In a career that stretched across seven decades, Grammy Award-winning music legend James Moody performed for two presidents at the White House and twice for the king of Thailand in Bangkok, received a Kennedy Center Living Jazz Legend Award and an NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship, made more than 50 solo albums and recorded the classic “Moody’s Mood For Love,” which has been covered by everyone from Aretha Franklin, Van Morrison and Queen Latifah to Rod Stewart, George Benson and the late Amy Winehouse.
“Moody was a top-level musician who had worldwide impact,” said trumpeter and Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz composer Wynton Marsalis. “He was an unbelievable player on alto and tenor saxophones and flute, a great singer, a great storyteller, a beautiful person, and very funny.”
Moody’s star continues to shine brightly today, 15 years after his death in San Diego from pancreatic cancer at the age of 85. His 100th birthday was March 26 and he is being feted on record and concert stages from coast to coast. It’s a banner year for an artist who always referred to himself as Moody and asked that others address him that way, as well. (“Only my mother called me James,” he noted.)
The album, “James Moody, 80 Years Young, Live At The Blue Note, March 26, 2005,” will be released Friday by Origin Records. The eight-song CD was lovingly produced by San Diego Realtor Linda McGowan Moody, his wife of 21 years. An expanded, 13-song version of the album is already available online via the Origin website.
On May 27 comes the “James Moody 100th Birthday Celebration” at New York’s Sony Hall. The dozen-artist lineup for the concert includes saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera, trumpeter Randy Brecker, bassist Christian McBride and former “Arsenio Hall Show” drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, who between them have won 25 Grammy Awards.
On July 12, Moody will be honored in Georgia at the annual jazz festival in Savanah, where he was born. During his lifetime, he was presented with three keys to that city.
On Oct. 4, the second annual San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival will present a Moody centennial concert at California Center for the Arts, Escondido. The lineup includes three Grammy winners — saxophonist David Sanchez, bassist John Clayton and drummer Lewis Nash — along with pianist and six-time Grammy nominee Gerald Clayton and top San Diego flutist Holly Hofmann.
In November, the 14th annual edition of the three-week TD James Moody Jazz Festival will be held at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. And next year will mark the 20th anniversary of the James Moody Jazz Scholarship for New Jersey, the state in which the longtime San Diegan spent his formative years and began playing music.
‘The spirit of jazz’
“Moody was the epitome of the spirit of jazz,” said New Jersey Performing Arts Center President & CEO John Schreiber, who is also the producer and creator of the TD James Moody Jazz Festival. “He was collaborative, creative, generous-hearted, a mentor to young people and somebody who — by virtue of his humanity and his art — made the world a better place every day. I couldn’t imagine a better namesake for this jazz festival ….”
For all the acclaim he earned — Moody’s longtime collaborator, Quincy Jones, hailed him as “a national treasure” — the Georgia native downplayed his accomplishments and was always eager to improve.
Or, as Moody put it in a 2005 San Diego Union-Tribune interview: “I play the best I can, but it’s still not good enough. The more you put into it, the less you get out of it, because there’s so much more there. It sounds like I’m contradicting myself, but I’m not … When you’re satisfied, you’re through. It’s done, over. I’ve heard things that I’ve done where I’ve said: `Gee, I like that, but it can be done better.’
“That’s the whole idea. I always want to be better tomorrow than I was today.”
His constant goal to take his musicianship ever higher is readily evident on “80 Years Young: Live At The Blue Note.”
It captures his ebullience on stage and the depth of his musicianship on saxophone (with an extended version of Dizzy Gillespie’s high-octane “Bebop” and “Ow”), flute (a lively reading of “Cherokee”) and vocals (“Moody’s Mood For Love” and the yodeling-inflected “Benny’s From Heaven”).
He combined showmanship and artistic excellence like few others in the jazz world. His new, nearly 62-minute-long, album spotlights both facets of the man who was a superb, forward-looking musician and an unabashed old-school entertainer wrapped into one. The album teams him with his longtime New York bassist and drummer, Todd Coolman and Adam Nussbaum, and such stellar guests as trombonist Slide Hampton, trumpeter Jon Faddis, pianist Cedar Walton and Cuban-born saxophonist D’Rivera, who was Moody’s band mate in Dizzy Gillespie’s United Nation Orchestra.
“Moody was always very interested in different harmonic approaches,” D’Rivera said, “and in exchanging ideas with other musicians and trying to learn from them. He had special tools when he improvised and he always had wonderful things to say on his instrument.”
