Talk about the state of the tenor saxophone in the Sixties - the last years that jazz was one homogenous tradition - and you'll hear names like Trane, Sonny, Joe Henderson. Booker Ervin will seldom be named among them; yet although he was not as innovative or experimental as Coltrane, he was just as much of an individual and memorable voice within mainstream jazz as the other three. His untimely death from kidney disease at the age of thirty-nine in 1970 is one reason, but not the only reason, why he is largely forgotten today - after all, Coltrane and Dolphy died tragically young also, but they get more attention nowadays than Ervin.

The neglect is curious, for Ervin recorded with Charles Mingus and Dexter Gordon, among others, and created a series of searingly powerful albums for Prestige in 1963 and 1964: The Freedom Book, The Song Book, The Blues Book, and The Space Book..

And he didn't just record with Mingus. "There's nothing on earth I like better than playing music," Ervin once said, and it shows brilliantly on his work with Mingus. He sang and danced and cried with Mingus. He anchored, he energized, he sparked the bassist's electrifying soul on the seminal Blues and Roots and Oh Yeah, as well as the live Mingus at Antibes. He may be overlooked because he was paired by Mingus with the great Eric Dolphy, whose serpentine and quicksilver lines might tend to overshadow Ervin's more conventional forays; however, Ervin and Dolphy are actually well matched, in the great contrapuntal tradition of Miles and Trane, Lacy and Rudd, John and Paul.

On the Mingus albums and on his solo work Ervin's robust tenor playing is distinguished by a blues cry (betraying the "Texas tenor" influence shared by Ornette Coleman and others) that enlivens the most tired standard material. He had a sharp, bright tone like Coltrane's, but more rounded and buoyant. His playing sends electricity coursing through any and every piece he plays. He was also a first-rank composer of jazz originals; musicians looking for "new standards" would do well to check out Ervin's "A Lunar Tune," "Number Two," "Mojo," and many others.

Like so many others great musicians, Booker Ervin died too young. We can only be grateful that he left us the documents of his work that he did. The Nineties, filled as they are with jazzmen copying old licks from the Fifties and Sixties, should be the time of the Booker Ervin revival. After all, a lot of those licks are his.

"Booker Ervin is today unquestionably one of the top practitioners of his very popular instrument; some, myself among them, would claim that no other tenorman, including the most famous, can out-think and out-swing Booker in the idiom of today's jazz." -- Michael Morgan, 1967

Familiar with Booker Ervin's work? We welcome your comments.