John Gilmore's Greatest Sax Solos (Part 1: Introduction)

John Gilmore with the Sun Ra Arkestra in Ann Arbor 1986 
(Peter Yates, CC BY-SA 3.0)



Charles Mingus' Mingus Dynasty and Santana's Caravanserai were my gateway drugs to jazz, but once I got hooked it was the saxophone that called the shots in my jazz addiction kingdom. Primarily Bird at first, and then after side forays into Ornette Coleman,Wayne Shorter, Eric Dolphy, David Murray, Jimmy Lyons, and Anthony Braxton (oh, yeah, and Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Ben Webster, and Johnny Hodges) (and Roscoe Mitchell and Henry Threadgill and Arthur Blythe) (and detours with Michael Brecker and Jan Garbarek), I settled on John Coltrane as my absolute fave, my jazz God. Yes, I had to have a "favorite"--I was very much taken with the concept of ranking. I had to be able to say Coltrane's the greatest. Whenever my mom would say to my baby daughter "Who's the greatest coach?" (her answer would be Dean Smith), I would always follow up with "And who's the greatest sax player?" Coltrane, of course.

The only thing is, my allegiance changed. I still love Coltrane deeply (after Live in Japan how could I ever stop?), as well as all those other players. But somewhere along the spaceways I realized that while Coltrane may have been the pinnacle, the mountaintop, I preferred being on the road--with John Gilmore. Gilmore speaks to my spirit in a way no other saxophonist (or, indeed, musician) does. Something in his tone, in the way he constructs his lines, the way he distorts time and timbre and transcends space, soothes my soul and brightens my spirit.

Of course, it's impossible to talk about Gilmore without invoking Sun Ra. Gilmore was the lead tenor sax player in Sun Ra's Arkestra for forty years. Asked by Graham Lock why he'd stayed with Ra for so long, despite fruitful side trips with Paul Bley, Andrew Hill, Art Blakey, McCoy Tyner, et al., Gilmore replied, "The wisdom, the learning. Being with Sun Ra is like--oh, tomorrow's newspaper headlines" (Lock, Chasing the Vibration, 1994, p. 162). Later in the same interview, he elaborated with a more musical answer: Ra is "unlimited in his ability to write challenging music--stuff that you maybe have to spend hours or weeks on just to get to it, to really play it. So you never get bored--the challenge is always there. … I'm not gonna run across anybody who's moving as fast as Sun Ra, so I just stay where I am" (Lock, p. 163). Like Johnny Hodges with Duke Ellington, or Jimmy Lyons with Cecil Taylor, Gilmore was never better than when he was with Sun Ra.

So how much of Ra's writing comes out in Gilmore's playing, particularly his solos? I think that Ra's spirit and sense of direction certainly pervaded Gilmore's playing, but it was a two-way street--maybe Ra paved it ahead of time, but Gilmore is driving on it, propelled by a hard Chicago wind that blows through the interstellar lo-ways.

At this point, it's worth quoting at length John Corbett's excellent summary of Gilmore's style, from his 1995 obituary of Gilmore:

While he is best known for his work with Ra amid the emergence of free-jazz and creative music, Gilmore had an important impact on much of the post-modal mainstream, in no small part through his influence on John Coltrane. A serious kink in the reductionist jazz historian's neck, Gilmore was at once a dedicated aural explorer and a bona-fide hard-bop giant… As influences, he cited Hawk, Bird and Pres, but also Stan Getz; he possessed a beautiful tone, played stunning ballads, but was also one of the most thorough investigators of saxophonic extremes, from slap-tongue to overblowing and harmonics. Neither all out nor all in, Gilmore exemplified the maintenance of tradition at the core of innovation. (Corbett, "John Gilmore dead at 63," Downbeat Nov. 1995)

I am limited in my ability to write about the technical, theoretical aspects of Gilmore's playing, but I can attempt to analyze those factors of his style that affect me emotionally: his tone, his structure, and his phrasing. Gilmore shares an acerbic tone, low on vibrato and strong and solid as granite, with Roscoe Mitchell, another prominent Chicago player. Of course, both Mitchell and Gilmore share the educating tutelage of Captain Walter Dyett. Where Mitchell delves into churning simultaneity and circular-breathing-driven dervishes of post-Coltrane acrobatics (as on The Flow of Things) as well as a cool sense of mathematical logic, Gilmore injects soul into the proceedings, while covering all the bases, from gutbucket honking and sheets of sound to outside squealing and heartfelt emotional swinging. His tone is rich and robust, marked by the extensive use of long tones, again with very little vibrato. There is something quite yearning and beautiful about his sound. His longer tones especially have a distinctive, almost keening quality, especially in his later years (perhaps this is what Robert L. Campbell meant when he said that "around 1976, he developed a Trane-like sag in his tone").

Gilmore was always a very structured player, in the sense that his solos often convey a strong sense of a beginning, a middle, and an end. They have a narrative quality, and they are very purposeful in their development of ideas. There were many opportunities for Gilmore to strengthen the structural aspect of his playing in Ra's repertoire, not only in Ra's focused originals, but in the many pop songs and jazz standards that were featured, especially those arranged by Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington. Most of these songs, particularly the Henderson ones, weren't stretched out; they retain the same tight arrangement and structure of the '30s three-minute versions they follow. Thus, Gilmore had a short time frame within each piece in which to solo. Almost all the extant versions of Ra recordings from the Fletcher Henderson repertory (such as "Can You Take It," "Hocus Pocus," and "Yeah Man!") include a short, concise jewel of a Gilmore solo, whether on tenor sax or clarinet.

In compiling this list of what I consider to be Gilmore's all-time greatest solos, I was struck over and over by Gilmore's versatility; he encompasses so much, from big-band swing and hard-bop blowing to smoky, late-night balladry, down-and-dirty blues, and total fire music, with piercingly burning high-register pyrotechnics--often in the same solo. He could go wherever Ra's music would take him, even to rock and roll and Disney tunes.

Gilmore was a master of phrasing, giving his solos a conversational quality. In so many of his solos, I hear him alternating long runs (ending in simple long notes) with more fragmented, short phrases. The effect gives his solos a colloquial character--it's like he's explaining something (the mysteries of the universe, perhaps). He starts with a simple statement, and then expands it, elaborating it. Little by little, he's expounding on it, more frequently and passionately. He's not preaching, but he is making his point with the finest rhetoric. This conversational quality, combined with his inherent lyricism, increases the substance of beauty so evident in all of his playing. Coltrane often hits you with sheets of sound, or takes a melodic kernel of a phrase and worries it to death, either of which can be exhilarating and mesmerizing. Gilmore can do both as well, but he is sparser in his delivery, holding back and releasing ideas as they arise developmentally in the solo.

A key aspect of his phrasing is what he called "rhythmatizing" his phrases. In explaining to Art Sato what it was about his playing that caused Coltrane to exclaim to him, "You've got the concept!" (back in 1961, supposedly resulting in the direction Coltrane took with "Chasin' the Trane"), Gilmore said:

It was about a different rhythm, the way I was rhythmatizing my phrases, instead of playing straight eighth or sixteenth notes. In New York, most of the cats were into playing straight with the exception of Sonny Rollins, who always played rhythmically. But me being with Sun Ra, I could take it off into something else in terms of rhythm. Having studied a little drums too, my rhythmic concept is a little different. That's why I was able to switch quickly from the eighth note, sixteenth note pattern and jump into something else when I realized that the other approach wasn't going to work. Very few musicians are trained to play like that. It's not easy because you're playing rhythmically and melodically at the same time. (Art Sato interview with John Gilmore, Be-Bop and Beyond, March/April 1986)

It's interesting that he mentions drumming here--not only was Gilmore an accomplished drummer in his own right (check out the albums My Brother the Wind Vol. 1 and The Night of the Purple Moon), but, as John Stubblefield said, "Well, one of the things I practice that John Gilmore turned me onto, is I practice out of drum books. The Louis Bellson ones. I practice rhythms, and study rhythm" (Tim Price interview with John Stubblefield, "John Stubblefield Insights" 2005). This strongly rhythmic phrasing aspect is a key feature of Gilmore's style.

For more on the substantial stylistic connections between Gilmore and John Coltrane, see this fascinating post by Ed Rhodes, Jr.

I'll close this introduction with another quote from Corbett:

Listen closely to three generations of Chicago saxophone players--[Von] Freeman, John Gilmore, and Henry Threadgill--and tell me whether you hear the family resemblance. Something deep links them, a common regional phraseology, a lurking accent that refuses to leave a native speaker's voice. (John Corbett, Microgroove: Forays into Other Music, 2014, p. 429)

Please see Part 2 for the actual list!