Sam Rivers: From Boston to New York City “Miles Wants to Hire You”: Spring 1964 In the late spring of 1964, Tony Williams sent a telegram to the Boston apartment of Sam and Bea Rivers offering Sam a place in the Miles Davis Quintet. The trumpeter needed a replacement for the departing tenor saxophonist George Coleman. “Miles wants to hire you. George quit,” it read. “Call me immediately today before 7 PM EN28498 so that I can give you details. Working at night. Tony” Williams, who had been Rivers’ regular drummer in Boston from 1959 until late 1962, had lobbied hard for Rivers to get the job and finally Miles had agreed. Rivers accepted the gig of course; few jazz musicians would have turned down Miles Davis. The telegram is undated, so exactly when it arrived is not known, but as early as May 1964 Rivers was talking about going on the road with Miles. Rivers had at least two weeklong gigs in Boston in late May and early June. On one of these gigs, a Rivers quartet residency at the Peppermint Lounge, drummer Joe Corsello remembers Rivers telling him that he was going on tour with Miles. If the exact date of the offer remains a mystery, the message certainly arrived at the right time for Rivers. He was getting restless and frustrated in Boston, where he’d lived, studied, married Bea and raised a family, and worked for most of the previous 17 years. Boston was renowned for its bebop scene but Rivers, one of its leading figures, had lots of things in mind that went well beyond bebop. He was intrigued by the new music of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Cecil Taylor, and his big band composing was starting to explore different areas. “There just wasn’t enough musicians that were up to doing the kind of things I had in mind,” he told saxophonist Bill Barron, host of WNYC’s Anthology of Black Classical Music program, in a 1971 radio interview. There were some opportunities in Boston for taking different approaches to improvisation. Starting in the late ‘50s, Rivers worked with a chamber group called the Boston Improvisational Ensemble led by Alan Kempton, a professor at Boston Conservatory. “We would go into museums,” Rivers said. “The professor would stand by various paintings by Van Gogh and others and explain the shape and movement of the brush strokes and other things about the painting, and we’d be playing the lines of the painting. That’s how I first became interested in free playing, from a classical point of view, abstraction, creating sound. That’s different than Ornette’s concept which comes out of the blues.” Even in more conventional jazz settings, Rivers was trying out new ideas. Drummer Shelley Rusten remembered a quartet gig with Rivers in 1964, just prior to his engagement with Miles, on which Rivers instructed Rustin to ignore the bassist and pianist and just follow him. Rivers began taking the music further and further out and Rusten went right along with him. The rest of the band were flummoxed. When bassist Phil Morrison urged Rusten in a stage whisper to “Come back, Shelley, come back in,” Rivers turned around and said, “Lay out Phil, lay out, we got it!” Perhaps most importantly, Rivers was growing more interested in composing for large ensembles around this time. In the years just prior to joining Miles, Rivers was working regularly with the Herb Pomeroy Orchestra, Boston’s pre-eminent progressive big band. “The music we were playing with Herb Pomeroy was very startling music for the time,” Rivers told Ted Panken in DownBeat. “Since I had heard everything out there on records, and I knew what was going on, I thought this band was probably the most exhilarating band on the scene at that time.” Rivers’ compositions would not have been appropriate for Pomeroy. According to Rivers, he wrote his last large ensemble composition using traditional harmony, an Afro-Latin number with “some nice rock feel,” in 1957. If this is true, he made the stylistic breakthrough while he was struggling with a heroin addiction and was in and out of the federal hospital for the treatment of drug addiction in Lexington, Kentucky, which was notable for the number of jazz musicians who were incarcerated there. “I dropped the chordal thing throughout a three-year span from ‘57 to ‘60,” he said, referring to the years he also was in and out of Lexington. “Maybe I’ll put a little chord thing in now and then for release, but they’re not really chords, they’re different sounds I group together. ... It’s never so you can say, ‘ah, there’s a C7.’ I’m dealing with clusters, and a lot of times, the notes don’t fit a chord at all.” In 1974, Rivers recorded one of his early pieces on his third album for Impulse, Crystals. It opens with “Exultation,” which he worked on between 1959 and 1964. As Rivers explains in the liner notes, it “represents my break with traditional concepts. I composed without the aid of the piano, disregarding traditional modulations and thinking more in sounds, rhythms, colors, clusters, images, superimposed rhythms, and unrelated melodies. Each instrument was thought of and written for as a solo part.” It’s hard to imagine such a composition sitting comfortably in the Herb Pomeroy Orchestra book alongside “Stella by Starlight,” no matter how “startling” and “exhilarating” the arrangement was. Three Weeks with Miles: June–July 1964 Sam and Bea hastily made arrangements and moved to New York when Sam got the job with Davis. But Rivers stayed with Miles for a very busy three weeks. In late June, the Davis band had a weeklong engagement at the Showboat in Philadelphia and another two nights at Birdland in New York. A trip to Japan with concerts in Tokyo and Kyoto was lined up in July. Various musical reasons have been advanced to explain Rivers’ short tenure with Davis, but none of them are really satisfactory. Some have said that Miles was displeased that Rivers’ solos were too long, but it’s hard to believe that Davis would be nonplussed by long solos after employing John Coltrane for so many years. In addition, the recorded evidence from Japan indicates that live performances of individual tunes didn’t clock in any longer than those with other saxophonists in the band. Another reason advanced for his short tenure is that Rivers was playing too “outside” for Davis’ taste. This explanation doesn’t hold water either. In the 1960s, Davis not only tolerated, but encouraged, his group to push limits. George Coleman, the man whom Rivers replaced, left the group because he was unhappy with the freedoms that the rhythm section was taking, so a certain amount of exploration was already taking place in the band. Rivers was too experienced and conscientious a professional (he was three years older than Davis) to play anything wildly inappropriate for the situation in which he performed. Based on the recordings from Japan, it’s clear he is playing the tunes properly. He occasionally does push limits, but always from within; he’s not ignoring the tunes, everything he plays grows out of them. And whatever Rivers plays, Williams is right there beside him; there’s no audible tension in the band arising from anything Rivers does. Davis did observe that Rivers “changed the sound of the group. He carried a new sound into the band. He made the rhythm figures and harmonies of the group freer than before.” But he says this without any hint of disapproval, and if Davis didn’t approve, he was not one to conceal it. In fact, freer rhythm figures and harmonies were already the trend within the band. “There’s always been this story out about how advanced I was, that Miles wasn’t happy with my style,” Rivers said. “It wasn’t that at all. Miles was right there with it. He understood. He could hear what I was doing. It wasn’t a problem at all. ... It wasn’t anything about me being much more advanced than Miles. Miles was just as advanced.” The most likely reason for Rivers brief visit to the Davis quintet is that he was essentially a fill-in before Wayne Shorter was able to leave Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and join Miles. When Shorter became available, Davis cut Rivers from the band. It must have come as something of a shock. “I didn’t know it at that time, they didn’t tell me, but the deal was he had already hired Wayne Shorter,” Rivers said in a Waxpoetics interview with Zach Callahan in 2008, “so it was nothing about my playing. Wayne Shorter was on the road with Art Blakey. When Wayne Shorter came back, I was supposed to join Art Blakey, and Wayne was supposed to go on with Miles. Nobody told me anything.” For unknown reasons, the saxophonist swap never happened. Instead, Blakey hired away John Gilmore from the Sun Ra Arkestra as Shorter’s replacement. Rivers was without a steady gig. Without Sam’s job with Davis, their situation in New York was precarious and the future must have seemed uncertain at best. If it’s true that “Nobody told me anything,” and Sam was in the dark about how short his tenure with Davis was to be, then in all likelihood they would not have upended their family life. Sam could have gone on the road with Miles for three weeks and returned to Boston, just as he had toured with other band leaders in the past. Blue Note Records: 1964–67 After the disappointingly short tenure with Davis, drummer Williams was again instrumental in Rivers’ career by introducing him to Blue Note records. He asked Rivers to join him on his debut as a leader, Life Time, in August. Afterwards, Blue Note producer Alfred Lion invited Rivers to participate in organist Larry Young’s Into Something and also signed Rivers to a contract. That December, accompanied by old Boston mates pianist Jaki Byard and Williams, along with Miles Davis’ bassist Ron Carter, Rivers made his recording debut as a leader at age 41 with Fuchsia Swing Song. It features what is certainly his best known composition, “Beatrice,” a dedication to his wife. Things got off to a rocky start and Lion nearly cancelled the date. It’s hard to say exactly what happened because Rivers himself told slightly different versions of the events at different times. In a 1997 interview with Ted Panken, Rivers said, “I had different music for the album, but it was a little too advanced for Alfred. He said he was going to cancel the date, so I went back and got other music. Fuchsia Swing Song was music I had done four or five years earlier. I really hadn’t planned on recording that music. I thought it was much too old to record.” This scenario implies that Rivers’ music was too avant-garde for Lion and there were creative tensions between forward-thinking artist and conservative producer. However, in a 2007 interview on WKCR, Rivers put a slightly different spin on the situation. In this version of the story, it appears there was a consensus between Rivers and Lion that the music needed more work in order to be recorded. To preserve the session, Rivers proposed using older music that his Boston quartet members already knew. “I brought in the music that was, I guess, a little too difficult for us to get it together. So, he [Alfred Lion] said, well, we'll have to cancel the session. But I said no, you don't need to do that, I have other music. ... For one rehearsal, we didn't have it. It would have taken more than one rehearsal to get it. So, I just I went and got more music, that was not a problem for me. I was having a problem with the music myself. He was right, it was too difficult because I couldn't even do it.” Regardless of whether the relationship between Rivers and Lions was contentious or not, the portrait of Rivers painted by his Blue Note albums is of a methodical experimenter growing more radical over time. Throughout his albums for the label there lurks tension between his older, post-bop style and free jazz. Some of that may be due to the guiding hand of producer Lion, but it may equally be an honest reflection of Rivers’ ongoing search for an ever more personal style. The albums practically diagram the route that Rivers took from hard bop to free jazz. His second Blue Note album, 1965’s Contours, features a standard quintet line up of Blue Note regulars: trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Joe Chambers. But among the conventional hard-bop trappings lie elements that foreshadow Rivers’ later free music. The shifting tempos of “Point of Many Returns” perhaps reflects what Rivers experienced with the Davis quintet. The elastic time of the Davis group developed spontaneously, but Rivers built tempo fluctuations into his composition with contrasting faster and slower sections. Rivers also plays with the dramatic arc of jazz performance on “Dance of the Tripedal” and “Euterpe,” both of which wind down in the middle instead of building continuously to a climax. The beat of “Dance of the Tripedal” all but disappears where it would conventionally be at its most assertive, and rhythmic abstraction rules before the beat reestablishes itself. “Euterpe” likewise dissipates in the middle before returning to the slinky groove in which it opens. In all these tunes, Rivers is able to indulge his penchant for contrast and variety in tempo by building them into the framework of his compositions. During his soprano solo on “Dance of the Tripedal,” Rivers begins to use a free jazz vocabulary of extended techniques and unusual timbres and textures. He uses these elements to heighten the emotional impact of the climax of his solo but not as a regular part of his vocabulary as he would in later years. His use of novel sounds and textures is a brief, crystal ball glimpse of the future. For his third Blue Note release, A New Conception, recorded in October 1966, Rivers brought in his working quartet from Boston for an album of standards. This seems like an unusual choice for an artist whose first two albums featured idiosyncratic original compositions. But for Rivers familiar tunes like “Detour Ahead” and “When I Fall in Love” were Trojan horses to sneak in some of his most far-reaching ideas. Rivers’ Boston band, featuring pianist Hal Galper, bassist Herbie Lewis, and drummer Steve Ellington, reconfigures the hierarchical relationship between the instruments in a jazz quartet. In its clear rootedness in jazz tradition and its equally clear departures from it, A New Conception is Rivers’ first avant-garde album. “The guys in Sam’s quartet all were beginning to feel that the established roles of the instruments in a band had become a little conservative,” pianist Hal Galper explained to Alain Le Roux, in a Le Jazz interview published in 1999. “The rhythm sections were often relegated to a background role while the soloist had a good time being free. We were trying to adapt the Dixieland technique of more than one instrument soloing at one time, to group playing, so that everyone could take fuller part in the improvising. “The challenge was to all solo together but still retain the clarity of the music and be able to hear each instrument clearly, as in Dixieland,” Galper explained further. “In the beginning this did lead to a somewhat dense band sound, but as we kept working at it over the years it became clearer to hear and it developed into a ‘layered’ effect. The idea was to eventually get this concept so smooth that the listener wouldn’t notice it. “Sam was ... playing standards freely and trained us to develop the concept of using the ‘rules’ of bebop to play free and give the music a sense of structure.” Building on the foundation of bebop “to play free and give the music a sense of structure” aptly describes Rivers’ methodology from this point forward. Dimensions and Extensions ended Rivers’ contract with Blue Note with by far the freest of his albums for the label. The compositions for sextet on side one – “Paeon,” “Precis,” and “Helix” – teeter on the brink of the avant-garde and frequently go over the edge. Rivers’ composing and arranging are full of piquant dissonances and rich inner voicings and fraught with rhythmic tensions but also retain a bopish quality. He makes liberal use of free jazz extended technique and sound abstraction in his soloes. (As a further sign of Rivers’ maturing style, the album’s compositions have single word titles, with the exception of “Effusive Melange.” One-word titles were a hallmark of his style from this time forward and they make their first documented appearance here.) Side two is completely in new musical territory in Rivers’ recorded output up to that time. “Effusive Melange” has a short, loosely played melody, and devotes itself primarily to extended free playing, ending with a collective improvisation by the full sextet. Drummer Steve Ellington forgoes strict timekeeping in favor of close interaction with Rivers. In many ways it is an extension of the collective approach the Rivers quartet took on A New Conception, but with a more tenuous connection to bop. “Involution” is unlike anything Rivers had recorded before, a great example of Rivers as an experimenter with form and color. Scored for two flutes, bass, and drums, the instrumentation is unusual. Furthermore, Rivers has the horns in one tempo and the bass and drums in another, building in a fascinating tension. And ending the album is “Afflatus,” a decisive adieu to hard bop, a full statement of Rivers free jazz intentions and the course he would primarily follow in the coming decades. Working in a trio with just bass and drums – a favored ensemble configuration for most of the rest of his career – Rivers sets the music free: the tempo is in constant flux, there’s complete equality among the instruments, and unconventional colors and textures are freely introduced into the music. Goodbye Blue Note. By March 1967, when Rivers made Dimensions and Extensions, Blue Note was undergoing dramatic change. Co-founder Alfred Lion produced his last session for Blue Note in July ‘67 and retired. Health concerns related to Lion’s constant cigarette smoking and nonstop work hours, were part of his motivation, but there were other reasons. In 1965, he had sold the label to Liberty Records and they were exerting more corporate control over production than the freewheeling Lion liked. As the person responsible for bringing artists like Cecil Taylor and Don Cherry to Blue Note, his departure had implications for the direction of the label. “We all stopped recording [for Blue Note] when Alfred [Lion] retired,” Rivers told Callahan in the Waxpoetics interview. “Francis Wolff ... didn’t really like our kind of music. ... Frank didn’t particularly care for so-called contemporary and modern musicians; he was more into blues style of music like Horace Silver and Grant Green. He really didn’t do anything else with any of the ‘cutting edge’ musicians.” Given the circumstances, it's little wonder that Dimensions and Extensions sat in Blue Note’s vault for a decade, before, under new label ownership, it was finally released as part of the double LP, Involution, and later issued on its own with its originally intended title. The New York Scene: Fall 1964–Spring 1965 In the months after departing Miles, when Sam first started recording for Blue Note, the Rivers remained in New York, while Sam checked out the city’s “cutting edge” musicians. Perhaps there was a way for Sam to establish himself well enough to make the transition to New York permanent. “In October that year [1964] I joined the October Jazz Revolution, and helped organize the Jazz Composer’s Guild set up by trumpeter Bill Dixon,” Rivers told Kiyoshi Koyama in a November 1973 Swing Journal article about Studio Rivbea. If Rivers played any role in the Jazz Composer’s Guild it was likely a very minor one. There’s no evidence that suggests a significant organizational role in the guild. Nor is there any evidence of his participation in the organization’s signature event, the four-night new music festival The October Revolution. Drummer Barry Altschul says he and Rivers played in a trio led by bassist Jimmy Stevenson at the October Revolution. However, there’s no mention of the trio in any of the festival advertising, although it’s possible that it was a late addition, and thus didn’t appear in the advertising. The historical silence about Rivers’ appearance at the October Revolution as either sideman or leader is puzzling, but Altschul’s testimony is compelling evidence that he did. Before the short-lived cooperative dissolved, Rivers did perform with the Jazz Composer’s Guild Orchestra once on February 28, 1965, after they’d moved their headquarters to the Contemporary Center, a loft space above the Village Vanguard in the West Village. Then, after Carla Bley and Mike Mantler gathered together many of the former members of the guild to form the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, Rivers appeared with them in April 1965 at another Contemporary Center concert. That’s the extent of the documentation of Rivers’ involvement with the guild. 