ENTHUSIASM

Roswell Hopkins Rudd Jr, jazz trombonist and composer. Born: 17 November 1935 in Sharon, Connecticut. Died: 21 December 2017 in Kerhonkson, New York, aged 82.

Roswell Rudd, who helped establish a place for the trombone in the jazz avantgarde, then disappeared from the world stage for almost 20 years before enjoying a latecareer resurgence in which he explored a wide array of styles, died last Thursday at his home.

His partner, Verna Gillis, said the cause was prostate cancer.

With groups like the New York Art Quartet and Archie Shepp’s bands of the mid1960s, Rudd was at the centre of the free-jazz scene. But he moved on, teaching at colleges and collaborating with musicians from around the world. After his return to commercial recording and international performances in 1999, his music became more diverse, mixing tuneful original compositions and jazz standards with R&B classics and ballads from France and Cuba.

What drew it all together was Rudd’s fluid playing, which could swiftly reroute a listener’s attention without disrupting the flow of a song. Profiling him in The New York Times in 2015, Nate Chinen wrote, “The soulful blare of Mr Rudd’s horn, coupled with his boundless curiosity, has made him into a sort of goodwill ambassador, despite the distinctly unconventional arc of his career.”

Roswell Hopkins Rudd Jr was the son of teachers Roswell and Josephine Rudd.

He played the mellophone in grammar school, then moved to the French horn. But when he failed to find any jazz records that featured that instrument, he asked his parents for a trombone.

Rudd’s earliest musical influences came from his family: his paternal grandmother, who led her Methodist church choir and had a knack for improvising, and his father, a collector of jazz records and a recreational drummer who hosted jam sessions. Rudd recalled the simpatico spirit of those sessions in 2015: “Suddenly a clarinet player shows up. Then a guy’s playing piano. My father’s on the drums over there. People start dancing, you hear laughter bursting out, and all kinds of conversation. That sound is what is still in me, and it seems to be inexhaustible.”

As an undergraduate at Yale University, Rudd played in a Dixieland band called Eli’s Chosen Six. He dropped out of college and moved to New York in 1958, bringing a sanguine, open-eared approach and a grounding in the trombone’s early-jazz history. In turn, he helped broaden the possibilities of an emerging avant-garde scene.

“What I liked about that music was the fact that the instruments sounded like people talking and laughing, vocal sounds,” he told the website All About Jazz in 2004, reflecting on jazz of the early 20th century. “The music of my contemporaries, when I was in my 20s in New York City, they were calling it avant-garde, but it leaned very heavily on collective improvisation. That’s how I was able to go from one traditional generation to another.”

In free-jazz settings Rudd played with an ear to the arc of the group, filling open pockets of sound with descants and undercurrents. A naturalborn listener, he might work as a foil to his more incendiary counterparts. Rudd often favoured performing with poets like Amiri Baraka and vocalists like Sheila Jordan, Bob Dorough and Fay Victor, whom he treated as equal collaborators, warbling and gliding in a friendly pas de deux.

In the early 1960s he worked with Herbie Nichols, an iconoclastic pianist and composer, and then with pianist Cecil Taylor, an ascendant figure in the avant-garde. He also joined a group focused on the repertoire of Thelonious Monk, informally known as the School Days Quartet, featuring saxophonist Steve Lacy, bassist Henry Grimes and drummer Denis Charles.

In 1964 he was featured on New York Eye and Ear Control, the soundtrack to an experimental film. That same year he was a founder of the New York Art Quartet, a pioneering group that collaborated with Baraka, then known as Leroi Jones. Its debut album, full of darting and thrashing improvisations and Baraka’s trenchant poetry, is widely seen as a landmark of the era.

By now Rudd was in high demand, and he recorded on a number of seminal albums: Liberation Music Orchestra (1969) by bassist Charlie Haden; Escalator Over the Hill (1971), by Carla Bley and Paul Haines; and Four for Trane (1964), by saxophonist Archie Shepp, for which Rudd wrote the horn arrangements.

“In New York, a major topic of discussion was the reality of being black and playing this music, versus the reality of being white and attempting to play it from a black perspective,” trumpeter Bill Dixon told Francis Davis for a 1993 essay on Rudd. “But Roz fit right in because of his musicianship and, I would have to say, his personality.”

In the mid-1960s Rudd began working with Alan Lomax, the song collector and anthropologist, on Lomax’s system of “cantometrics,” whereby music traditions from around the world are categorised. Working off and on for 30 years, Rudd played an integral part in its development.

In the 1970s, Rudd began lecturing on musical anthropology at Bard College, then joined the music faculty at the University of Maine at Augusta. His attempts to integrate studies of Indian raga and other musical traditions met with resistance from the department, and after being denied tenure in 1980 he moved to the Catskills with his wife, Moselle Galbraith. He had released just a few albums under his own name – including Flexible Flyer, from 1974, featuring compelling original compositions and fetching interplay with Jordan – but none were widely distributed. He spent the early 1980s playing at small establishments and taking odd jobs around the Catskills, then joined the house band at a resort in Kerhonkson. He recorded sparingly and was virtually unseen on a major stage for nearly 20 years.

He returned to international touring in 1999 and made an album, Broad Strokes, which featured original compositions, tunes by Nichols and Monk, and a cover of an Elvis Costello song.

In the following years, Rudd released a stream of recordings, many exploring musical traditions from around the world. In 2002, with the help of Gillis, a musical anthropologist and concert producer, he recorded Malicool, a wellreceived album with Toumani Diabate, a master of the kora, a Malian stringed instrument.

In addition to Gillis, Rudd is survived by sons Gregory, from his marriage to Marilyn Schwartz, which ended in divorce, and Christopher, from his marriage to Moselle Galbraith, who died in 2004. © New York Times 2017. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service The Scotsman welcomes obituaries and appreciations from contributors as well as suggestions of possible obituary subjects. Please contact: Gazette Editor n The Scotsman, Level 7, Orchard Brae House, 30 Queensferry Road, Edinburgh EH4 2HS; n gazette@scotsman.com

“What I liked about the music was the fact that the instruments sounded like people talking and laughing, vocal sounds”