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Jazz

Yale, Oklahoma, to Amsterdam

Chet Baker

Chet Baker was born in Yale, Oklahoma, in 1929 and grew up in Glendale, California. He switched from trombone to trumpet at 13, and first heard modern jazz while posted to Berlin with an Army band. After West Coast dates with Charlie Parker, he joined the Gerry Mulligan Quartet in 1952. Chet Baker Sings, on Pacific Jazz in 1954, put his voice alongside his horn. Heroin got in the way. It brought nearly a year and a half in prison in Lucca from 1960, a 1966 beating that cost him teeth, and a long silence before the 1974 comeback She Was Too Good to Me. From 1977 he worked mostly in Europe. He died in Amsterdam in May 1988 after a fall from a hotel window.

Born Fort Lauderdale, raised Philly

Archie Shepp

Archie Shepp was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 1937, raised in Philadelphia, and studied drama at Goddard College from 1955 to 1959. He played in Cecil Taylor's band and formed the New York Contemporary Five with John Tchicai and Don Cherry. John Coltrane's admiration got him onto Impulse!, starting with Four for Trane in 1964. He recorded Ascension with Coltrane in 1965 and made Fire Music the same year. Attica Blues came later, in 1972. After the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers he recorded in Paris at the BYG Actuel studios, and from 1971 he spent some thirty years as a professor of music at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Fort Worth, Texas, 1930

Ornette Coleman

Ornette Coleman was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1930. He taught himself saxophone and got to Los Angeles with Pee Wee Crayton's band. Contemporary Records put out his debut, Something Else!!!!, in 1958. In November 1959 came The Shape of Jazz to Come on Atlantic and a controversial residency at the Five Spot Café in New York. His 1960 double-quartet album Free Jazz gave its name to a genre he soon grew uncomfortable with. In the mid-1970s he formed the electric band Prime Time around his theory of harmolodics, and in 2007 Sound Grammar won him the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He died of cardiac arrest in Manhattan in June 2015, aged 85.

Philadelphia, Blue Note, 1956

Lee Morgan

Lee Morgan was born in Philadelphia in 1938 and joined Dizzy Gillespie's big band at 18, staying until Gillespie broke it up in 1958. By then he had been recording for Blue Note since 1956. He was in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers from 1958 until drug problems forced him out in 1961. He made 25 albums as a leader for Blue Note, among them Candy in 1958, The Sidewinder in 1963, Search for the New Land, which reached the R&B top 20, and Live at the Lighthouse, recorded in Hermosa Beach in 1970. On February 19, 1972, his live-in girlfriend, Helen Moore, shot him between sets at Slugs' Saloon. Snow delayed the ambulance, and he died aged 33.

Little Rock to Coltrane's band

Pharoah Sanders

Pharoah Sanders was born Ferrell Lee Sanders in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1940. He moved to Oakland in 1959 and to New York in 1962, where Sun Ra gave him a place to live and encouraged the name Pharoah. In 1965 he joined John Coltrane's band, recording Ascension and Meditations, and he stayed on in Coltrane's final quintet. He signed to Impulse! in 1966 and made Tauhid, Karma, Thembi and Black Unity before leaving the label in 1973. In 1994 he went to Morocco to record The Trance of Seven Colors with the gnawa musician Mahmoud Guinia. His last album was Promises, made with Floating Points and the London Symphony Orchestra and released in 2021. He died at home in Los Angeles in September 2022, aged 81.

From Atlanta to Ascension

Marion Brown

Marion Brown was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1931 and took up the saxophone early. In the army he played alto, clarinet and baritone, and was stationed for a time in Hokkaido. He studied music at Clark College and law at Howard University, then moved to New York in 1962, where he befriended Amiri Baraka and played on John Coltrane's Ascension in 1965 and on Archie Shepp's Fire Music. He went to Europe in 1967, recorded with Gunter Hampel and scored Marcel Camus's film Le temps fou, and settled in Connecticut in 1970. Afternoon of a Georgia Faun, Geechee Recollections and Sweet Earth Flying all drew on Jean Toomer's poetry of the Georgia countryside. Later he taught and painted. He died in Hollywood, Florida, in 2010, aged 79.

Queens to Munich, first on ECM

Mal Waldron

Mal Waldron was born in New York in 1925 to West Indian parents, grew up in Jamaica, Queens, and took a music degree at Queens College in 1949. He worked with Charles Mingus, cut his debut as leader, Mal-1, in 1956, and played on Prestige sessions under John Coltrane. From April 1957 until her death in July 1959 he was Billie Holiday's regular accompanist. A heroin overdose in 1963 led to a breakdown, and he relearned the piano partly by listening to his own records. He left America in the mid-1960s and settled in Munich in 1967. His 1969 album Free at Last was the first release on ECM. Later he partnered Steve Lacy and made more than 100 albums as leader. He died in Brussels in 2002.

Soho, house pianist at Ronnie Scott's

Stan Tracey

Stan Tracey was born in Denmark Hill, South London, in 1926. He turned professional at sixteen, playing accordion, his first instrument, in an ENSA touring group. After a spell in Ted Heath's Orchestra from 1958 to 1959 he became house pianist at Ronnie Scott's club in Soho from 1960, backing Sonny Rollins and plenty of other visiting Americans. The record he's best known for is the 1965 Jazz Suite Inspired by Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, which grew out of an LP of the original BBC broadcast. The big band album Alice in Jazz Land followed in 1966, then freer playing with Keith Tippett and John Surman. In the mid-1970s he started his own label, Steam. He was made a CBE in 2008 and died of cancer in December 2013, aged 86.

Sapporo, the Slowboat jazz club

Ryo Fukui

Ryo Fukui was born in Biratori, Hokkaido, in 1948 and came to music late. He learned the accordion at 18, started teaching himself piano at 22 and soon moved to Tokyo. Six years later, in 1976, came his debut, Scenery, a trio record with bassist Satoshi Denpo and drummer Yoshinori Fukui. Mellow Dream followed in 1977. Based in Sapporo, he met the American pianist Barry Harris in 1992, who mentored him in bebop, and in 1995 he and his wife Yasuko opened the Slowboat jazz club. His final album, A Letter from Slowboat, was recorded live at the club and released in 2015. He died of lymphoma in March 2016, aged 67. Reissues and streaming have since found him a wide new audience.

Poughkeepsie, Hathut Records, 1975

Joe McPhee

Joe McPhee was born in Miami in 1939 and grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he started on trumpet at eight. At 29 he taught himself saxophone, and he later added flugelhorn and valve trombone. His first recording was Clifford Thornton's Freedom and Unity in 1967. His own Underground Railroad and Nation Time followed on the CjR label in 1969 and 1971. In 1975 Werner Uehlinger started the Swiss label Hathut Records specifically to put out his music. In the 1980s he studied Pauline Oliveros's theories and worked with her Deep Listening Band. From 1998 he recorded as Trio X with Dominic Duval and Jay Rosen, and also worked with Peter Brötzmann, Evan Parker and The Thing. He released I'm Just Say'n in 2025.

The Collection