Charles James Shavers (August 3, 1920 – July 8, 1971) was an American jazz trumpeter who played with Dizzy Gillespie, Nat King Cole, Roy Eldridge, Johnny Dodds, Jimmie Noone, Sidney Bechet, Midge Williams, Tommy Dorsey, and Billie Holiday. He was an arranger and composer, and one of his compositions, “Undecided“, is a jazz standard.

Shavers’s father, a distant relative of Fats Navarro, was from the Shavers family of Key West, Florida. Charlie Shavers was a cousin of heavyweight boxer Earnie Shavers. Born in New York City, he took up piano and banjo before switching to trumpet. In the mid-1930s, he performed with Tiny Bradshaw and Lucky Millinder. In 1935, he played in the trumpet section with Dizzy Gillespie and Carl (Bama) Warwick in Frankie Fairfax’s Campus Club Orchestra. In 1936, he joined John Kirby‘s Sextet as trumpet soloist and arranger. He was only 16, but gave his birth date as 1917 to avoid child labor laws; many biographies still list this date.

Shavers’s arrangements and solos helped make the band one of the most commercially successful and imitated of its day. In 1937, he performed with Midge Williams and her Jazz Jesters. In 1944, he began playing sessions in Raymond Scott‘s CBS staff orchestra. In 1945, he left John Kirby‘s band to join Tommy Dorsey‘s Orchestra, with whom he toured and recorded, off and on, until Dorsey’s passing in 1956. In 1949, he sang and played the hit “The Hucklebuck” with the Dorsey Orchestra.

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