Arthur Blythe

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Arthur Blythe (1989)

Arthur Murray Blythe (born July 5, 1940 in Los Angeles - † March 27, 2017 ) was an American jazz musician ( alto saxophone , soprano saxophone ), composer and arranger .

Live and act

Blythe was born in Los Angeles, grew up in San Diego , where his parents moved in 1944, and learned alto saxophone from the age of nine. In the mid-1950s he had lessons from the former Jimmie Lunceford saxophonist Kirtland Bradford. From the age of thirteen he played with local rhythm & blues bands before turning to jazz as a teenager. At the end of the 1950s he returned to his hometown and soon became known in the local avant-garde jazz scene . From 1963 to 1973 he worked with Horace Tapscott , with whom he made his first recordings ( The Giant is Awakening , 1969), in 1967 with Owen Marshall and then until 1973 with Stanley Crouch's Black Music Infinity .

In 1974 he moved to New York City , where he worked with Leon Thomas , Julius Hemphill and Chico Hamilton (1975-77). From 1976 to 1978 he played with Gil Evans ( Priestess ), also with Lester Bowie (1978) and for a longer period with Jack DeJohnette's formation "Special Edition" as well as with McCoy Tyner , Charles Tyler , Ted Daniel and Julius Hemphill. After his departure, he briefly took up his position in the World Saxophone Quartet .

From 1977 he also led his own bands with which he recorded records. He first published on the independent label India Navigation , then with Columbia , and then found labels with Enja and Savant who are committed to avant-garde jazz . For his often unusually orchestrated albums, he worked with musicians such as Abdul Wadud , Bobby Battle , Kelvyn Bell , Steve McCall , Fred Hopkins and John Hicks . In 1979 he recorded the album Lenox Avenue Breakdown for Columbia , a. a. with tuba player Bob Stewart , Guilherme Franco and guitarist James Blood Ulmer . In the same year he worked on Jack DeJohnette 's Special Edition album . He also recorded several duo albums with James Newton , Art Davis and Malachi Favors (1980). In addition to the conventional rhythm group, Arthur Blythe integrated African drums, Turkish percussion, violins, violas, electric guitars and tuba into his various ensembles . From 1980, the year of his final breakthrough, he played almost every year at major festivals such as the Berlin Jazz Days , the Montreux Jazz Festival and the Newport Jazz Festival . In the early 1980s he experimented briefly with pop music; from 1986 Blythe was a founding member of the all-star formation The Leaders .

Blythe recorded the album Hipmotism for Enja in 1991 ; Retroflection followed in 1993 with his “electric” formation . According to Ssirus W. Pakzad, “he did not live up to high expectations with increasing age. Numerous publications of his own have shown that although he was still able to play high-density music, artistically he only turned in circles, since he limited himself to performing the same, well-known compositions. ”He gained new attention in the late 1990s in the group of Joey Baron , in 2002 Blythe recorded the album Focus on the Savant label with marimba players Gust Tsilis , Bob Stewart and Cecil Brooks III .

Appreciation

Blythe, who counts among his musician idols Charlie Parker , John Coltrane , Harold Land and Eric Dolphy as well as Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk as composers, said in an interview: “I am not just avant-garde. I like to play all types of music as much as I can play, straight-ahead or whatever they call that. I like rhythm and blues. I like music with form, not atonal or aform. I am not only there. Sometimes they put me into a weird bag and want me to be weird, inaccessible. I think I am accessible. "

For Ian Carr, Blythe is one of the most talented and creative saxophonists of the 1970s; Leonard Feather and Ira Gitler highlight his emotional game, which combines its roots in gospel and blues with the more abstract game of the avant-garde derived from Eric Dolphy. According to Ulrich Olshausen , "his sweet tone" reflects - without appearing epigonal - role models such as Johnny Hodges or Benny Carter . “At high altitudes, this tone can almost whistle with radiance or come close to soprano saxophonists like circus clowns play. In the depths, on the other hand, it takes on body and Ornette Coleman's typical robustness.

According to Martin Kunzler , Blythe had "reached a new dimension of sound flexibility" with his instruments. Kunzler sees the repertoire of Blythe, who called one of his band projects In the Tradition , from Johnny Hodges to Charlie Parker and Cannonball Adderley to the extreme avant-garde. Blythe died in March 2017 of complications from Parkinson's disease .

Discography

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Frank Schindelbeck: Arthur Blythe has died . JazzPages, March 28, 2017, accessed March 28, 2017.
  2. ↑ Wolf Kampmann (ed.), With the assistance of Ekkehard Jost : Reclams Jazzlexikon . Reclam, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-15-010528-5 . Similarly, Richard Cook Jazz Encyclopedia London 2007
  3. ↑ a b quotation from Feather & Gitler, p. 68.
  4. ↑ Quoted in All About Jazz
  5. ↑ cit. according to Kunzler, p. 133.
  6. ↑ cit. according to Kunzler, p. 132.
personal data
SURNAME Blythe, Arthur
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Blythe, Arthur Murray (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American jazz musician
DATE OF BIRTH 5th July 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH los Angeles
DATE OF DEATH March 27, 2017