Tribute to Jimmy Giuffre:
Jimmy Giuffre was a jazz clarinetist, composer, and saxophonist. At the end of his career, he mainly played tenor and baritone saxophone. He is known for developing jazz forms in which a freer interaction between musicians was central.
At the beginning of his career, he was mainly a well-known figure in West Coast Jazz and Cool Jazz.
In his own music groups, he initially played with Jim Hall and Ralph Peña. He also became known from a number of television specials that focused on jazz music.
Later, together with pianist Paul Bley and Steve Swallow, he developed a form of Free Jazz that leaned more toward classical chamber music. Long before the “free improvisation craze” in Europe, Giuffre explored with Bley and Swallow the possibilities that completely improvised music offered to musicians.
In the final phase of his career, he was hired by several renowned music universities in America to teach his approach to jazz improvisation and music composition.
Jimmy Giuffre has left a significant mark on how jazz music developed in the 1970s and has thus been an important founder of a movement in jazz.
A tribute to this hero of free improvisation is therefore more than justified.