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Jimmy Lyons

Imagine what Sonny Stitt might have sounded like had he embraced free jazz after mastering bebop, and one can probably conjure a pretty good mental impression of Jimmy Lyons. Like Stitt, Lyons was enamoured of Charlie Parker's style, particularly in terms of phrasing. Lyons' slippery, bop-derived rhythms and melodic contours lent his improvisations a Charlie "Bird" Parker-like cast, even as his performance contexts were more harmonically free. Lyons made his reputation playing with pianist Cecil Taylor, with whom he became inextricably linked. He was a near-constant presence in Taylor's bands from 1960 until the saxophonist's death in 1986. Lyons always lent an explicitly swinging element to the pianist's music, helping remind the listener most emphatically that — regardless of how much Taylor may have been influenced by European art music — this was unquestionably jazz.

A teenaged Lyons was given an alto sax by the clarinetist Buster Bailey, an important member of Fletcher Henderson's band in the '20s and '30s. Lyons studied with veteran big band saxophonist Rudy Rutherford, and at a young age made friends with such jazz luminaries as Elmo Hope, Bud Powell, and Thelonious Monk. Lyons came into his own as a professional upon his association with Taylor in 1960. With Taylor, Lyons recorded a number of landmark albums, including Cecil Taylor Live at Café Montmartre (1962), in a trio with drummer Sunny Murray; and Unit Structures (1966), in a larger band who included, significantly, drummer Andrew Cyrille. Lyons took his own bands into the studio infrequently. In 1969, he led his first session, an album entitled Other Afternoons, which was issued on the now-defunct BYG label. Beginning in 1978, he began leading record dates more often. In the years to come he would release several albums on the Hat Hut and Black Saint labels.

Like many jazz musicians, Lyons was compelled by circumstance to augment his performance income by teaching. In 1970-1971 he taught music at Narcotic Addiction Control, a drug treatment center in New York City. From 1971-1973 he served — with Taylor and Cyrille — as the artist in residence at Antioch College, and in 1975 he directed the Black Music Ensemble at Bennington College. Perhaps Lyons' stature as a musician is best illustrated by the fact that Taylor essentially found him irreplaceable. After Lyons, Taylor never established a similar long-standing relationship with another musician. Jimmy Lyons' premature death at the age of 52 robbed Taylor — and avant-garde jazz in general — of a vital, swinging, eminently creative voice.

Jimmy Lyons: Live From Studio Rivbea (Jimmy Lyons)

Read "Live From Studio Rivbea (Jimmy Lyons)" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
July 29, 2025

Alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons was underappreciated even at the height of his powers, but to those with ears attuned to the radical innovations of the loft jazz era, he was a galvanizing presence. That his legacy remains under-lit is due in part to his long-standing tenure in Cecil Taylor's incandescent orbit. Lyons was more than a foil; he was Taylor's most empathetic interlocutor, the tether to bebop logic amid Taylor's eruptive torrents. But a fatal cocktail of perfectionism ...

Album Review

Cecil Taylor: Live at Fat Tuesday's February 10, 1980

Read "Live at Fat Tuesday's February 10, 1980" reviewed by Giuseppe Segala

by Giuseppe Segala
June 2, 2025

Nella collana First Visit di ezz-thetics, dedicata a registrazioni storiche rimaste inedite fino a ora, l'etichetta svizzera Hat Hut Records pubblica il terzo CD di Live at Fat Tuesday's, completando così la documentazione degli straordinari concerti che videro impegnato il sestetto Unit di Cecil Taylor a New York dall'8 al 10 febbraio 1980. Come nelle precedenti pubblicazioni, It Is in the Brewing Luminous, uscita nel 1981, e Live At Fat Tuesday's February 9, 1980 First Visit, diffusa nel ...

Album Review

Cecil Taylor: Live At Fat Tuesday's February 9, 1980 First Visit

Read "Live At Fat Tuesday's February 9, 1980 First Visit" reviewed by Giuseppe Segala

by Giuseppe Segala
October 24, 2024

Nel periodo di passaggio tra gli anni Settanta e Ottanta, Cecil Taylor è stato oggetto di numerose attenzioni da parte di etichette europee, che ne hanno lodevolmente documentato esibizioni dal vivo assai significative. Tra queste, alcune presentano la formazione Unit in differenti organici strumentali, che esprimono con dovizia un momento di impeto formidabile e di incredibile intesa creativa. Ne sono esempio le registrazioni in Germania del giugno 1978 Live in the Black Forest e One Too Many Salty Swift and ...

