Full Name Robert Herridge Years active 1939–1981 | Name Robert Herridge Role Television producer | |
Born January 12, 1914 ( 1914-01-12 ) New Jersey, U.S. Occupation Poet, short story writer, television writer and producer Died 1981, Woodstock, New York, United States | ||
Miles Davis & Gil Evans "So What" 1959
Robert Herridge (January 12, 1914 - August 14, 1981), was a television producer and writer who created the CBS television program Camera Three, among more than 1,700 hours of TV programming, beginning in 1950.
Herridge also served as a writer for the Studio One television series in 1948.
He produced one of the first American network television shows specifically about jazz, the one-hour "The Sound of Jazz", a December 8, 1957 edition of the CBS television series Seven Lively Arts. "The Sound of Jazz" was essentially a broadcast jam session including many luminaries of jazz, such as Miles Davis, Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, Milt Hinton, and Billie Holiday.
Herridge produced and hosted The Robert Herridge Theater, a half-hour dramatic anthology that ran in syndication circa 1959-1960 or in 1961 (sources vary), primarily on educational television stations. One edition, "The Sound of Miles Davis", which Herridge referred to onscreen as "a story told in the language of music", consisted of an April 2, 1959, jazz concert by Davis, John Coltrane, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb, and the Gil Evans Orchestra at CBS TV's Studio 61. It aired July 21, 1960.
Herridge died of a heart attack at his home in Woodstock, New York.