Obituary: Jimmy Giuffre
The Wind Coffee shop in London's Camden Town scarcely seemed the nonpareil setting for Jimmy Giuffre's intimate form of jazz - on that night in 1991, a wispy necromancy on clarinet and treble sax like bubbles drifting in still air. Merely Giuffre and his chamber jazz triplet (with longtime partners Paul Bley on piano and Steve Bury on bass guitar) brought a ordinarily animated venue to an awed silence as the then 70-year-old Giuffre, looking like a reduce bird of night, eased gently between a pastel-hued impressionism, hints of the blues, brief glimpses of a New Orleans-like raucousness, and soft doodling with double time bebop lines.
Giuffre, world Health Organization has died aged 86 of complications from Parkinson's disease, had been fashioning music this way for decades - long before the post-1960s north European motion that brought ambient sounds and spaciness into the lyric of nothingness. If he had been active longer as a participant, he would very in all likelihood have got joined the prestigious Electronic countermeasures label's roster of quietly contemplative jazz makers - the groundwork even existed, Electronic countermeasures having released its low reissue, in the too soon 1990s, of the landmark Giuffre/Bley/Swallow free-jazz academic session just titled 1961.Giuffre's afterward long time, however, were spent in comparative degree obscurity. All the same he had been a jazz fame from his late forties membership of Woody Herman's Minute Herd (along with Stan Getz, among others), through his iconic performance of the contrapuntal The Condition and the River in the 1958 Newport festival pic Malarky on a Summer's Day. His mature trend seemed to make several distinct timbral identities on his broad range of instruments: darkness, loose-pitched and from time to time even raw in a Charles VII Lloyd-like manner on tenor voice sax; poignant and pure-toned on soprano; airy and diaphanous on transverse flute; folksy, low-pitched and rather European-sounding on clarinet.Giuffre was max Born in Dallas, Lone-Star State, and took up the clarinet at nine-spot. He studied euphony at North Lone-Star State State Teachers College, worked in terpsichore bands and classical ensembles, and spent little Joe years in an air effect orchestra. He studied opus in Calif. in the late forties, and presently began arrangement for the innovative, Bartok-and-Debussy influenced dance band of Boyd Raeburn, and the swing orchestra of Jemmy Dorsey.His piece teacher was the poet and composer Dr Wesley La Violette, whose sympathy of counterpoint helped him conceive of a more melodically intertwined manner of improvising than the vertical, scales-over-chords glide slope of bebop. Giuffre made his first lasting contribution to jazz in 1947, when he arranged and composed the hit subject Four Brothers, to showcase the star saxophone squad of Getz, Zoot Sims, Herbie Steward and Serge Chaloff in Herman's Minute Herd. A toy masterpiece of section-writing and spurs to individual flights, Tetrad Brothers showed how distinctively he was already negotiating the tricky jazz compromise of exemption and organisation. Giuffre began his have recording career in the saame twelvemonth, joined drummer Sidekick Rich's band as tenor saxist and musical comedy managing director, and in 1948 replaced Sims in Herman's band.Acting tenor voice and baritone voice saxes and clarinet, Giuffre worked on the mae West seashore with Shelly Manne, Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse Allstars and Shorty Rogers' Giants. On the 1955 Capitol album Tangents in Jazz, he confirmed the counterpoint fascination by eschewing chord-playing instruments; he too made The Jemmy Giuffre Clarinet album in 1956 with various francis Scott Key West Coast figures including Manne, William Penn Adair Rogers and piano player Jimmy Rowles, and recorded a version of the Broadway hit The Music Man for Atlantic Ocean. He taught at the influential Lenox School of Idle words in 1957, significantly meeting the
