Frank Walton -

Frank Walton is an American jazz-funk trumpeter and flugelhorn player who released the 1978 album Reality on Delmark Records.

Background

Frank Walter Walton was born June 24, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama. He began trumpet lessons at age eleven at Lincoln Elementary School under band director Frank Adams and later studied privately with trumpeter Amos Gordon. Walton played in the A.H. Parker High School Marching Band and took his first professional job at age seventeen with the Royal American Show Band. He attended Tennessee State University in Nashville, where he studied trumpet with Louis Smith, played in the Aristocrat of Bands, and earned a Bachelor of Science in Music Education.

At Tennessee State, Walton played with saxophonist Arthur Doyle and bassist Bob Reid in a free-jazz group organized by Aaron Neal. The group appeared at Nashville public schools, Fisk University, local clubs, and events connected with the Black movement. Walton also spent approximately two years with the John Stubblefield Quartet before he left Nashville for Chicago.

Walton joined Chicago Public Schools as a music teacher and continued trumpet and theory studies at the American Conservatory of Music, where he earned a Master of Music. He established himself on the Chicago jazz circuit through the Morris Ellis Orchestra and big bands led by George Hunter, Jimmy Ellis, and Muhal Richard Abrams. Walton assembled alto saxophonist Henry Threadgill, tenor saxophonist Ari Brown, pianist Jodie Christian, bassist Rudolph Penson, and drummer Ben Montgomery at Paragon Recording Studios in Chicago in March 1978 for the sessions that produced Reality.

Discography: