This great saxophonist was born in Oklahoma and was raised in both Chicago and Little Rock. In 1947 he moved to Boston to attend the Boston Conservatory of Music, later transferring to Boston University where he majored in composition. He remained in Boston and help to generate the thriving Boston jazz scene of the late 50's and early 60's. At one of his quartet gigs in 1959, a 13 year-old drummer named Tony Williams sat in which is where Williams developed many of his early influences.

After he was heard by Alfred Lion, he was immediately sign onto Blue Note Records. His style of playing had a sense of rhythmic freedom but and well grounded in mondern harmonic concepts. He had a brief stay with the Miles Davis group in 1964 but his playing didn't fit with what Miles was going for at the time. In a 1975 interview he was quoted as saying,

Miles was still doing things that were.........pretty straight. I was there, but I was somewhere else too. I guess it sounds funny, but I was already ahead of that. I kept stretching out and playing really long solos, and that's probably why I didn't last.

Throughout the 60's, he could be heard on recordings with greats such as Larry Young, Freddie Hubbard, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Andrew Hill, Donald Byrd, and many others. Throughout the 70's and 80's his quest for creativity lured him to develop a format by which he would improvise without any compositional framework on tenor, soprano, flute and piano with a bassist and drummer. His most influential trio included Dave Holland on drums and Barry Altschul on drums. These creations are logical, emotionally centered and gorgeous. In regard to this musical farmat he once said,

Evertime I play is a new experience. It's not improvising because for that, you need a theme. It is really creating, listening and responding and reacting. You need to have command of your instrument. If I hear myself playing something I did yesterday, I fight hard to avoid it. I don't want to bore myself, because it's hard to fake enthusiasm if you are not really feeling it.

Who is this saxophonist?