Jazz giant Bobby Hutcherson dies at 75

Vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, one of jazz’s greatest improvisers and a deep, sweet-souled musician who played with enormous feeling, fire and grace, died Monday.

Over his prolific 45-year career, Mr. Hutcherson, a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, performed and recorded with many of the greatest jazz artists of his time, including tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, pianists Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Cedar Walton and drummer Billy Higgins.

Mr. Hutcherson produced a singularly beautiful sound on the vibraphone, a resonating metal-and-wood percussion instrument used mostly for novelty effect until jazz musicians like Lionel Hampton made it swing in the 1930s, and the lyrical bebopper Milt Jackson made it sing with a richness, warmth and grit that inspired a 12-year-old kid from Pasadena named Hutcherson to take up the vibraphone and expand its expressive range.

Mr. Hutcherson came of age in the tumultuous 1960s playing vital original music with Hancock and Tyner — both of whom he continued to make memorable music with over the decades — trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, the avant-garde reedman Eric Dolphy and other brilliant young players and composers associated with Blue Note records.

A master of harmony who could accompany like a pianist with a pair of red-tipped mallets in each hand and fly high as a soloist, Mr. Hutcherson struck those metal bars in a way that made them ring with uncommon intensity and tenderness — earthy and celestial.

Known for his sly wit and lack of guile, Mr. Hutcherson was “a very honest person,” Rollins went on, like [Thelonious] Monk was.

The vibraphonist, who’d played some piano and absorbed the music at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, found his calling one summer day in 1955 as he strolled down Pasadena’s Lincoln Avenue and heard the sound of Milt Jackson’s grooving vibes, wafting from a record shop.

Hutcherson, who in high school jammed with smart young L.A. musicians like Dolphy and saxophonist Charles Lloyd, baked his own cookies after moving to New York in the early ’60s.

After a pot bust, Mr. Hutcherson, who quit dope and drinking two decades ago, lost his New York cabaret card and taxi license.

An international star and pride of the Bay Area jazz world, Mr. Hutcherson found respite from the road in Montara, where he grew dahlias and tulips and hung out with family and friends like the late, great San Francisco drummer Eddie Marshall.

“Bobby can play one note and generate 10 times more energy than someone who would play 50 notes in that space,” Stefon Harris, one of many vibraphonists inspired by Mr. Hutcherson and the one who followed him in the SFJAZZ Collective, said in 2012.

The celebrated saxophonist Joshua Redman played with Mr. Hutcherson in the Collective’s first incarnation in 2004.