Roswell Rudd
b. 17 November 1935, Sharon, Connecticut, USA. Rudd studied singing and French horn at college and theory at Harvard (1954-58). Like several other members of the '60s avant garde he began his jazz career playing dixieland, a fact which points up the line of evolution between the New Orleans roots and the New Thing, and his big, fulsome trombone sound strongly recalls the early ‘tailgate’ players, even when he is working in the most abstract surroundings. Rudd moved to New York in 1954 and played in various traditional bands. He began to work in a modern context with Herbie Nichols (1960-62) and in 1961 he joined Steve Lacy (who also started out playing traditional jazz). His conversion to free-form jazz began as a result of meeting Bill Dixon. In 1964 he formed the New York Art Quartet with John Tchicai, to whom he had been introduced by Dixon ( MOHAWK, NEW YORK ART QUARTET). When the Quartet disbanded in 1965 he became a member of Archie Shepp's highly-influential group until 1967 ( FOUR FOR TRANC, MAMA TOO TIGHT). In 1968 he formed the Primordial Quintet (which ended up as a nine-piece band) with Lee Konitz. During the late '70s and '80s he toured extensively with his own groups, and in 1982 was reunited with Lacy in the Monk Project with Misha Mengelberg. He has also worked with Cecil Taylor, Jazz Composer's Orchestra (who, in 1973, commissioned the NUMATIK SWING BAND from him), Albert Ayler, Karl Berger, Enrico Rava, Perry Robinson, Gato Barbieri, Robin Kenyatta and Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, and in 1961 he appeared in the film THE HUSTLER. He has also worked with the distinguished ethno-musicologist Alan Lomax, and became professor of Music Ethnology at the University of Maine. He has tried to show the connections between jazz, so-called ethnic music and the European classical tradition in his compositions. In the early '90s he was reportedly playing dixieland again in upstate New York.