Performance · Other credits

Norman Keenan

Norman Keenan is credited on 400 releases across 81 albums tracked on Gatefold, active 1959–2025 — the collector-built map of who actually made the music.

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400

Pressings credited

81

Albums

8

Decades active

70

In collections

Biography

Norman Dewey Keenan (November 23, 1916 in Union, South Carolina – February 12, 1980 in New York City) was an American jazz double-bassist. Keenan began playing piano before learning bass at age 15. He worked with Tiny Bradshaw (mid-1930s), Lucky Millinder (1939–40), Henry Wells (1940), Earl Bostic, and Cootie Williams, and jammed at Minton's Playhouse around the same time. Following World War II he worked with Williams again and with Eddie Cleanhead Vinson in 1947-49. From 1949 to 1957 he was the bassist in the house trio at the Village Vanguard. After backing Harry Belafonte from 1957 to 1962 and working on the TV show Hootenanny, he began playing jazz again in the 1960s, with Count Basie (1965-74) and Roy Eldridge (1966).

Bio from Wikipedia

Credited work

400 releases · 81 albums · active 1959–2025

  • Performance · 467
  • Other credits · 2

Studios: Carnegie Hall · T.T.G. Studios · Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey · The Tropicana, Las Vegas

Discography

Records they worked on — most-collected first.

Frequent collaborators

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