NEW YORK — Sam Rivers, an inexhaustibly creative saxophonist, flutist, bandleader, and composer who cut his own decisive path through the jazz world, spearheading the 1970s loft scene in New York and later establishing a rugged outpost in Florida, died Monday in Orlando. He was 88.
The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter Monique Rivers Williams.
With an approach to improvisation that was uninhibited but firmly grounded in intellect and technique, Mr. Rivers was among the leading figures in the postwar jazz avant-garde. His sound on the tenor saxophone, his primary instrument, was distinctive: taut and throaty, slightly burred, dark-hued. He also had a recognizable voice on the soprano saxophone, flute, and piano and as a composer and arranger.
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Growing up in Chicago and on the road, Mr. Rivers studied violin, piano, and trombone. After his father had a debilitating accident in 1937, he moved with his mother to Little Rock, Ark., where he zeroed in on the tenor saxophone. Joining the Navy in the mid-1940s, he served for three years.
Mr. Rivers enrolled in the Boston Conservatory of Music in 1947 and later transferred to Boston University, where he majored in composition and briefly took up the viola and fell into the busy Boston jazz scene.
He made an important acquaintance in 1959: Tony Williams, a 13-year-old drummer who already sounded like an innovator. Together they delved into free improvisation, occasionally performing in museums alongside modernist and abstract paintings.
By 1964, Williams was working with the trumpeter Miles Davis and persuaded him to hire Mr. Rivers, who was with the bluesman T-Bone Walker at the time, for a summer tour. Mr. Rivers’s blustery playing with the Miles Davis Quintet, captured on the album “Miles in Tokyo,’’ suggested a provocative but imperfect fit. Wayne Shorter replaced him in the fall.
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On a series of Blue Note recordings in the middle to late ’60s, Mr. Rivers expressed his ideas more freely. He made four albums of his own for the label, the first of which — “Fuchsia Swing Song,’’ with Williams, pianist Jaki Byard, and bassist Ron Carter, another Davis sideman — is a landmark of experimental post-bop, with a free-flowing yet structurally sound style. “Beatrice,’’ a ballad from that album Mr. Rivers named after his wife, would become a jazz standard.
Beatrice Rivers died in 2005. In addition to his daughter Monique, Mr. Rivers leaves two other daughters, Cindy Johnson and Traci Tozzi; a son, Dr. Samuel Rivers III; five grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.