Album Review

Cecil Taylor: Live At Fat Tuesday's February 9, 1980 First Visit

Read "Live At Fat Tuesday's February 9, 1980 First Visit" reviewed by John Eyles

by John Eyles
June 15, 2024

For some years, Werner X. Uehlinger's Ezz-thetics label has been bringing smiles to the faces of countless lovers of free jazz by re-releasing albums featuring such luminaries as Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Jimmy Giuffre, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor (to name but a few of many) all with state-of-the-art sound quality. The label's distinctive orange lettering over black and white period images of the featured artists has made its albums instantly recognisable. Until now. The current album has blue ...

Album Review

Cecil Taylor Unit: Live At Fat Tuesday's February 9,1980 First Visit

Read "Live At Fat Tuesday's February 9,1980 First Visit" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
April 30, 2024

More faux-intellectual codswallop has been written about Cecil Taylor than about any other jazz musician, dead or alive. He has been, and continues to be, misrepresented as an arcane Einsteinian theorist by a cult whose members are afraid of visceral reactions to his art (or to anyone else's). But Taylor's work demands a visceral response. It has nothing to do with rational thought and everything to do with emotion and physicality. Sadly, the nonsense that has been written about his ...

Album Review

Albert Ayler: More Lost Performances Revisited

Read "More Lost Performances Revisited" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
November 15, 2023

A state-of-the-art sonic restoration of obscure but historically important Albert Ayler material by Switzerland's ezz-thetics label, which with its parent label, Hat Hut, has been creating an audiophile archive of Ayler recordings with the support of his estate since 1978. All too often, “more" in an album title means “Beware: barrel scraping in progress." Not in this case. More Lost Performances Revisited is primetime Ayler. The disc draws from three sources over a five-year timespan. The earliest ...

Album Review

Cecil Taylor: With (Exit) To Student Studies Revisited

Read "With (Exit) To Student Studies Revisited" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
August 16, 2022

Documenting the evolution of Cecil Taylor is an undertaking that is way beyond the pay grade of most listeners. Just as in the study of homo sapiens (yes, us) where there is no critical moment (the missing link) that we can definitely pinpoint where our ancestors established language, art and importantly, abstract thought, Taylor's music can be thought of in similar terms. Obviously his approach didn't emerge fully formed. Or did it? No, that is an irrational thought, but a ...

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Award / Grant

Alex Hargreaves Awarded Jimmy Lyons Scholarship at Berklee School of Music

Source: GoMedia PR
September 14, 2010

Presentation will be made to Adventure Music's Youngest Recording Artist on the Jimmy Lyons Stage at the Monterey Jazz Festival on September 19 Berklee College of Music and the Monterey Jazz Festival have announced that award-winning violinist and Adventure Music recording artist Alex Hargreaves is the fourteenth recipient of the Jimmy Lyons Scholarship at Berklee, a major music education prize. The full-tuition scholarship is named in honor of the festival's late founder, James L. (Jimmy) Lyons, who began the festival ...
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Education

Trumpeter Billy Buss wins Monterey/Jimmy Lyons Scholarship to Berklee

Source: All About Jazz
September 14, 2006

Berklee College of Music and the Monterey Jazz Festival names Berkeley's Billy Buss the tenth Jimmy Lyons Scholar

Presentation to be made on the Jimmy Lyons Stage, 2 pm Sunday 9/17; previous Lyons Scholar, drummer James Williams to make presentation *

Berklee College of Music and the Monterey Jazz Festival announced today that trumpeter Billy Buss of Berkeley, California, is the tenth recipient of the Jimmy Lyons Scholarship at Berklee, a major music education prize. The scholarship is named in ...
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137

Award / Grant

Berklee College of Music and the Monterey Jazz Festival Name Richmond's Carlin Muccular Seventh Jimmy Lyons Scholar

Source: All About Jazz

Presentation to be made by Albert “Tootie" Heath, 2 pm Sunday

Monterey and Boston, Sept. 20, 2002-- Berklee College of Music and the Monterey Jazz Festival announced today that Carlin Muccular of Richmond, CA is the seventh recipient of the Jimmy Lyons Scholarship at Berklee, a major jazz education prize. The scholarship is named in honor of the festival's late founder, James L. (Jimmy) Lyons, who began the festival more than 40 years ago with jazz education at its core. ...
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Music Industry