Gil Askey: Pre-Med Dropout, the Supremes at the Copa and an Oscar Nod

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Gil Askey was born in Austin, Texas, on March 9, 1925, the son of a public health activist and Texas historian. He left home at 17 and completed two years of a pre-med track on a medical scholarship before quitting to study music formally at the Boston Conservatory and the Hartnett School of Music in New York. He then spent about 25 years as a jazz trumpeter alongside Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Miles Davis, and played duets with Billie Holiday. At Motown he arranged and conducted for Billy Eckstine, Gladys Knight, the Temptations, Martha and the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and the Jackson 5, and joined the artist development team with Maxine Powell, Maurice King, Cholly Atkins and Harvey Fuqua.

In 1965 he arranged and conducted the Supremes' run at the Copacabana, adding strings and horn charts so the hits suited a supper club crowd. When Diana Ross went solo he became her musical director for a decade, and his score for Lady Sings the Blues, the 1972 film about Billie Holiday, earned an Academy Award nomination. Later in the 1970s he arranged for Curtis Mayfield's Curtom label, working with Linda Clifford and the Jones Girls. He married an Australian woman he met on tour, moved to Melbourne in 1988, returned to jazz gigs in 1993 and mentored young musicians until he died of lymphoma there on April 9, 2014.

• Berry Gordy called him the glue that kept everything together.
• On a 1970s Four Tops show in Antwerp, his trumpet line pulled a collapsing performance back into rhythm.
• Scoring Lady Sings the Blues meant arranging music about a singer he had personally performed with.
• He met his future wife while touring in 1973 and married her in 1980.
• He was posthumously inducted into the National Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame in 2025.