Formed 1968

Beaver Harris came to drums late. Born in Pittsburgh in 1936 and good enough at baseball as a teenager to play for the Kansas City Monarchs and attract scouts from the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants, he didn't start drumming until his army service in the early 1960s. After moving to New York in 1963, encouraged by Max Roach to pursue music seriously, he worked his way through the free jazz scene with Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, Marion Brown and Roswell Rudd before co-founding the 360 Degree Music Experience in 1968 with trombonist Grachan Moncur III and pianist Dave Burrell. The band operated as a cooperative with a rotating membership, its core personnel shifting across the 1970s and 1980s to include Hamiet Bluiett, Ricky Ford, Ron Carter, Buster Williams, Jimmy Garrison and Don Pullen, who replaced Burrell as co-leader after Burrell's departure. The concept remained fixed regardless of personnel: a band whose name described its actual practice, incorporating African, Caribbean and Asian music into free jazz without flattening any of them into decoration. "In:Sanity" (Black Saint, 1976), recorded with a six-player steel drum ensemble alongside Bluiett, Cecil McBee, Azar Lawrence and Sunil Garg on sitar, remains the fullest realisation of that idea on record. Harris died in New York on 22 December 1991, aged 55.