Avant-garde multi-instrumentalist, composer and maven of the New York City loft scene in the 1970s, Sam Rivers was born on September 25, 1930. His technical skill and creativity were unquestioned and it has been written that “Rivers was as substantial a player as avant-garde jazz ever produced." In contrast to Ornette Coleman who approached free jazz from a blues perspective, Rivers drew more upon his classical training to inform his music.

His parents were touring gospel musicians and Sam was born in El Reno, Oklahoma in the midst of one of those tours. He grew up in Chicago and Little Rock, Arkansas beginning his musical studies on the piano and violin at age five. He later played trombone for a while before settling on tenor saxophone as his instrument of choice, although he would later add flute and soprano saxophone to his array of performance instruments.

After a three-year stint in the United States Navy on the west coast, Rivers moved to Massachusetts where he studied at the Boston Conservatory of Music and later at Boston University. While in Boston he played in Herb Pomeroy’s band that also featured Quincy Jones, Serge Chaloff and Jaki Byard.

In 1959 Rivers met and began to play with drummer Tony Williams and they formed a free improvisation group. That relationship would later lead to Rivers playing briefly with the Miles Davis Quintet in 1964. During the early 1960s Sam Rivers worked regularly with members of the Jazz Composers Guild including Archie Shepp, Paul Bley and Cecil Taylor. He recorded his first album as a leader for Blue Note Records in 1964.

​In 1970, now living in New York City, Sam Rivers and his wife Beatrice opened a music and dance studio in Harlem, which later relocated to the SoHo district. Called Studio Rivbea, it soon became one of the best-known venues for the presentation of new improvised music and was a pioneer of the jazz loft scene of the 1970s. The studio also served as a rehearsal space for Rivers’ Rivbea Orchestra and his Winds of Change woodwind ensemble. His trio played improvised music in the purest sense in that there was no written music or precomposed melody. Instead, they relied upon “a stream-of-consciousness approach that differed structurally from the head-solo-head style that still dominated free jazz." In 1976 Rivers began a musical relationship with bassist Dave Holland that produced two duo albums.

In the 1980s Rivers moved to Orlando, Florida and began a new version of the Rivbea Orchestra employing musicians that worked at local theme parks. From the middle of the decade on Rivers recorded for his own Rivbea Sound label, and also two very interesting big band records for RCA. Rivers died of pneumonia in late 2011 at the age of 88.

Here is a link to a 1989 Sam Rivers Quartet performance of a tune named for his wife:

"BEATRICE"