Jimmy Cheatham

Jimmy Cheatham (June 18, 1924 – January 12, 2007) was an American jazz trombonist and teacher who played with Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton and Ornette Coleman. In 1978, Cheatham was invited to head the jazz program at University of California, San Diego and, in 1979, he was appointed head of the African American and jazz performance programme there. He retired in 2005.

Biography
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, it was while serving in the United States Army during and just after World War II, that Cheatham played in the 173rd Army Ground Force Band.

Cheatham met his wife, Jean Evans, in 1956 in Buffalo, New York, when the local musicians' union chief called them separately to replace two musicians who could not make a job at the local Elks Ballroom. They married in 1959.

In the mid-1980s Cheatham formed The Sweet Baby Blues Band with his wife. The Sweet Baby Blues Band played Kansas City style blues. Cheatham's Sweet Baby Blues album won a French Grand Prix du Disque. Their album Luv in the Afternoon was voted blues album of the year in a 1991 critics poll in Down Beat magazine.

Cheatham also taught jazz at Bennington College in Vermont and at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin.

Cheatham's legacy is carried on by several students who went on to become, like him, prominent composer/performer/educators: flutist Nicole Mitchell, bassist Karl E. H. Seigfried, and drummer Vikas Srivastava.

Cheatham died in San Diego, California, in January 2007 following heart surgery, at the age of 82.

As leader

 * 1984 Sweet Baby Blues
 * 1985 Midnight Mama (Concord)
 * 1987 Homeward Bound (Concord)
 * 1988 Back to the Neighborhood (Concord)
 * 1990 Luv in the Afternoon (Concord)
 * 1991 Basket Full of Blues (Concord)
 * 1993 Blues and the Boogie Masters (Concord)

As sideman
With Chico Hamilton
 * El Chico (Impulse!, 1965)
 * The Further Adventures of El Chico (Impulse!, 1966)
 * The Dealer - arranger and conductor (Impulse!, 1966)