Tenor Saxophone | 1931-1995

John Gilmore grew up in Chicago, started playing clarinet at fourteen, took up tenor saxophone during Air Force service and played briefly with Earl Hines after his discharge in 1952, then joined Sun Ra's ensemble in Chicago in 1953 and spent the next four decades almost exclusively inside it. He was, by the account of the musicians who knew his playing best, one of the finest tenor saxophonists in jazz, with a forceful tone, an advanced harmonic conception that treated bebop as a starting point rather than a destination, and a technique built on hours of daily practice that Sun Ra described by calling him "Honest John." John Coltrane took informal lessons from him, and multiple sources place Coltrane's approaches on recordings from the early 1960s in direct relationship to what he absorbed from those sessions. The "Blowing in from Chicago" Blue Note date (1957), co-led with his Du Sable High School classmate Clifford Jordan and backed by Horace Silver, Curly Russell and Art Blakey, remains the clearest document of what Gilmore sounded like in a straight hard bop context, and the only album he ever co-led outside the Arkestra. A handful of 1960s sideman sessions with Andrew Hill, Paul Bley, McCoy Tyner and Art Blakey complete the portrait of a musician who consistently chose the most demanding creative environment available over the wider recognition his talent would have allowed elsewhere. When Sun Ra died in May 1993, Gilmore led the Arkestra until his own death on 20 August 1995, aged 63. Marshall Allen succeeded him.