Fred Katz, who married cello to jazz, dies at 94

Fred Katz, a classically trained cellist who quite by accident helped elevate his instrument to unlikely stardom in jazz, died Saturday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 94. His son, Hyman, confirmed the death.

Katz, best known for his long association with the Chico Hamilton Quintet, was also a pianist who accompanied Lena Horne, a composer who wrote songs for Frankie Laine and film scores for Roger Corman, an arranger who worked with Carmen McRae, and a retired professor of anthropology.

In the mid- 1950s, when Hamilton, a drummer, founded his quintet, the cello was a marginal figure in the jazz world. Afew jazz bassists, like Oscar Pettiford, sometimes doubled on cello, typically plucking its strings ( a technique known as pizzicato), just as they did on the bass.

But jazz had been home to few if any musicians who were cellists first— and who, as often as not, played the instrument using the bow, much as they would in classical music.

Katz joined the Hamilton quintet primarily as a pianist, playing the cello only on ballads. Between sets, he often took his cello and sat onstage alone, playing a classical work like an unaccompanied Bach suite.

One night, playing between sets at a small club in Long Beach, Calif., Katz, his eyes closed in reverie, did not realize that his bandmates had crept back onstage. The stage was tiny and crowded, and by the time the band swung into an up-tempo number and he realized what had happened, he could no longer get to the piano.

So he stayed where he was, cello in hand, and played along — and with that the group had its new sound, and went on to become one of the most popular in jazz.

Frederick Katz was born on Feb. 25, 1919, in Brooklyn and reared in the Williamsburg section there. A prodigy on both the cello and the piano, he was performing in public by the time he was a teenager.

As a young man he was a cello student of Pablo Casals and a member of the National Symphony Orchestra.

But Katz found himself attracted increasingly to the jazz he had heard in the Manhattan nightclubs he had haunted as a youth. A Communist as a young man — for him, art, spirituality and progressive politics formed a seamless, imperative whole — he was also deeply drawn to folk music.

“The Communist Party in those days, we used to do hootenannies,” he said in a 2007 interview with “All Things Considered” on NPR. “And that was part of the radical movement, to bring back American folk poetry. We really were terrific that way.”

During World War II, Katz was an entertainment director with the Seventh Army in Germany, conducting concerts and writing arrangements for musical revues. Afterward he moved to the West Coast and turned his attention to popular music.

As a pianist, Katz accompanied Horne and Vic Damone. As an arranger and conductor, he was responsible for McRae’s 1958 album, “Carmen for Cool Ones.” As a composer, he wrote several songs sung by Laine, including “Satan Wears a Satin Gown,” written with Laine and with Jacques Wilson.

He wrote music for a slew of Corman’s sanguinary lowbudget films, including “The Wasp Woman” ( 1959), “A Bucket of Blood” (1959) and “The Little Shop of Horrors” (1960).

“I hated every picture that Corman did, but you’ve got to be a professional about this,” Katz said in a 2008 interview.