Noah Howard

All Music Guide:

One of free jazz's more enigmatic figures, alto saxophonist Noah Howard was documented so infrequently on record and spent so much time living in Europe that the course of his career and development as a musician remain difficult to trace, despite a late-'90s renewal of interest in his music. Howard was born in New Orleans in 1943 and began playing music in church as a child. He started out on trumpet (the instrument he played in the military during the early '60s) but subsequently switched to alto, and got in on the ground floor of the early free jazz movement. Most influenced by Albert Ayler, Howard made his debut as a leader for the groundbreaking ESP label, recording a pair of dates in 1966 (Noah Howard Quartet and At Judson Hall). Dissatisfied with the reception accorded his music -- and the avant-garde movement in general -- in America, Howard relocated to Europe, where he initially lived in France. He played with Frank Wright in 1969, and in 1971, he recorded with Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink (among others) on Patterns, which was issued on his own AltSax label. Howard recorded a bit for FMP in the mid-'70s, and in 1979 also did a track for France's Mercury division, "Message to South Africa," that went unissued due to its militancy. Howard flirted with jazz-funk sometime in the '80s and early '90s, a phase that went largely undocumented. He returned to free jazz in the late '90s and began recording for labels other than AltSax, including CIMP (1997's Expatriate Kin), Cadence (1999's Between Two Eternities), Ayler (Live at the Unity Temple), and Boxholder (2001's Red Star), returning to the AltSax label after the turn of the millennium with the release of 2003's Dreamtime and 2007's Desert Harmony (with Jordan's Amir Faqir). Thanks to the relative increase in visibility, Howard began to get more of his due as an early avant-garde innovator. He died suddenly on September 3, 2010 while vacationing in the South of France.

Wikipedia:

Noah Howard (April 6, 1943 – September 3, 2010) was an American free jazz alto saxophonist.

Biography

An American born in New Orleans, Howard played music from childhood in his church. He first learned trumpet and later switching to alto, tenor and soprano saxophone. He was an innovator influenced by John Coltrane and Albert Ayler. He studied with Dewey Johnson first in Los Angeles and later on in San Francisco. When he moved to New York he started playing with Sun Ra.

He recorded his first LP “Noah Howard quartet” as a leader in 1965 and his second LP “Noah Howard at Judson Hall“ in 1966 both for ESP Records, but found little critical acclaim in the USA. In the Sixties and Seventies he performed regularly in the USA and Europe and moved to Paris in 1968.

In 1969 he appeared on Frank Wright's album One For John and on Black Gipsy with Archie Shepp. As leader he recorded The Black Ark with Arthur Doyle among others. In 1971 he created his own record label AltSax and published most of his music under that label .

In 1971 he recorded Patterns in the Netherlands with Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink. He moved to Paris in 1972, lived in Nairobi in 1982 and finally moved to Brussels late 1982, where he had a studio and ran a jazz club. He recorded steadily through the 1970s and 1980s, exploring funk and world music in the latter decade and recording for AltSax. In the 1990s he returned to his free jazz origins, releasing on Cadence Jazz among others, and experienced a resurgence in critical acclaim. His last two albums Desert Harmony (2008, with Omar al Faqir) and Voyage (2010) reflected his interest in World Music and were influenced by Indian, Latin American and Middle Eastern music.