[Dixielandjazz] Sam Rivers obit

[Steve Voce]

  Sam Rivers: Saxophonist at the cutting edge of jazz's avant garde


FRIDAY 30 DECEMBER 2011

The avant-garde work of the saxophonist Sam Rivers was the most 
accessible free-form music for the general listener. The more prickly 
practitioners of the Sixties avant-garde saxophone treated their 
audiences with aggression, but Sam was almost without ego, a brilliant 
teacher and among the nicest of men.

Unusually for someone who worked outside the bounds of convention, he 
was universally respected and liked. As a teacher he was orthodox, but 
brilliant, making sure his students had a thorough musical grounding 
rather than forcing their flowerings.

In the last years of his life when he played with his quartet he was a 
black-hatted, bespectacled wisp of a man, often dressed from head to 
foot in black. He played with a dry yet lively tone that could 
ultimately be traced back to the Coleman Hawkins style, but his new 
ideas bore no relation to those of the older man. Despite being 
revolutionary, his music developed from a logical base and he enthralled 
audiences for almost half a century.

He came from a musical family, his career beginning conventionally. 
Leaving the US Navy in 1947 he enrolled at the Boston Conservatory of 
Music, where his local colleagues included Quincy Jones, Charlie 
Mariano, Serge Chaloff and, most importantly, Jaki Byard, himself a 
progressively-minded pianist. Rivers and Byard developed a strong 
musical partnership, although they didn't record together until 1964.

Rivers toured with Billie Holiday and then remained based in the Boston 
area until 1965. In 1959 he met a 13-year-old drummer, Tony Williams, 
whose playing was at the vanguard of contemporary drumming. They 
occasionally improvised together alongside abstract paintings in museums 
and art galleries. In 1964 Williams joined the Miles Davis band and in 
the summer of that year persuaded Davis to hire Rivers as his tenor 
player. Rivers took the chair that had originally been John Coltrane's 
but, unlike Coltrane, he found no inspiration in working for the trumpeter.

"I'd already been where Miles was at then some time before. I was years 
ahead of him," he said dispassionately. He found the music offered him 
no challenge and left a couple of months later after a tour of Japan 
with the band.

It was later in 1964 that he made recordings for the Blue Note label as 
both a leader and a sideman that were to become among his best known. 
Tony Williams, Davis's drummer, had recommended Rivers to the label.

Rivers then joined the quartet of pianist Andrew Hill, another 
revolutionary musician, and appeared on all of Hill's recordings for the 
Blue Note label in the mid-'60s. The two reunited in the 1993 album 
Summit Conference. In 1968, by now doubling on flute and soprano 
saxophone, Rivers worked often for the pianist Cecil Taylor, and the two 
were appointed musicians in residence at the Fondation Maeght in St Paul 
De Vence in the south of France, where they stayed until 1972. Rivers 
thrived in the European setting, and from now on worked there as often 
as he could.

In 1970 he and his wife Bea established the Studio Rivbea in a Manhattan 
loft and it became an important forum for forward-looking musicians. It 
stayed open until 1979.

Rivers was also composer-in-residence at the Harlem Opera Society from 
1968 and taught at the Wesleyan University (1970-73). Back in Europe he 
can be seen playing in the 1974 film Jazz in Piazza made at the Umbria 
Jazz Festival. He worked often in the late '70s with the bassist Dave 
Holland; throughout the next 20 years Rivers worked mostly in Europe. In 
the late 1980s he joined both the Dizzy Gillespie quintet and 
Gillespie's United Nations Orchestra.

Rivers settled in Florida in the 1990s, where he worked to establish an 
avant-garde scene while still playing prolifically in Europe. During 
1996-97 he played and recorded with the trombonist Julian Priester and 
in 1998 put together the Rivbea All-Star Orchestra in Orlando and 
continued to work from there with a trio. Rivers continued to rehearse 
the Rivbea Orchestra regularly at the Musicians' Union Hall in Orlando 
until last September, when illness overcame him.

"Music was his life," said his daughter Monique, who managed Rivers' 
concert bookings. "Music is what kept him alive. My father, in my eyes, 
was on vacation all his life. He used to tell me, 'I'm working, but I'm 
loving every minute of it.' Retirement was not in his vocabulary. 'Why 
do we even have that word?' he used to ask me. 'There should be no such 
thing.'"

/Steve Voce/

*Samuel Carthorne Rivers, saxophone and flute player, pianist, 
bandleader, composer and teacher: born El Reno, Oklahoma 25 September 
1923; married Beatrice (died 2005; one son, three daughters); died 
Orlando, Florida 26 December 2011.*