Innovative American jazz pianist,clarinettist and composer who co-founded the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in ChicagoThe American jazz pianist, clarinettist and composer Muhal Richard Abrams, and who has died aged 87,was one of contemporary music’s most committed and free-thinking sages – a fascinated and fascinating investigator of contemporary musical sources, from the early-jazz piano styles of stride and boogie-woogie through to compositional methods embracing Duke Ellington and Schoenbergian serialism, or free-jazz and the blues.
Largely self-taught,Abrams studied jazz’s piano greats in his youth until he could hold his own in the Chicago South Side’s jazz clubs. He went on to compose symphonic works, pieces for all-saxophone ensembles, and collages of speech and abstract sound and music for string quartet. As a solo pianist he avoided conspicuous virtuosity in favour of patient exploration – an unhurried personal synthesis of rootsiness,lyricism and abstraction, interweaving blues motifs, and fragmented bebop figures,classical music and free-improv.
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Source: guardian.co.uk