Collection: John Gilmore

John Gilmore grew up in Chicago, started clarinet at fourteen, picked up tenor in the Air Force, played briefly with Earl Hines after his discharge in 1952, and then met Sun Ra in 1953 and effectively disappeared from the wider jazz world for the next four decades. That disappearance is the central fact of his biography, and it is both a loss and a choice: Gilmore was, by the account of virtually every serious musician who heard him, one of the finest tenor saxophonists in jazz, and he spent almost his entire career inside an ensemble whose cosmic mythology and extreme avant-gardism kept most casual listeners at a distance. John Coltrane took lessons from him, not the other way around. The record most people point to when they want to hear what Gilmore could do outside the Arkestra context is "Blowing in from Chicago" (Blue Note, 1957), the only album he ever co-led, recorded with his Du Sable High School classmate Clifford Jordan over a rhythm section of Horace Silver, Curly Russell and Art Blakey. He made a handful of other outside appearances across the 1960s, with Andrew Hill, Paul Bley, McCoy Tyner, Art Blakey and Pete La Roca, but the Arkestra was always where he returned. Sun Ra called him "Honest John." When Sun Ra died in May 1993, Gilmore led the Arkestra himself for two years before his own death in August 1995, after which Marshall Allen took over. What's stocked here centres on his rare recordings as a leader and his most collected sideman appearances outside the Arkestra.