, San Francisco, in June 1984 , 2009 At the war's conclusion, Donaldson returned to Greensboro, where he worked club dates with the Rhythm Vets, a combo composed of
A&T students who had served in the U.S. Navy. The band recorded the soundtrack to a musical comedy featurette,
Pitch a Boogie Woogie, in
Greenville, North Carolina, in the summer of 1947. The movie had a limited run at black-audience theatres in 1948, but its production company, Lord-Warner Pictures, folded and never made another film.
Pitch a Boogie Woogie was restored by the
American Film Institute in 1985 and re-premiered on the campus of
East Carolina University in Greenville the following year. Donaldson and the surviving members of the Vets performed a reunion concert after the film's showing. In the documentary made about
Pitch by
UNC-TV,
Boogie in Black and White, Donaldson and his musical cohorts recall the film's making—he originally believed that he had played clarinet on the soundtrack. A short piece of concert footage from a gig in
Fayetteville, North Carolina, is included in the documentary. Donaldson's first jazz recordings were with bop musicians
Milt Jackson and
Thelonious Monk in 1952, and he participated in several small groups with other prominent jazz musicians, such as trumpeter
Blue Mitchell, pianist
Horace Silver, and drummer
Art Blakey. He was inducted into the
North Carolina Music Hall of Fame on October 11, 2012. Also in 2012, he was named a NEA Jazz Master by the
National Endowment for the Arts. ==Retirement and death==