Collection: Don Pullen

Don Pullen grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, in a preacher's household, learned piano from a neighbour at ten, and spent his early performance years accompanying church vocalists before finding his way to Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy records in his teens. He studied at Johnson C. Smith University before abandoning medicine for music, moved to Chicago and worked with Muhal Richard Abrams, then settled in New York in the mid-1960s where he played organ for R&B groups behind Big Maybelle and Ruth Brown, recorded free duets with Milford Graves, and worked briefly with Nina Simone. The technique he was developing throughout all of this is one of the most recognisable in jazz piano history: a percussive, highly physical approach that used the backs of his hands, his knuckles and occasionally his elbows to generate dense tone clusters that sat somewhere between free jazz and gospel fury. Charles Mingus heard him in 1973, recommended by drummer Roy Brooks, and Pullen spent the next two years as the pianist in Mingus's final great quintet, recording "Changes One" and "Changes Two" (Atlantic, 1975) alongside George Adams, Jack Walrath and Dannie Richmond. When Mingus died in 1979, Pullen and Adams co-led a quartet with Richmond and bassist Cameron Brown that ran for nearly a decade, an inside-outside group that extended the Mingus energy into more overtly avant-garde territory. In 1979 Pullen also co-led the 360 Degree Music Experience with Beaver Harris, replacing Dave Burrell as the band's pianist. His Blue Note period began with "New Beginnings" (1988), a trio session with Gary Peacock and Tony Williams that demonstrated how much ground he could cover in a single evening, and continued through the African-Brazilian Connection, which fused jazz with traditional West African and Brazilian music until weeks before his death. He died on 22 April 1995, aged 53.