Minneapolis Star Tribune obituary

Bill Price, local jazzman and businessman

Growing out of the Chicago jazz scene, he had a significant influence on Minnesota business and music.

By Dick Parker, Star Tribune

Bill Price named his band the New Yorkers, but he made his mark on traditional jazz and business in Minnesota.

Price, a cornetist and trumpeter with a national reputation, was a vice president of Data Card Corp. in the 1970s, when it was a leader in a new industry.

He died Dec. 21 on a golf course in Bradenton, Fla., where he had retired in 1984. He was 83.

Price was born in Dawson Springs, Ky. After military service during World War II, he attended the University of Chicago and became active in the city’s lively jazz scene around 1946.

According to Charlie DeVore, Minnesota cornetist and jazz historian, some of the musicians Price played with in those years included trombonists Georg Brunis and Miff Mole, as well as drummer Baby Dodds.

Price also made a connection with the Salty Dogs, a band that’s still active, and with Jazz Limited, a downtown Chicago club that opened in 1947 featuring a band led by Minnesota cornetist Doc Evans.

“He was an extraordinary musician—a gifted cornetist and a gifted bandleader,” said William J. Schafer, a professor emeritus at Berea (Ky.) College and a regular contributor to the Mississippi Rag, an internationally circulated monthly on traditional jazz.

Paige Van Vorst, a Chicago-based official of the Jazzology record label and a Mississippi Rag contributing editor, said his company has just completed work on a reissue of the 1979 “After Hours” TV series featuring pianist Art Hodes with traditional-jazz musicians including Price.

The worlds of music and business didn’t mesh for Price right away, though, said Van Vorst. The young graduate got his first job as a bond trader in Chicago and found the nights and weekends on the bandstand putting a strain on his day job. And when Price went to work for American National Bank in St. Paul, he again found his cornet and briefcase incompatible. “He had to soft-pedal the jazz,” Van Vorst said, and play anonymously in bands.

By the late 1950s, Price was showing his talent as a mentor. He was playing with Doc Evans’ band at the Rampart Street Club in Mendota, and after hours the members of the newly formed Hall Brothers band would join Price at the club and he would coach them, said DeVore, who was the Hall Brothers cornetist.

That willingness to share his knowledge of jazz came out about 20 years later when Price coached another new group, bringing them up to speed to play in the building that had been the Rampart Street Club—the Hall Brothers’ Emporium of Jazz.

By then, Price’s business and music careers had converged. In the late 1960s he joined the newly formed Data Card Corp., founded by former Control Data executive Willis (Bill) Drake, as vice president for finance. Drake, who died in 2005, was a jazz drummer. The company pioneered machinery for embossing and magnetic-striping credit cards. Another of its early pillars was engineer Mike Polad, who plays piano, guitar, banjo and soprano sax.

Price and Drake formed a band and called it the Original New Yorkers, favoring the polished New York style of traditional jazz. Over the years the New Yorkers included a number of Minnesota musicians and some visiting celebrities such as clarinetist Herb Hall.

Between 1969 and the 1980s they released four LPs.

Price is survived by his wife, Grace, of Bradenton. Plans for a memorial service are pending.