Collection: Sunny Murray

Sunny Murray grew up in Philadelphia after being raised by an uncle in Idabel, Oklahoma, survived a steel factory accident that cost him parts of three fingers, and moved to New York in 1956 with no drum kit and very little money, eventually acquiring one left behind after a police raid on an after-hours club. He spent several years working with bebop musicians, Jackie McLean, James Moody and Donald Byrd among them, while pushing toward something the musicians around him consistently rejected. The problem was that Murray did not want to keep time. What he wanted to do with the drum kit was something closer to what he heard when he attended workshops with composer Edgard Varèse alongside Cecil Taylor in the late 1950s, an approach built around timbral colour, acoustical texture and pulse rather than metronomic beat. Taylor, who had become his neighbour in Lower Manhattan, was the first musician willing to let him try. The recordings they made together from 1960 onward documented a drummer who had genuinely redefined what a drum kit was for. When Taylor took his group to Europe in 1962, Murray met Albert Ayler on the tour and offered to split his room and wages if Taylor would let him join the band. The resulting partnership produced "Spiritual Unity" (ESP-Disk, 1964), with Gary Peacock on bass, one of the most radical and most collected free jazz records ever made. Murray appeared on most of Ayler's major sessions through 1967. He moved to Paris in 1968, recorded prolifically for European labels including BYG Actuel and Shandar, worked with Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, Dave Burrell and Grachan Moncur III, and continued performing and recording into his eighties. He died in Paris on December 7, 2017, aged 81.