Sam Rivers | |
---|---|
![]() Rivers at Studio Rivbea jazz loft, July 1976, New York City | |
Background information | |
Birth name | Samuel Carthorne Rivers |
Born | El Reno, Oklahoma, U.S. [1] [2] | September 25, 1923
Died | December 26, 2011 88) Orlando, Florida, U.S. | (aged
Genres | Jazz, avant-garde jazz, free jazz |
Occupation(s) | Musician, bandleader, composer, educator |
Instrument(s) | Tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, flute, harmonica, piano |
Years active | 1950s–2011 |
Labels | Blue Note, Impulse, FMP, RCA, Nato, Postcards, Stunt, Timeless, Rivbea Sound, Posi-Tone, Marge |
Website | Sam Rivers |
Samuel Carthorne Rivers (September 25, 1923 – December 26, 2011) was an American jazz musician and composer. Though most famously a tenor saxophonist, he also performed on soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, flute, harmonica, piano and viola.
Active in jazz since the early 1950s, he earned wider attention during the mid-1960s spread of free jazz. With a thorough command of music theory, orchestration and composition, Rivers was an influential and prominent artist in jazz music. [2]
Rivers was born in El Reno, Oklahoma, United States. [3] His father was a gospel musician who had sung with the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Silverstone Quartet, exposing Rivers to music from an early age. His grandfather was Marshall W. Taylor, a religious leader from Kentucky. Rivers was stationed in California in the 1940s during a stint in the Navy. Here he performed semi-regularly with blues singer Jimmy Witherspoon. [4] Rivers moved to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1947, where he studied at the Boston Conservatory with Alan Hovhaness. [2]
He performed with Quincy Jones, Herb Pomeroy, Tadd Dameron and others.
In 1959, Rivers began performing with 13-year-old drummer Tony Williams. [3] Rivers was briefly a member of the Miles Davis Quintet in 1964, partly on Williams's recommendation. [3] This edition of the quintet released a single live album, Miles in Tokyo , from a show recorded on July 14 at Kohseinenkin Hall. Rivers' tenure with the quintet was brief: he had engagements in Boston, and his playing style was too avant-garde for Davis during this period; he was replaced by Wayne Shorter shortly thereafter. [5]
Rivers was signed by Blue Note Records, for whom he recorded four albums as leader and made several sideman appearances. [3] Among noted sidemen on his own Blue Note albums were Jaki Byard, who appears on Fuchsia Swing Song (1964), Herbie Hancock and Freddie Hubbard. He appeared on Blue Note recordings by Tony Williams, Andrew Hill and Larry Young.
Rivers derived his music from bebop, but he was an adventurous player, adept at free jazz. The first of his Blue Note albums, Fuchsia Swing Song, adopts an approach sometimes called "inside-outside". Here the performer frequently obliterates the explicit harmonic framework ("going outside") but retains a hidden link so as to be able to return to it in a seamless fashion. Rivers brought the conceptual tools of bebop harmony to a new level in this process, united at all times with the ability to "tell a story", which Lester Young had laid down as a benchmark for the jazz improviser.
His powers as a composer were also in evidence in this period: the ballad "Beatrice" from Fuchsia Swing Song has become an important standard, particularly for tenor saxophonists. For instance, it is the first cut on Joe Henderson's 1985 The State of the Tenor, Vols. 1 & 2 , and Stan Getz recorded it during the 1989 sessions eventually issued as Bossas & Ballads – The Lost Sessions .
During the 1970s, Rivers and his wife, Beatrice, ran a jazz loft called "Studio Rivbea" in New York City's NoHo district. It was located on Bond Street in Lower Manhattan and was originally opened as a public performance space as part of the first New York Musicians Festival in 1970. [6] Critic John Litweiler has written that "In New York Loft Jazz meant Free Jazz in the Seventies" and Studio Rivbea was "the most famous of the lofts". [7] The loft was important in the development of jazz because it was an example of artists creating their own performance spaces and taking responsibility for presenting music to the public. This allowed for music to be free of extra-musical concerns that would be present in a nightclub or concert hall situation. A series of recordings made at the loft were issued under the title Wildflowers on the Douglas label. [8]
Rivers was also recruited by Clifford Thornton to lead a student world-music/free-jazz ensemble at Wesleyan University in 1971. During this era Rivers continued to record, including several albums for Impulse!: Streams , recorded live at Montreux, Hues (both records contain different trio performances later collated on CD as Trio Live), the quartet album Sizzle and his first big-band disc, Crystals ; perhaps his best-known work from this period though is his appearance on Dave Holland's Conference of the Birds , in the company of Anthony Braxton and Barry Altschul.
In the early 1990s, he and his wife moved to Florida, in part to expand his orchestra compositions with a reading band in Orlando. This band became the longest-running incarnation of the RivBea Orchestra. He performed regularly with his Orchestra and Trio with bassist Doug Mathews and drummer Anthony Cole (later replaced by Rion Smith.) [4] From 1996 to 1998 he toured and recorded three projects for Nato Records in France with pianist Tony Hymas and others. In 1998, with the assistance of Steve Coleman, he recorded two Grammy-nominated big-band albums for RCA Victor with the RivBea All-Star Orchestra, Culmination and Inspiration (the title-track is an elaborate reworking of Dizzy Gillespie's "Tanga": Rivers was in Gillespie's band near the end of the trumpeter's life). Other late albums of note include Portrait , a solo recording for FMP, and Vista , a trio with drummers Adam Rudolph and Harris Eisenstadt for Meta. During the late 1990s he appeared on several albums on Postcards Records.