1965–1966: A Transitional Period? In the Waxpoetics interview, Rivers says that he left Miles and immediately “went on the road with Andrew Hill.” Michael Cuscuna also repeats Rivers’ claim that he went to California “for a few dates” with Hill at that time in the liner notes to the Complete Sam Rivers Blue Note Sessions. However, Rivers sessionographer Rick Lopez found no evidence of such at tour in 1964, immediately after Rivers left the Davis quintet. Rivers did indeed go on the road with Hill to California a year and a half later in April 1966. There were also several concert appearances in New York in ‘66 and ‘67 with various groups in which Hill was a leader or member. In a CV that Rivers submitted to Wesleyan University in 1971, when he applied to become a visiting artist in residence, he lists his tenure with Hill as taking place in 1966. It’s probable that Rivers simply conflated the time between the two gigs, since he was recalling the transition many years after it happened. A close look at the time between Rivers’ departure from Miles Davis in mid-1964 and his association with Andrew Hill, which seems to have begun in earnest in 1966, raises the question of whether the Rivers remained in New York or moved back to Boston in the spring of 1965. There’s compelling evidence that they stayed in New York for several months and then returned to Boston for several more months before moving permanently to Manhattan in 1966. The April 1965 Jazz Composer’s Orchestra date is also Rivers’ last documented concert in New York until his Boston quartet appears at Slugs’ August 30–September 5, 1966, a month before they recorded A New Conception, and shortly after Rivers’ west coast trip with Hill. According to the Lopez sessionography, with the exception of recording sessions for Blue Note, all of Rivers’ other live gigs were in Boston toward the end of the year. If he was living in New York, it’s almost inconceivable that no record of live performances, as a leader or sideman, survives. Now, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so it’s possible Rivers was living in New York during this period. Maybe he was playing in venues and lofts that didn’t advertise and perhaps the Blue Note recording dates were enough to get by on for a while. But it’s easier to believe that Rivers had returned to Boston, where he had a well-established network of musicians and places to play, and where he could live more cheaply. He wouldn’t necessarily have to be in New York to make the Blue Note dates. Boston is only about 200 miles from New York and he could easily get there for limited periods to record. Perhaps he decided to regroup in Boston and prepare for a transition more orderly than the hastily arranged departure to go with Davis. There is also anecdotal evidence of Rivers living in Boston around this time. Trombonist Joseph Orange, who had just recorded on Archie Shepp’s 1965 Impulse album, Fire Music, was touring with flutist Herbie Mann in late 1965 or early 1966 when the band came to Boston. “Some guy came up to me after I got through playing a set, and asked me if I wanted to go over to Sam Rivers’. I said ‘Yeah, I’d love to meet Sam Rivers!’ So, the next day I took my horn and went over there, to Rivers' apartment. “First thing he said to me when I walked in the door was, ‘Man, I really like that album, Fire Music.’ Sam Rivers and I had a nice, long jam session. We must have played together for about four hours. Sam and I had a good time playing together; he was a brilliant musician. We were playing tunes, traditional tunes, all the classics – Horace Silver and just pop tunes, whatever came into our heads. Finish one and play another. We didn’t have a piano, bass, or drums, I think he was feeling me out.” Taken together, the evidence of gigs in Boston, the lack of evidence of any New York dates other than Blue Note sessions, and Orange’s anecdote suggest that Rivers was at the very least splitting his time between New York and Boston from spring 1965 to late summer 1966, and probably not in New York at all. If he did retreat to Boston, returning to New York was undoubtedly his plan. In interviews, he repeatedly said that his need for musicians to rehearse and perform his orchestral scores and a place to rehearse was an overriding concern for him at the time. The evidence suggests that 1966 was the year that Rivers moved permanently to New York. The Lopez sessionography shows a dramatic increase in New York performances in the later part of that year. The appearance of an address in Harlem, the reunion with his youngest children, and the beginning of his regular orchestra rehearsals all date to 1966 and just after.
© 2025 Ed Hazell
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