Carl Fontana
b. 18 July 1928, Monroe, Louisiana, USA. As a teenager Fontana played trombone in a band led by his father, then joined Woody Herman in 1952. Subsequent big band stints came with Lionel Hampton and Stan Kenton. In the late '50s he worked with Kai Winding's four-trombone band. He spent most of the '60s working in house bands in Las Vegas but returned briefly to Herman for a world tour. In the early and mid-70s he was in Supersax and was co-leader with Jake Hanna of the Hanna-Fontana Band. An enormously resourceful and inventive soloist, Fontana combines a phenomenal technique with a beautiful tone that he ably demonstrates on A Beautiful Friendship, recorded with Hanna at the 1975 Concord Jazz Festival. He is equally at home in a roaring big band and small groups with bebop or dixieland orientation, but is at his rhapsodic best in mainstream bands where he is given plenty of solo space.