Make your contribution now and help Gothamist thrive in 2023.From the 1970s through the ’90s, David Murray was a titan of New York’s downtown culture. He was a brilliant jazz saxophonist who crossed social and stylistic borders, and a composer who collaborated with poets, writers and photographers, feeding the era's interdisciplinary energy.
Murray arrived in New York in September 1975, as a college sophomore. He’d grown up in the Bay Area, and played alto saxophone at church with his family since the age of 9, and in local bands as a teen. But after studying with renowned jazz critic Stanley Crouch and trumpeter Bobby Bradford at Pomona College, he felt the pull of Manhattan’s avant-garde music.
Murray and Shange created numerous pieces at the Public — including “A Photograph” and “Spell #7” — and inspired its now-legendary music series, New Jazz at The Public. They also fell in love and got married. The romantic union didn’t last long — “about three months,” by his estimation. “But it was a hell of a story.”
“There's the blues in his playing, deep lyricism in his lines — it's not all exclamation,” he added, invoking mid-’80s albums the notoriously prolific Murray recorded as homages to classic jazz saxophonists Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins. After his marriage in Paris ended, Murray returned to New York in 2017. And thought his studio output has slowed down, he’s continued to play live. And if age robbed Murray of many jazz peers , he has been reinvigorated by a new generation of players fluent in the music’s many histories, but with something new and original to contribute.
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