Sam Rivers Sessionography: A Work In Progress

Review by Ken Waxman

Amateurs were the first chroniclers and discographers in Jazz. Starting in the 1920s and 1930s when very few journalists and almost no academics took the emerging music and its then close cousin the blues seriously a few hardy souls researched and collected every scrap of evidence they could find about Jazz. The first Jazz histories and record research were the result of their efforts. Inevitably as the music evolved and become more accepted professional authors and academics began to dominate the field of Jazz research. So did grant-giving bodies. But with notable exceptions, the burgeoning, better-financed mixture of scholarship and sensationalism created too many superficial or arcane works. Popular figures were written about again and again – compare, the number of books on Miles Davis to those on Herbie Nichols for instance – and many discographies became could be streaming service playlists. Moving from the marketplace to academe, it appears that most academic studies are more concerned with content analysis of early Jazz publications or trying to tie the essence of improvisation to community building or kids’ play than first-person detail finding.

That long preamble is a way to compliment Rick Lopez’s Sam Rivers Sessionography. The work of an amateur in the very best sense of the word, Lopez set out to collect every scrap of evidence available about every performance of Sam River (1923- 2011), who during a career that stretched from the late 1940s until his death, encompassed roles as tenor saxophonist and flutist, composer, leader of big bands and combos, music pedagogue, and owner and booker of the RivBea studio, one of the best-known venues during the so-called Loft Era.

This last role and his stints in the small groups of Miles Davis (limited) and Dizzy Gillespie (extensive) are where most jazz followers point their focus. But Lopez’s volume is particularly valuable in that Rivers’ few brushes with world-wide fame take a small portion of the book. Rivers was an important part of Boston’s music scene before making the move to New York, and his move to Orlando, Florida afterwards made him the fulcrum in developing a free scene in a state that seems to prefer its jazz as backwards looking as its politics. Plus like many other advanced musicians of the time, Rivers spent travelling to Europe to work, and Lopez has attempted to track down every one of the saxophonist’s overseas gigs, whether at a recording session or a concert.

While the author follows the discographers creed in listing the date, personnel, take, matrix number, medium and variations of the many sessions he find, he doesn’t stop there. Seeking to avoid the ethos that makes most discographies and sessionographies resemble the unvarnished scrolls of Medieval monks, the pages are filled with historical photos and pictures of musicians, record jacket covers, nightclub and concert fliers, advertisements and visual art, professional or not. Within the year-by-year chronicle, he adds context to the raw musical data by including stories and commentaries about what each session represents. Culled from magazine and newspaper articles and interviews as well as extensive first-person interviews Lopez and his associate Ed Hazell conducted with other musicians, audience attendees and members of Rivers family, to provide definitive details about Rivers’ musical and personal life.

Making a few Alfred Hitchcock-like cameo appearance in the volume, Lopez also interjects additional scholarship and research that solves discrepancies created by several versions of certain incidents or musical issues. Along the way the reader can discover interesting factoids including that Rivers is on separate records by Chaka Khan and John Lee Hooker.

No one can race through the volume in one shot – the diminutive type size doesn’t help – but it’s designed for the serious follower of Jazz. It’s for those who has can dip in and out of the volume and use it as defining reference about certain Rivers music or to discover aspects of it not previously known.