Charles Thompson (jazz)

Charles Phillip Thompson (March 21, 1918 – June 16, 2016), known as Sir Charles Thompson, was an American swing and bebop pianist, organist, composer, and arranger.

Thompson was born in Springfield, Ohio, United States, on March 21, 1918. His father was a minister and his stepmother played the piano. First studying the violin, and briefly tenor saxophone, Thomson later took up piano as a teenager. He moved with his family to Parsons, Kansas, in the southeastern part of the state. Later Thompson attended a Kansas City high school.

By the age of twelve, Thompson was playing private parties with Bennie Moten and his band in Colorado Springs, Colorado. During this time, Count Basie played off and on with Moten's band. During a show, Basie called Thompson up to perform. He was dubbed "Sir Charles Thompson" by Lester Young.

Thompson chiefly worked with small groups, including the Coleman Hawkins/Howard McGhee sextet in 1944–1945. Throughout the 1940s he played and recorded with Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon, Miles Davis, and J. C. Heard, among others. He played with Lucky Millinder's big band in 1946, and under Illinois Jacquet in 1947–48 and 1952.

He worked freelance, principally on organ, for much of the 1950s. He played with Parker again in 1953 and recorded with Vic Dickenson and Buck Clayton in 1953–54. Thompson worked with Earl Bostic in the late 1950s before heading his own quartet in 1959.

In the early 1960s, he toured Europe and Canada with Buck Clayton. Thompson was in Europe again in 1964, with Jazz at the Philharmonic, and in 1967 for the show Jazz from a Swinging Era. He lived variously on the West Coast, often working with Vernon Alley. Through the 1970s and 1980s, he led small groups during his stays in Toronto, Paris, and Zurich.

Thompson composed the jazz standard "Robbins' Nest".

Thompson had one daughter. He died on June 16, 2016, at the age of 98 in a hospital near Tokyo, Japan. He had lived in the country with his wife Makiko since 2002.