Collection: Steve Kuhn

Steve Kuhn grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, started classical piano lessons at five under Madame Chaloff, was accompanying her son the baritone saxophonist Serge Chaloff on professional gigs at fourteen, held down a six-nights-a-week job in Harvard Square while studying at Harvard, and graduated with a degree before continuing at the Lenox School of Music alongside Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, studying under Gunther Schuller, George Russell, John Lewis and Bill Evans. It was at Lenox that he met Kenny Dorham, who hired him for a year-long stint in his band. He left Dorham in 1960 when John Coltrane invited him to join a new quartet, an opportunity Kuhn had generated himself by simply calling Coltrane and asking for an audition after learning the saxophonist had left Miles Davis to go out on his own. He played with Coltrane for eight weeks at the Jazz Gallery until McCoy Tyner took over the piano chair. That sequence, from Dorham's band to the founding Coltrane quartet in the space of two years, defined how Kuhn was positioned in jazz for the next six decades: a musician of unquestionable inside connections who nonetheless built a career on his own terms. He worked with Stan Getz from 1961 to 1963, whose rhythm section at one point included Scott LaFaro and Roy Haynes, then spent a year with Art Farmer's group before forming his own trio with bassist Steve Swallow and drummer Pete La Roca. The 1966 Impulse! album "The October Suite," a collaboration with vibraphonist and composer Gary McFarland built around Third Stream ideas absorbed at Lenox, made a direct impression on Manfred Eicher and shaped his thinking as he developed ECM. Kuhn moved to Stockholm in 1967, returned to New York in 1971, and began his long relationship with ECM directly: "Trance" and "Ecstasy" (both ECM, 1974) documented his working quartet with Swallow, Steve Slagle and Bob Moses, recorded at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg. A later quartet with singer Sheila Jordan produced the ECM albums "Playground" and "Last Year's Waltz." He has continued recording into his late eighties, most recently for ECM and Sunnyside. He is still active.