Collection: Lew Tabackin

Lew Tabackin grew up in South Philadelphia at a time when, as he's put it, nobody played the flute, but he stuck with it through high school and a flute performance degree at the Philadelphia Conservatory before picking up tenor saxophone at 15 because Frankie Avalon needed a horn player for his band. The two instruments never merged into one voice. His tenor playing, shaped by Coleman Hawkins and Al Cohn, is forceful and hard-driving; his flute playing, built on a classical foundation from players like Jean-Pierre Rampal, is delicate and almost otherworldly. He spent the 1960s working through the heart of the New York big band scene, Cab Calloway, Thad Jones and Mel Lewis, Clark Terry, Doc Severinsen's Tonight Show band, before meeting pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi in 1967. They married in 1969, moved to Los Angeles in 1972, and in 1973 formed what became the Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Big Band, with Tabackin as principal soloist for the next thirty years. He also built a solo catalogue alongside the big band work, starting with his self-titled RCA debut in 1974 and continuing through "Dual Nature" (Inner City, 1976), an album that splits the difference between his two instruments by giving one side entirely to flute and the other to tenor. What's stocked here moves between the Akiyoshi big band records and his own RCA and Inner City solo sessions.