Reeds, flute, sahnai. German musician equally adept at improvising or composing. Dudek studied clarinet privately and attended music school in the '50s before joining a big band led by his brother Ossi until 1958. During the early '60s, he played two years in the Berliner Jazz Quintet, in Karl Blume's group and in Kurt Edelhagen's orchestra... [+] Read More

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Three decades after his death, the legacy of Albert Ayler is plain -- a plethora of reed-biting aural contortionists bent on exploiting the saxophone's propensity for making sounds that resemble a human scream. Many such players, unable to play anything resembling a coherent melody, rely instead on the extreme manifestations of the Ayler... [+] Read More

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Roscoe Mitchell is the rare jazz musician who also moves comfortably within the realm of contemporary classical music. It might even be said that Mitchell is a more convincing artist when working in European-influenced forms. When relying on structural and formal jazz conventions, Mitchell can often come off as stilted and unswinging. On the... [+] Read More

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Few, if any, free jazz saxophonists have approached music with the same degree of intellectual rigor as Sam Rivers; just as few have managed to maintain a high level of creativity over a long life. Rivers plays with remarkable technical precision and a manifest knowledge of his materials. His sound is hard and extraordinarily well-centered, his... [+] Read More

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Of all the jazz musicians, Sun Ra was probably the most controversial. He did not make it easy for people to take him seriously, for he surrounded his adventurous music with costumes and mythology that both looked backward toward ancient Egypt and forward into science fiction. In addition, Ra documented his music in very erratic fashion on his... [+] Read More

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Alto and baritone saxophonist, composer, and bandleader Tim Berne was born in Syracuse, NY, in 1954, and purchased his first alto saxophone while attending Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. A fan of R&B and Motown music, he was not particularly interested in jazz until he heard saxophonist Julius Hemphill's album Dogon A.D. Immediately inspired... [+] Read More

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