Samuel Carthorne Rivers was an
American jazz musician and
composer. He performed on soprano and tenor
saxophones,
bass clarinet,
flute,
harmonica and
piano died from pneumonia he was 88..
(September 25, 1923 – December 26, 2011)
Rivers was born in
Enid, Oklahoma. 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]
Early life
Rivers's 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. Rivers was stationed in California in the 1940s during a stint in
the
Navy. Here he performed semi-regularly with blues singer
Jimmy Witherspoon.
[3] 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.
Blue Note era
In 1959 Rivers began performing with 13-year-old
drummer Tony Williams, who later went on to have an impressive career. Rivers was briefly a member of
Miles Davis's quintet in 1964, partly at Williams's recommendation. This quintet recorded a single album,
Miles in Tokyo.
However, Rivers' playing style was too unrefined to be compatible with
Davis's music at this point, and he was soon replaced by
Wayne Shorter. Rivers was signed by
Blue Note Records,
for whom he recorded four albums as leader and made several sideman
appearances. Among noted sidemen on his own Blue Note albums were
Jaki Byard, who appears on
Fuchsia Swing Song,
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
(1964), 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.
Loft era
During the 1970s, Rivers and his wife, Bea, 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.
[4]
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".
[5]
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.
[6]
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.
Later career
In the early 1990s Sam and wife Beatrice 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.)
[3] 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 recent 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 2006, he released
Aurora, a third CD featuring compositions
for his Rivbea Orchestra and the first CD featuring members of his
working orchestra in Orlando.
Rivers died from pneumonia on December 26, 2011 at the age of 88 in Orlando, Florida.
[7][8]
Discography
Lake Eola, Orlando Fl in 2008
As leader
As co-leader
Compilations
- The Complete Blue Note Sam Rivers Sessions (Mosaic, 1996)
As sideman
With Barry Altschul
- You Can't Name Your Own Tune (Muse, 1977)
With Steven Bernstein
With Miles Davis
With Bruce Ditmas
With Brian Groder
With Andrew Hill
With the Dave Holland Quartet
With Bobby Hutcherson
With Jason Moran
- Black Stars (Blue Note, 2001)
With the Stephen McCraven Quartet
- Intertwining Spirits (Free Lance, 1982)
With Music Revelation Ensemble (James Blood Ulmer)
- In the Name of... (DIW, 1993)
With NOJO
With Don Pullen
With Roots (
Arthur Blythe,
Chico Freeman,
Nathan Davis, a.o.)
- Salutes the Saxophone - Tributes to John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins and Lester Young (In & Out, 1992)
- Stablemates (In & Out, 1993)
With Kazuko Shiraishi
- Dedicated to the Late John Coltrane and Other Jazz Poems (Musicworks, 1977)
With Cecil Taylor
With Tony Williams
With Larry Young
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