Collection: Wendell Harrison

Wendell Harrison started clarinet at seven, switched to tenor saxophone at Northwestern High School where his classmates included trumpeter Lonnie Hillyer, saxophonist Charles McPherson and drummer Roy Brooks, performed with Motown artists in his teens, and left Detroit for New York in 1960. He spent the decade recording and touring with Grant Green, Sun Ra and Eddie Jefferson, and spent four years with saxophonist Hank Crawford, appearing on Crawford's Atlantic albums "Double Cross," "Dig These Blues" and "Mr. Blues." By 1970 the road had worn him down. He spent time at the Synanon Center in California, met Esther Phillips and Art Pepper, and then returned to Detroit, where he connected with trombonist Phil Ranelin, who had moved from Indianapolis, and together in 1971 they founded Tribe. They produced records and concerts, published a magazine and built a model of musician self-determination. The label's albums, "Message from the Tribe" (1972), Harrison's own "An Evening with the Devil" (1973) and Phil Ranelin's "Vibes from the Tribe" (1975), are among the most collected jazz records produced entirely outside the New York and Los Angeles mainstream. Tribe formally disbanded in 1977 but Harrison kept building - Rebirth Inc. as a non-profit jazz education organisation, the WenHa label for his own ongoing recordings, and more recently a partnership with Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad's Jazz Is Dead series. He received the Kresge Eminent Artist Award in 2018. Harrison remains active in Detroit, aged 83.