“It was such an honor working with him,” said drum master Carrington, who is the founder and artistic director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. She was still in her teens when Moody hired her in the late 1980s.
“He was such an amazing artist who always kept growing,” Carrington continued, speaking from Abu Dhabi where she performed April 30 at the 2025 International Jazz Day All-Star Concert. “Moody played saxophones and flute with such excellence and authenticity that he made each sound like it was the only instrument he played. When he talked about anything, it was clear he had done research and given it a lot of thought. He was very serious and had a great sense of humor. All of that was very inspiring to me as a young musician.”
Similar sentiments are shared by Coolman, who was long Moody’s bassist of choice, and trumpeter Faddis, a close friend and collaborator for more than 40 years.
“Moody was so humble and always wanting to learn more and improve,” Coolman said. “As great a musician as he was, he was an even greater human being. He was a tremendous force for good while he was on earth.”
“Moody was such a kind person and he was like a kid in a candy store with music,” said Faddis, the director of jazz performance at Purchase College’s Conservatory of Music in New York.
“If Moody heard someone play something that excited him, he would go up to them and ask: ‘What was that you just did?’ They would tell him and Moody would take that idea, practice it inside and out, then take it places the other person never thought to take it.”
In turn, Moody helped young musicians come into their own as of his band. And he welcomed drummer Carrington and other talented women artists into his group long before it became fashionable to do so.
“Moody meant so much to me and I deeply treasure the almost 20 years I spent as a member of his quartet,” said Canadian pianist Renee Rosnes, who will perform at the May 27 “James Moody 100th Birthday Celebration” in New York. She ed his band in 1987.
“I first began working with him when I was 27 and consider myself fortunate to have spent so much time being mentored by one of the pioneering geniuses of bebop,” Rosnes said. “His singular sense of harmony and rhythm, together with that original sound made him completely unique. Hear two notes, and you know it’s Moody. He was a generous and optimistic man with a great sense of humor that was also part of his stage persona.”
Parisian thoroughfare
Moody’s devotion to music began in 1941 when he was 16 and his uncle gave him an alto saxophone. The fact that he was born partially deaf did not deter him in the least and he was able to hear even the slightest musical variations and nuances with pinpoint precision.
After honing his chops during World War II as a member of a U.S. Air Force band, Moody became a member of trumpet icon Dizzy Gillespie’s all-star big band in 1946. Only 21, he concurrently ed the Bebop Boys, a small ensemble led by bassist Ray Brown that also featured Gillespie and vibraphonist Milt Jackson. His first album as a band leader, “James Moody and His Bebop Men,” was released in 1947.
Moody moved to Paris in 1949 for three years. It was an eye-opening experience for a young Black American man who, growing up during the Jim Crow era, had experienced racism in overt and subtle ways in the United States. He recounted his move to Paris in his 2005 Union-Tribune interview.
“In America, I thought there was something wrong with me,” said Moody, who recalled how, as an Air Force private in North Carolina, he was not allowed to eat in the same restaurants where German prisoners of war dined.
“In Paris, they treated me like they treated each other, which was altogether different from how they treated me here. When I was in , I said: `Ah, it isn’t me (that’s the problem in America), it’s them.’ I felt good, and now I know there’s no one in this world who’s better than me. By the same token, I’m not better than anyone else.”
Moody recorded what would become his most famous song during a 1949 visit to Stockholm, where he was backed by a Swedish band. The song, his instrumental version of “I’m in the Mood for Love,” featured what remains one of the most heralded sax solos in jazz history.
His solo in turn inspired a vocal version by jazz singer Eddie Jefferson in 1952, who retitled the song “Moody’s Mood for Love,” followed by singer King Pleasure’s hit pop version in 1954.
“The melodic content of Moody’s solo on that song is just off the charts and it is so romantic,” trumpeter Faddis said.
“In many ways, it is the perfect solo,” bassist Coolman agreed. “It’s a great work of art with so much soul. And Moody was all about making art. He didn’t care much about making money.”
“Moody’s Mood for Love” received a Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 2001 for “its lasting qualitative and historical significance.” What makes his sublime solo all the more notable on the song is that Moody recorded it on a borrowed alto saxophone.
“When I made that record,” he recalled, “I was a tenor saxophonist playing alto for the first time on record and I was trying to find the right notes, to be truthful. People later said to me ‘You must have been very inspired when you recorded that.’ And I said ‘Yeah I was inspired to find the right notes!’ ”
‘Unconditional love’
Faddis, D’Rivera and Coolman each credit Moody’s wife, Linda, for making it possible for him to constantly hone his music. He always lovingly called her Honey, and he used that same name as the title for his 1990 album. It opens with the song “Honey’s Tune.”
