Sam Rivers! It's like discovering another Eric Dolphy, Harold Land, Wayne Shorter, or Warne Marsh that you never knew about. How do fit him in the picture? What else has to move over a step, if anything, for things to make sense again? There's a lot of Dolphy in his playing, from what I can hear, so the first thought would be to see him as a Dolphy-influenced player. But he's more than that. (Tune in to WKCR for a week-long festival on this tenor man.)
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Last night in Lawrence, Kansas for many months. Will everything fit in my car? My office is packed up too; they will move it to another floor in June.
Wonderful duos with Dave Holland from the 70s.
ResponderEliminarBut funnily enough, the only time I heard Rivers live was with Dizzy Gillespie in the mid-eighties!
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ResponderEliminarRivers is definitely one of the players to reckon with, though I'm biased cause I grew up hearing him play in the Boston area. While I was in jr high & high school, he regularly played at a proto-hippie coffee house in Cambridge with Tony Wiliams, Jaki Byard and a bass player who I can't remember right now.
ResponderEliminarI don't know what Rivers you've heard, but just about any of the Blue Note discs he's own, whether or not he was the leader, are well worth hearing. I've been listening some to the two early Tony Williams Blue Notes, Spring and Life Time, in the last week or so, but Rivers' own sessions are great as is his work with Andrew Hill & Bobby Hutcherson. He also had a stint with Cecil Taylor (with Jimmy Lyons (who you might should also check out) & Andrew Cyrille) in the 1970s that's not well documented, though the album or two that exist are good.
Oh yeah, and Tony Williams got Rivers in Miles Davis' band after George Coleman left. It didn't work out for whatever reason, but there's a live album with Rivers done in Japan that's fascinating.