Sam Rivers

Samuel Carthorne Rivers (September 25, 1923 – December 26, 2011) was an American jazz musician and composer. He performed on soprano and tenor saxophones, bass clarinet, flute, harmonica and piano.

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.

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. Rivers moved to Boston, Massachusetts in 1947, where he studied at the Boston Conservatory with Alan Hovhaness.

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 the Miles Davis 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. 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". 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.

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.) 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.

As leader

 * 1964: Fuchsia Swing Song (Blue Note)
 * 1965: Contours (Blue Note)
 * 1966: A New Conception (Blue Note)
 * 1967: Dimensions & Extensions (Blue Note)
 * 1973: Streams (Impulse!)
 * 1971-73: Hues (Impulse!)
 * 1974: Crystals (Impulse!)
 * 1976: Sizzle (Impulse!)
 * 1976: The Tuba Trio Vols. 1-3 (Circle)
 * 1976: Jazz of the 70's (Circle)
 * 1976: The Quest (Red / Pausa)
 * 1976: Black Africa! Villalago (Horo)
 * 1976: Black Africa! Perugia (Horo)
 * 1977: Paragon (Fluid)
 * 1978: Waves (Tomato)
 * 1979: Contrasts (ECM)
 * 1981: Crosscurrent (Blue Marge)
 * 1982: Colours (Black Saint)
 * 1995: Portrait (FMP)
 * 1998: Culmination (RCA Victor/BMG France)
 * 1998: Inspiration (RCA Victor/BMG)
 * 2003: Celebration (Posi-Tone)
 * 2006: Aurora (Rivbea Sound)
 * 2007: Firestorm (Rivbea Sound)
 * 2011: Trilogy (Mosaic)

As co-leader

 * 1976: with Dave Holland - Dave Holland / Sam Rivers (Improvising Artists)
 * 1976: with Dave Holland - Sam Rivers / Dave Holland Vol. 2 (Improvising Artists)
 * 1977: with Mario Schiano - Rendez-vous (Vedette)
 * 1977: with James Newton - Flutes! (Circle)
 * 1983: with Stephen McCraven - Intertwining Spirits (Freelance Records)
 * 1995: with Improvisors Pool (Alexander von Schlippenbach) - Backgrounds for Improvisors (FMP)
 * 1996: with Noël Akchoté / Tony Hymas / Paul Rogers / Jacques Thollot - Configuration (Nato)
 * 1996: with Julian Priester - Hints on Light and Shadow (Postcards)
 * 1997: with Alexander von Schlippenbach - Tangens (FMP)
 * 1998: with Tony Hymas - Eight Day Journal (Nato)
 * 1998: with Tony Hymas - Winter Garden (Nato)
 * 2003: with Adam Rudolph / Harris Eisenstadt - Vista (Meta)
 * 2004: with Ben Street / Kresten Osgood & Bryan Carrott - Purple Violets (Stunt)
 * 2004: with Ben Street / Kresten Osgood - Violet Violets (Stunt)
 * 2007: with Dave Holland / Barry Altschul - Reunion: Live in New York (Pi, 2012)

Compilations

 * The Complete Blue Note Sam Rivers Sessions (Mosaic, 1996)

As sideman
With Barry Altschul 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 With the Stephen McCraven Quartet With Music Revelation Ensemble (James Blood Ulmer) With NOJO With Don Pullen With Roots (Arthur Blythe, Chico Freeman, Nathan Davis, a.o.) With Kazuko Shiraishi With Cecil Taylor With Tony Williams With Larry Young
 * You Can't Name Your Own Tune (Muse, 1977)
 * Diaspora Blues (Tzadik, 2002)
 * Miles in Tokyo (Columbia, 1964)
 * What If (Postcards, 1994)
 * Torque (2007)
 * Change (Blue Note, 1966)
 * Conference of the Birds, (ECM, 1973)
 * Dialogue (Blue Note, 1965)
 * Black Stars (Blue Note, 2001)
 * Intertwining Spirits (Free Lance, 1982)
 * In the Name of... (DIW, 1993)
 * City of Neighbourhoods (True North, 2004)
 * Capricorn Rising (Black Saint, 1975)
 * Salutes the Saxophone - Tributes to John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins and Lester Young (In & Out, 1992)
 * Stablemates (In & Out, 1993)
 * Dedicated to the Late John Coltrane and Other Jazz Poems (Musicworks, 1977)
 * The Great Concert of Cecil Taylor (Prestige, 1969)
 * Life Time (Blue Note, 1964)
 * Spring (Blue Note, 1965)
 * Into Somethin' (Blue Note, 1964)