Wallace Roney, an accomplished jazz trumpeter who studied under and collaborated with the likes of Miles Davis and Art Blakey over a four-decade career, died this morning of complications from COVID-19, NPR reports.
He had been admitted to St. Joseph's University Medical Center in Paterson, New Jersey last Wednesday, March 25. He was 59. Roney was born on May 25, 1960, in Philadelphia.
He began playing the trumpet at just five years old, and by 12 he had joined the classical brass quintet the Philadelphia Brass, where he studied under Clark Terry.
He spent his teen years in Washington, D.C., attending high school at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts and college at Howard University and the Berklee College of Music in Boston.