy of a Grammy nomination.
But it was a 1949 sax improvisation on I'm in the Mood for Love that was to become his most prized achievement. As Moody's Mood for Love, it was a pop hit for King Pleasure, a vehicle for vocalists from Sarah Vaughan to Amy Winehouse, and part of the score for the musical Jersey Boys.
Moody enjoyed a long and productive relationship with the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie – a connection that went back to the mid-1940s – but he also worked with jazz stars including Miles Davis, Milt Jackson and Dexter Gordon. As a tenor saxophonist, he had a characteristically rubbery, peculiarly hollow sound, with a phrasing reminiscent of Lester Young's, but a harmonic sense drawn from later jazz developments, including those of John Coltrane. On alto saxophone, he was influenced by the work of Charlie Parker, though his sound became earthier and more vocalised as he matured. But he was also one of the most assured and original exponents of jazz flute-playing.
Moody was determined to twist the capacities and traditions of his instruments to his own wayward ends, and his solos were characterised by constant variation in phrases, and the impression of skidding cavalierly over the harmonic ground-rules of a tune.
But he took the same approach to the guidelines for onstage announcements, insisting, for instance, that the Latin-jazz movement really began with a chance meeting between Tom Jobim and Christopher Columbus, or that Parker's famous tune Anthropology had started life as the hip plea of an ant that wanted to apologise for a misdemeanour. A regular Moody standby was Benny's from Heaven, a song about a husband's attempts to comprehend the origins of an unexpected offspring, that ran: "Benny must be from Heaven, 'cos he sure as hell ain't from me."
When Moody played, it was always apparent where his loyalties and emotions really lay. He was born in Savannah, Georgia, and raised by his (single) mother, Ruby Hann Moody Watters. Born partially deaf, he was deemed to have learning difficulties at school, and his mother moved him to Newark, New Jersey, where he attended the Bruce Street school for deaf children, and then Newark's Arts high school.
Encouraged by an uncle who gave him a saxophone, a 16-year-old Moody began to learn the alto, and then the tenor sax. In 1943 he was drafted into the air force (an experience of racism that stayed with him, notably through the force's preferential treatment of German PoWs over its own black servicemen), where his saxophone skills accelerated with the help of fellow musicians. He met Gillespie when the trumpeter played a gig at his base. By 1946 Moody was good enough to join a Gillespie band that included such stars as the vibraphonist Jackson and the pianist Thelonious Monk, and his bold improvisation on Gillespie's Emanon marked him out as an emerging original.
His first recordings as a bandleader were with James Moody and his Modernists in 1948, but he moved to Paris to stay with an uncle in an attempt to overcome alcoholism, and worked there in 1949 with the Miles Davis/Tadd Dameron quintet. The British singer Annie Ross recalled meeting Moody with the pianist Bud Powell and the drummer Kenny Clarke in Paris at this time, "and they were all wonderful to me – especially Moody". The saxophonist would encourage the young singer to listen closely to harmonies, from Debussy's to Dameron's, to improve her ability to improvise.
In 1949, during a session with local players in Sweden, Moody recorded the improvisation on I'm in the Mood for Love, which was to become one of his signature achievements. The vocalist Eddie Jefferson put lyrics to the passage, and in 1952 King Pleasure turned the combination into the pop hit Moody's Mood for Love.
Back in the US from 1951, Moody formed a septet with r'n'b leanings, and toured with a revue featuring Dinah Washington, Brook Benton and the arrangements of a then-unknown young trumpeter called Quincy Jones. He later hired fine jazz partners including the saxophonist/pianist Benny Golson and the pianist Kenny Barron.
But after a fire in Philadelphia in 1958 destroyed his band's instruments, uniforms and scores, Moody decided on a change. He checked himself into Overbrook hospital, New Jersey, for rehab and recorded his masterly Last Train from Overbrook on his discharge six months later. By the beginning of the 1960s he was a sideman in the classic bebop group led by the saxophonists Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt. But in 1962 he returned to Gillespie, who was later to remark: "Playing with Moody is like playing with a continuation of myself." Moody responded: "I felt the same way with him. He was my mentor, my teacher, my best friend, and my brother."
Though he continued to record distinctive projects that reaffirmed his stamp on the bebop tradition (and brought about a reunion with Jefferson in 1969), Moody stayed with Gillespie's quintet until 1973, when he decided to give up touring and devote more time to his young daughter. Joining the Las Vegas Hilton orchestra, he found himself backing Bill Cosby, Ann-Margret, Liberace, Elvis Presley, the Osmonds, Lou Rawls and many others.
But after divorce from his first wife in 1979, he resumed his jazz career with appearances at the Nice jazz festival, the Sweet Basil club and the Kool jazz festival, both in New York, and Montreux in 1981, receiving a Grammy nomination for his solo on Manhattan Transfer's Vocalese album in 1985.
By 1986 he was back as a jazz leader on a major label. He recorded the album Something Special for RCA/Novus that year, met his second wife, Linda, in 1987, married her in 1989 (with Gillespie as his best man), and settled in San Diego. When Gillespie then formed his cross-cultural United Nation Orchestra, Moody was a founder-member, and his star-studded 70th birthday party at the Blue Note club in 1995 (with Cosby as MC) was diverting enough to become the live album Moody's Party. The same year he made Young at Heart, a beautifully crafted and intelligent set, enhanced by Gil Goldstein's arrangements for an expanded band.
The 1997 follow-up, Moody Plays Mancini, was even better – the outcome of a chance meeting between Moody and Mancini at a tribute dinner for Ella Fitzgerald. On hearing that the saxophonist wanted to make a songbook album, Mancini promptly mailed him his scores. Mancini died before he heard the results, but Moody's playing on a theme such as Silver Streak – with a gracefully attentive trio featuring Goldstein on keys and Terri Lyne Carrington on drums – showed just how much he could still do as an improviser in sympathetic circumstances.
Through the 1990s, Moody also worked with Jackson, took up soprano saxophone, received a Grammy nomination for his singing (Get That Booty, a duet with Gillespie), worked with Lionel Hampton and Tito Puente, and saw a tribute to his remarkable flute improvisation with the publication in 1995 of James Moody's Greatest Transcribed Flute Solos. In 1997 he had a minor role in Clint Eastwood's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, received a Jazz Master award from the National Endowment for the Arts the following year, and in July 2000 was presented with an honorary doctorate from the Berklee College of Music, Boston, Massachusetts.
In 2005 Moody and his wife founded the James Moody scholarship endowment at Purchase College, New York, and, in early 2010, the James Moody scholarship fund for Newark youth in the town where he was raised. He kept the news of his inoperable cancer from all but his innermost circle, and though he declined further treatment, he remained comfortable and typically genial through his last months, continuing to play his instruments at home on his stronger days.
Moody is survived by Linda, his daughter and three sons, a brother, four grandchildren and a great-grandson.
• James Moody, jazz musician, born 26 March 1925; died 9 December 2010
