Music

Dallas avant-garde trumpeter Dennis Gonzalez was in Slovenia in 1985, enjoying an easy morning after a jazz festival performance, when a friend dropped the needle on a new LP.

"The sounds that came from the speakers were intriguing – very modern, very hip and provocative, a cross of jazz and electronic sounds," Mr. Gonzalez remembered.

"And when I asked whose music it was, my friend said, 'This is your hometown boy – Jimmy Giuffre.'

"I was embarrassed because I'd never heard his music," Mr. Gonzalez said.

Many in jazz might say the same.

Mr. Giuffre, born and raised in Dallas and educated at what is now the University of North Texas, died April 24, two days before his 87th birthday.

He first gained notice as a writer-arranger for Woody Herman and composer of "Four Brothers" for Mr. Herman's Second Herd. Mr. Giuffre settled in Los Angeles and became a key player in the West Coast Sound, his cool-tone tenor sax and lilting clarinet a natural fit with groups such as Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse All-Stars and Shorty Rogers' Giants.

But even then, his muse tugged him toward unconventional groupings – reeds, guitar and bass on the album Jimmy Giuffre 3, with Jim Hall and Ralph Pena; and later, reeds, guitar and valve trombone, again with Mr. Hall and Bob Brookmeyer, in the film Jazz on a Summer's Day.

He managed a minor hit with "The Train and the River," done in a rhythmic style Mr. Giuffre called "blues-based folk jazz," and maintained a profile high enough to win various jazz polls.

By 1961, he'd organized another trio with more conventional voicing – Mr. Giuffre on reeds, Paul Bley on piano and Steve Swallow on bass – playing far less conventional music, a mélange of modal, counterpoint and Third Stream. Thesis, Fusion and Free Fall, the key albums from that group, stretched the definition of jazz.

But as Mr. Giuffre pushed away from the mainstream, fewer people heard his increasingly difficult work. Quickly ignored and soon largely forgotten, he pursued a path that few bothered to follow.

Pity.

For as Mr. Gonzalez discovered, Mr. Giuffre's forays to the edges of avant-garde were as groundbreaking as John Coltrane's elaborate "sheets of sound" or Ornette Coleman's "harmolodics," emerging at about the same time.

A few years after Mr. Gonzalez discovered Mr. Giuffre's work, ECM Records of Germany released a compilation of Fusion and Thesis, called 1961.

Almost 30 years after they were recorded, "these sounded even more modern than the avant-gardists I was listening to at the time," Mr. Gonzalez said

But then, those who studied Mr. Giuffre's compositions and heard him play couldn't help but be swayed by his idiosyncratic vision of jazz.

Rock legend Van Morrison, whose music blends blues, jazz, rock, country and Celtic folk, lists Mr. Giuffre as a major influence.

In a 1991 interview in the British magazine Now Dig This, Mr. Morrison recalled the music he heard as a young teenager.

"I decided I wanted a sax when I heard Giuffre doing 'The Train and the River.' I couldn't get enough of it after that," Mr. Morrison said.

Alto saxophonist Bud Shank often worked with Mr. Giuffre in the 1950s, with the Lighthouse All-Stars and the Giants and in other groupings.

"We all paid attention to what he was doing. We couldn't follow – I guess we weren't good enough," Mr. Shank said. "But we carefully watched every move he made."

Even then, as he made the transition from a big band musician to leader of his own small groups, Mr. Giuffre "was constantly searching, looking for things," Mr. Shank said.

Mr. Giuffre began studying with poet-composer Wesley La Violette, who taught Mr. Rogers and other musicians in Los Angeles. Quickly, Mr. Giuffre saw the boundaries of music stretch in unimagined ways.

"That was his first introduction to free counterpoint, classical counterpoint," Mr. Giuffre's wife, Juanita, recalled years later. "It was a revelation to him, freeing him up from strict chord structure."

Mr. Giuffre eventually left Los Angeles and settled in New England, teaching composition at the Lenox School of Jazz in the Berkshires and organizing his ultimate Jimmy Giuffre Three with Mr. Swallow and Mr. Bley.

Fusion and Thesis signaled the evolution in Mr. Giuffre's work, but Free Fall took his interest in free improvisation to the breaking point for many jazz fans and most critics. While the Penguin Guide to Jazz awarded Free Fall a crown, its highest rating, others wondered what had become of the folk jazz style they'd come to love.

"A lot of people hated it," Mrs. Giuffre told the Web site allaboutjazz.com. "As a matter of fact, when we got to Europe, some of the more traditional audiences were quite unhappy."

Eventually European fans embraced Mr. Giuffre's work.

"But every now and then you'd run into an audience that came expecting to hear 'Train and the River' or 'Four Brothers,' " she said. "And the people would be very disappointed."

His trio with Mr. Bley and Mr. Swallow ended after 18 months. The breakup came after the hat was passed at a New York coffeehouse, yielding just 35 cents for each man.

After the reception given to Free Fall, Mr. Giuffre turned to teaching full time, settling in at the New England Conservatory of Music.

And though he would emerge occasionally with new music and new recordings, Mr. Giuffre found himself relegated to the fringes of jazz.

In the early '90s, though, the jazz avant-garde rediscovered Mr. Giuffre and the trio with Mr. Swallow and Mr. Bley. They reunited with a record contract and a tour of Europe. But Mr. Giuffre was already battling Parkinson's disease, which forced his retirement.

"I only saw him play once at that stage," Mr. Shank said, "and it was pathetic seeing him go out on stage like that. But when they stuck that clarinet in his mouth, Jimmy was great."

Dr. David Austin of the University of Texas at Austin first heard Mr. Giuffre in the mid-'50s and became a fan.

"All I knew is he could swing like mad," he said. "And his work really holds up."

Writer Ted Gioia devoted a chapter of his book, West Coast Jazz, to Mr. Giuffre and argues that his influence "is greater than most people realize."

"My experience is that younger players who hear his recordings become deeply impressed," Mr. Gioia said. "It's getting them to listen to the first one that's the challenge. He fails on the 'hipness' chart – it's not cool to listen to him the way it is to listen to Monk or Mingus."

Mr. Shank echoed that. "Jimmy's name, unfortunately, doesn't seem to come up in musicians' conversations, at least not with the guys I hang out with, and they're mostly a lot younger than I am," he said.

"He was never appreciated like he should have been."

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