“Linda is a jewel,” D’Rivera said. “She’s a very warm, intelligent, beautiful woman. Moody was a very lucky man to be with her, and he knew it.”
“She was always there for him,” Faddis said. “They were on the same wave length, and she was always in his corner. She looked out for him, made sure he was eating properly, made sure he got his rest. Before and after he ed, she was really his No. 1 crusader. She’s very helpful in keeping his name and music out front, so that everybody can know just how great her husband was and is.”
“Moody and Linda were soul mates who gave each other unconditional love,” Coolman said, “and it was amazing. She really believes in his music and she’s been instrumental in making this live album and concert in New York happen, as well as her tireless work with the Moody Scholarship and annual jazz festival in New Jersey. She walks through walls for him.”
Linda Moody describes her devotion to her late husband as a combination of profound love and pragmatism.
“I tried to make his life as wonderful as it could possibly be,” she said. “I told him: ‘I want i make your life perfect, so that you can just be James Moody — that’s what you were brought to this earth for — and people can hear you. I’ll do the rest.’
Both Moodys had previously been married and both had adult children. Atter being introduced at the Los Angeles jazz club Catalina’s in the spring of 1988, they went on their first date late that same year. It took place shortly after Moody began a two-week performance residency at Elario’s in La Jolla.
“By the time the two weeks were up, we were in love,” Moody recalled in a 2004 Union-Tribune interview. “But I was going to Africa on a month-long tour with Dizzy (Gillespie). I was trying to think of something I could do so she wouldn’t forget me, so I sent her a dozen roses every Monday. And she still gets them every week.”
Moody proposed to Linda on Feb. 1, 1989. They were married two months later at Faith Chapel in Spring Valley. Bebop pioneer Gillespie was the best man, Linda’s sister, Thelma White of Seattle, was matron of honor.
“People often told us they could feel the love between us and that’s a wonderful legacy,” Linda Moody said.
“Linda was really Moody’s sweetheart and she took such great care of him,” said Italian-born jazz singer Roberta Gambarini, who was championed by Moody and performed with him a number of times.
“In many ways, Linda provided the foundation of love that allowed him to thrive in his music. I don’t think this new live album or the ‘James Moody 100th Birthday Celebration’ concert in New York would be possible without her.”
The album is a labor of love that took 20 years to reach fruition.
It was recorded on Moody’s birthday, March 26, 2005, on the final night of his weeklong residency at the famed Blue Note club in New York as a keepsake for him from Linda. That same year saw him featured on the first episode of the 2005 PBS TV series “Legends of Jazz.” In 2007, he received a Kennedy Center Living Jazz Legend Award.
Moody continued touring the world for the next five years. He performed his final concert in January, 2010, at a Grammy Awards-related event in Seal Beach. “4B,” his final album to be released during his lifetime, came out in August of 2010.
Its release was just three months before he and Linda disclosed he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer early that year. Moody had undergone surgery in February and had subsequently decided against receiving chemotherapy or radiation therapy.
His memorial service in 2010 was held in the same Spring Valley church where he and Linda had married. The tapes of what became his new live album sat in her safe for 15 years, untouched.
“I had wanted to put out the album in 2020, But I was still grieving and didn’t realize it,” Linda Moody said. “And then COVID happened.”
Determined to make the album as perfect as possible, she had it remastered three times to achieve the best audio quality. She also changed the order of the songs until it had a flow that felt just right to her that captured her husband’s essence in action on stage.
“Linda oversaw the art work, the sound editing and mixing, the album liner notes, and finding a record company to release it,” Coolman said. “She was a part of it all. She was determined and she found a way to do it.”
For Linda Moody, the album is simply a labor of love for the man she loved so dearly.
“Timing is everything,” she said, “and his centennial birthday year seemed like the perfect year to put the album out. I had the album recorded just for the two of us, for posterity, and now I want to share it.
“Moody and I were ed at the hip and anything I did for him was all about love. That’s where everything stemmed from, and this album is all about that love. It’s my first album as a producer, and my last.”
The second annual San Diego Tijuana International Jazz Festival presents James Moody @ 100
Featuring: David Sanchez, John Clayton, Holly Hofmann, Gerald Clayton, Lewis Nash and more tba.
When: Oct. 4
Where: California Center for the Arts, Escondido, 340 North Escondido Blvd.
Tickets: On sale June 1 (prices to be announced)
Online: sdtjjazz.org
