Jimmy Giuffre, 86; iconoclast as jazz composer, performer

Jimmy Giuffre played a half-dozen instruments; it was the clarinet that gave him a signature sound. (Arthur Ellis/Washington Post)

NEW YORK - Jimmy Giuffre, the adventurous clarinetist, composer, and arranger whose 50-year journey through jazz led him from writing the Woody Herman anthem "Four Brothers" through minimalist, drummerless trios to striking experimental orchestral works, died on Thursday in Pittsfield, Mass. He was 86 and lived in West Stockbridge.

The cause was pneumonia brought about by complications of Parkinson's disease, said his wife of 46 years, Juanita.

Among the half-dozen instruments he played, from bass flute to soprano saxophone, it was the clarinet that gave him a signature sound; it was a dark, velvety tone, centering in the lower register, pure but rarely forceful. But among the iconoclastic heroes of the late 1950s in jazz, he was a serene oddity, changing his ideas as fast as he could record them.

His album "Tangents in Jazz" (1955) did away with chordal instruments like piano or guitar two years before Sonny Rollins famously did so; his trios from 1956 to 1961 were without a drummer, prefiguring the quieter, classical-timbred music of vanguardist jazz circles in the 1980s.

Little of this impressed more traditional audiences, however. What made Mr. Giuffre important to big-band aficionados was one composition, "Four Brothers," a big hit for Woody Herman's Second Herd in 1947. It established the characteristic Herman front-line sound of three tenor saxophones and a baritone saxophone, played fast, in harmony and without vibrato.

Mr. Giuffre (pronounced JOO-free) was born in Dallas. He began playing clarinet at 9. He attended what was then North Texas State Teachers College, where he earned a degree in music in 1942; upon graduation he joined the Army for four years, playing with a quintet in mess halls at mealtimes, and then moved to Los Angeles.

In the late 1940s he became a free-lance arranger and, in some cases, saxophonist for big bands. In the early 1950s, West Coast cool jazz began, and Mr. Giuffre took part. Usually playing tenor saxophone, he was in small groups led by Shorty Rogers, Shelly Manne, and Howard Rumsey.

Meanwhile, he was growing stronger as a composer. Mr. Giuffre's teacher from 1947 to 1952, Wesley LaViolette, emphasized the virtues of contrapuntal writing, and counterpoint became the structural glue for Mr. Giuffre's art, making some of his most outre experiments hold together. LaViolette also taught Mr. Giuffre that jazz could accommodate any amount of composition, not just for the front-line instruments but for all of them, and in the mid-'50s Mr. Giuffre began to write specific parts for bass and drums, sometimes winnowing their roles to providing color and accent.

The late-'50s versions of the Jimmy Giuffre 3 - with the guitarist Jim Hall and the bassist Ralph Pena, then with Hall and the trombonist Bob Brookmeyer - gained him some commercial renown.

If Mr. Giuffre was long on ideas, he was not a partisan in aesthetic matters. Though he prized his even, smooth sound quality on clarinet, he did not disdain players who had a more fractured sound. He never saw an irreconcilable split between American and European influences. He admitted that the instrumentation for his late-'50s trios had a European inspiration, Claude Debussy's Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp; at the same time he used those trios to convey a sense of rustic, bluesy Americana.

From the mid-'50s on, Mr. Giuffre taught music, initially at the Lenox School of Jazz, the late-summer educational conference in Lenox, Mass., which existed from 1957 to 1960. (A remark made the rounds at the time: when told that Mr. Giuffre would be there to teach clarinet, among other things, the writer André Hodeir joked, "Who will be teaching the upper register?")

It was at Lenox that Mr. Giuffre first encountered Ornette Coleman, a scholarship student at the school, in 1959. Mr. Giuffre was knocked sideways by Coleman's conviction and freedom and had a sort of ecstatic transformation.

Mr. Giuffre changed his music again. The result was the moody, overlapping improvisations with no fixed key or tempo that characterize the playing of his trio with Paul Bley on piano and Steve Swallow on bass, heard on the reissues "1961" and "Free Fall." This trio lasted for less than two years, playing ever more uncompromising music; Swallow wrote the group made its last stand at a Bleecker Street coffeehouse in New York, breaking up on a night when each musician earned 35 cents.

But when "1961," a pairing of trio albums, was reissued in 1992, it was greeted with awe by some younger musicians and critics for its prescience about the post-1960s jazz landscape. The album received a five-star rating in Down Beat.

A similar belated reception awaited "Free Fall," which included some piercing, agitated solo improvisations. Though the album was a commercial failure on its initial release in 1963, when Columbia brought it out again 25 years later, "The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD" gave it the book's highest rating.

After "Free Fall" Mr. Giuffre made no albums for 10 years. He taught at the New School and New York University, and in 1978 he joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where he taught until the early 1990s. He also created another version of the Jimmy Giuffre 3, which turned to sounds from Africa and Asia; in the 1980s he made a series of quartet recordings.

Also in the '80s he formed a productive association with the French saxophonist Andre Jaume, who recorded Mr. Giuffre several times. The 1961 edition of Jimmy Giuffre's trio, with Bley and Swallow, reunited sporadically for performances and recordings, including "The Life of a Trio" (Owl, 1990) and "Conversations With a Goose" (Soul Note, 1992).

Mr. Giuffre leaves his wife, Juanita. The couple have lived in an 18th-century mill in West Stockbridge since 1976.