On the evening of December 17, 1999, Grover Washington Jr. was at CBS Studios in New York, recording a performance for The Saturday Early Show. He played four songs with his band, due to be broadcast the following morning.
Afterwards, in the green room, he collapsed. He was rushed to St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital, where he was pronounced dead following a heart attack. He was 56 years old.
CBS faced an immediate decision: air the performance he’d just recorded, or pull it out of respect. They chose to broadcast it, explaining that those who knew Grover believed he would have wanted the music to be heard.
From the Army Band to “Just the Two of Us”
Washington’s story didn’t begin in a CBS studio. It began, of all places, in the 78th Army Band at Fort Dix, New Jersey, where a young draftee found himself playing alongside a drummer named Billy Cobham. When both men left the service, Cobham introduced Washington to musicians in New York’s jazz scene — the connection that eventually opened the door to everything that followed.
By the early 1970s, Washington was helping define an entire sound. His version of Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues,” from his 1971 debut Inner City Blues, showed a saxophonist equally comfortable in soul, funk, and jazz, unwilling to treat those as separate languages.
The song most people know him for came almost a decade later. “Just the Two of Us,” from 1980’s Winelight, paired Washington with Bill Withers — who, by his own account, agreed to sing it only on the condition he could rework the lyrics first. “I said, ‘Yeah, if you’ll let me go in and try to dress these words up a little bit,'” Withers later recalled.
The song reached number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, won the Grammy for Best R&B Song, and has become one of the most enduring records in American popular music — a permanent fixture at weddings, on soul radio, and in the memory of anyone who’s heard it once and never forgotten it.
A Career That Reached the White House
Washington’s four decades in music took him from Philadelphia session work to the biggest stages in the country. He performed at the White House alongside Wynton Marsalis and Herbie Hancock, and became, alongside artists like Bob James and George Benson, one of the architects of what would come to be called smooth jazz — a genre that, whatever critics made of it, reached an audience most straight-ahead jazz records never touched.
He never stopped being a serious musician in the process. Sonny Rollins, one of the most respected saxophonists alive, told DownBeat after Washington’s death: “He was one of the best people we had in this music, both on a human level and as a great player.”
The Broadcast That Almost Wasn’t
What makes December 18, 1999 — the morning after Washington’s death — so remarkable is the decision CBS made in the hours immediately following it.
As journalist Russ Mitchell commented on Facebook: “I was there for his performance. Our bosses reached out to Mr. Washington’s wife, who gave us her blessing to air the segment. She told us he would have wanted that. He was a wonderful man.”
He never saw it broadcast. He never knew his final professional performance would be the one so many people remember him by. The four songs he played in that CBS studio, on an ordinary December evening, turned out to be a farewell nobody — least of all Washington — had any reason to expect.
What are your memories of Grover Washington Jr.? Let us know in the comments below.