In 2005, he released Aurora, a third CD featuring compositions for his Rivbea Orchestra and the first CD featuring members of his working orchestra in Orlando. [9] 2011 saw the release of Trilogy , a three-CD box set featuring 22 previously-unheard compositions performed by many of the same musicians. [10]
Rivers died from pneumonia on December 26, 2011, at the age of 88 in Orlando, Florida. [11] [12]
During 2019–2022, NoBusiness Records issued six live albums as part of their Sam Rivers Archive Series, featuring previously unreleased music drawn from Rivers's extensive collection of recordings. [13] [14]
With Roots
With Tony Williams
With Reggie Workman
With others
Ray Anderson is an American jazz trombonist. Trained by the Chicago Symphony trombonists, he is regarded as someone who pushes the limits of the instrument, including performing on alto and soprano trombone. He is a colleague of trombonist George E. Lewis. Anderson also plays sousaphone and sings. He was frequently chosen in DownBeat magazine's Critics Poll as best trombonist throughout the late 1880s and early 1890s.
Rashied Ali, born Robert Patterson, was an American free jazz and avant-garde drummer who was best known for performing with John Coltrane in the last years of Coltrane's life.
Roy Owen Haynes is an American jazz drummer. He is among the most recorded drummers in jazz. In a career lasting over 80 years, he has played swing, bebop, jazz fusion, avant-garde jazz and is considered a pioneer of jazz drumming. "Snap Crackle" was a nickname given to him in the 1950s.
Evan Shaw Parker is a British tenor and soprano saxophone player who plays free improvisation.
David Holland is an English double bassist, bass guitarist, cellist, composer and bandleader who has been performing and recording for five decades. He has lived in the United States since the early 1970s.
Kenneth Vincent John Wheeler, OC was a Canadian composer and trumpet and flugelhorn player, based in the U.K. from the 1950s onwards.
Cecil McBee is an American jazz bassist. He has recorded as a leader only a handful of times since the 1970s, but has contributed as a sideman to a number of classic jazz albums.
Barry Altschul is a free jazz and hard bop drummer who first came to notice in the late 1960s for performing with pianists Paul Bley and Chick Corea.
Julian Priester is an American jazz trombonist and occasional euphoniumist. He is sometimes credited "Julian Priester Pepo Mtoto". He has played with Sun Ra, Max Roach, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and Herbie Hancock.
Herman Davis "Dave" Burrell is an American jazz pianist. He has played with many jazz musicians including Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Marion Brown and David Murray.
Reginald "Reggie" Workman is an American avant-garde jazz and hard bop double bassist, recognized for his work with both John Coltrane and Art Blakey.
Gary Thomas is an American jazz saxophonist and flautist, born in Baltimore, Maryland. He was a member of Jack DeJohnette's Special Edition band and has worked with John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, Pat Metheny, John Scofield, Jim Hall, Dave Holland, Greg Osby, Wayne Shorter, Ravi Coltrane, Cassandra Wilson, Wallace Roney, Steve Coleman, and Miles Davis.
Rashid Bakr is an American free jazz drummer.
Alexander von Schlippenbach is a German jazz pianist and composer. He came to prominence in the 1960s playing free jazz in a trio with saxophonist Evan Parker and drummer Paul Lovens, and as a member of the Globe Unity Orchestra. Since the 1980s, Von Schlippenbach has explored the work of more traditional jazz composers such as Jelly Roll Morton or Thelonious Monk.
Conference of the Birds is an album by the Dave Holland Quartet, recorded on 30 November 1972 and released on ECM the following year—Holland's debut as bandleader and fourth project for the label. The quartet features alto saxophonist Anthony Braxton, tenor saxophonist Sam Rivers, and percussionist Barry Altschul.
Thomas Henry Lowther is an English jazz trumpeter who also plays violin.
Reunion: Live in New York is a live album by the Sam Rivers trio, featuring Rivers on saxophone, flute, and piano, Dave Holland on bass, and Barry Altschul on drums. It was recorded on May 25, 2007, at Columbia University's Miller Theatre in New York City, and was released in 2012 as a double-CD set by Pi Recordings.
The Quest is a live album by Sam Rivers on which he is accompanied by double bassist Dave Holland and drummer Barry Altschul. It was recorded on March 12 and 13, 1976, during the Rassegna Internazionale Jazz at the Palazzo dello Sport in Milan, Italy, and was initially released later that year by Red Records. It was reissued the following year by Pausa Records, and was also reissued by Fabbri Editori in a variety of forms over the next four years.
Paragon is an album by Sam Rivers on which he is accompanied by double bassist Dave Holland and drummer Barry Altschul. It was recorded on April 18, 1977, at Davout Studio in Paris, and was released later that year by Fluid Records. In 2015, it was reissued as a digital download by Rivers's RivBea Music.
Ricochet is a live album by the Sam Rivers Trio, led by multi-instrumentalist and composer Rivers, and featuring double bassist Dave Holland and drummer Barry Altschul. Consisting of a single 52-minute track, it was recorded on January 12, 1978, at the Keystone Korner in San Francisco, California, and was released in 2020 by NoBusiness Records as volume 3 of the Sam Rivers Archive Series.