Don Butterfield

Don Butterfield (April 1, 1923 – November 27, 2006) was an American jazz and classical tuba player.

Biography
Butterfield took up tuba in high school. He wanted to play trumpet, but the band director assigned him to tuba instead. After serving in the U.S. Military from 1942-46 he went on to study the instrument at the Juilliard School.

Butterfield started his professional career in the late 1940s playing for the CBS and NBC radio networks. He played in orchestras, including the American Symphony, on albums by Jackie Gleason until he became a full time member at the Radio City Music Hall.

In the 1950s, Butterfield switched to jazz, backing such artists as Dizzy Gillespie, Frank Sinatra, Charles Mingus, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Jimmy Smith, and Moondog. He fronted his own sextet for a 1955 album on Atlantic Records and played the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.

In the mid 1960s, Butterfield took a temporary, nearly unpaid, position conducting an amateur group of musicians known as the Gloria Concert Band, located in upstate New Jersey. During one concert, he passed out the music for Stars and Stripes Forever by John Phillip Sousa. The band had not practiced this piece but were capable of performing it. Except for the very young piccolo player who had never seen the music before. He announced to the crowd that the band would next be playing this piece. The poor piccolo player was about to faint. He further explained that since this was a piece by Sousa, the inventor of the Sousaphone, he would be playing the piccolo part on the tuba in his honor. What followed was a perfect, octaves lower, performance of that part. There is, unfortunately, no recording of that performance. (Maybe impossible to verify, but I was the one sitting next to the piccolo player.)

In the 1970s he worked as a session musician. He played on recordings for a variety of artists and on television and film soundtracks, including The Godfather Part II.

The Grove dictionary of music calls Butterfield's playing style, "uncommonly florid, a skill that made him of value as a jazz musician... He was one of the first modern jazz players who, rather than simply marking out the bass line, rediscovered the possibility of bringing to the instrument a facility akin to that of a trumpeter."

Butterfield suffered a stroke in 2005, which left him unable to play, and he passed in 2006 from a stroke-related illness.

As sideman
With Cannonball Adderley With Nat Adderley With David Amram With Bob Brookmeyer With Kenny Burrell With Donald Byrd With Teddy Charles With Jimmy Cleveland With Bill Evans With Art Farmer '''With Maynard Ferguson With Dizzy Gillespie With Jimmy Heath With Roland Kirk With John Lewis With Arif Mardin With Gil Mellé With Charles Mingus With the Modern Jazz Quartet With James Moody With Wes Montgomery With Lee Morgan With Oliver Nelson With Oscar Peterson With Sonny Rollins With Lalo Schifrin With Jimmy Smith With Billy Taylor With Clark Terry With The Thad Jones / Mel Lewis Orchestra With Stanley Turrentine
 * African Waltz (Riverside, 1961)
 * Domination (Capitol, 1965)
 * Autobiography (Atlantic, 1964)
 * Subway Night (RCA, 1972)
 * Brookmeyer (Vik, 1956)
 * Jazz Concerto Grosso (ABC-Paramount, 1957) with Gerry Mulligan and Phil Sunkel
 * Portrait of the Artist (Atlantic, 1960)
 * Blues - The Common Ground (Verve, 1968)
 * Night Song (Verve, 1969)
 * Jazz Lab (Columbia, 1957) - with Gigi Gryce
 * I'm Tryin' to Get Home (Blue Note, 1965)
 * Word from Bird (Atlantic, 1957)
 * Cleveland Style (EmArcy, 1958)
 * A Map of Jimmy Cleveland (Mercury, 1959)
 * Symbiosis (MPS, 1974)
 * Brass Shout (United Artists, 1959)
 * Baroque Sketches (Columbia, 1967)
 *  The Blues Roar (Mainstream, 1965)
 * Gillespiana (Verve, 1960)
 * Carnegie Hall Concert (Verve, 1961)
 * With Coleman Hawkins
 * The Hawk in Hi Fi (RCA Victor, 1956)
 * Swamp Seed (Riverside, 1963)
 * The Roland Kirk Quartet Meets the Benny Golson Orchestra (Mercury, 1963)
 * Essence (Atlantic, 1962)
 * Journey (Atlantic, 1974)
 * Gil's Guests (Prestige, 1963)
 * The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (Impulse!, 1963)
 * Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus (Impulse!, 1963)
 * Plastic Dreams (Atlantic, 1971)
 * Moody with Strings (Argo, 1961)
 * Moody and the Brass Figures (Milestone, 1966)
 * Movin' Wes (Verve, 1964)
 * Delightfulee (Blue Note, 1966)
 * Impressions of Phaedra (United Artists Jazz, 1962)
 * The Kennedy Dream (Impulse!, 1967)
 * Bursting Out with the All-Star Big Band! (Verve, 1962)
 * Sonny Rollins and the Big Brass (Metro Jazz, 1958)
 * New Fantasy (Verve, 1964)
 * Once a Thief and Other Themes (Verve, 1965)
 * The Cat (Verve, 1964)
 * Hoochie Coochie Man (Verve, 1966)
 * My Fair Lady Loves Jazz (Impulse!, 1957)
 * Top and Bottom Brass (Riverside, 1959)
 * New Life (A&M, 1975)
 * Nightwings (Fantasy, 1977)