Allen Eager

In the early 1950s Allen Eager’s tenor saxophone bore such a close resemblance to the voices of Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Al Cohn, and Brew Moore that the five musicians—each shaped by the Lester Young–influenced Four Brothers approach—actually convened for a collective recording session. Among them, however, Eager sustained the least substantial trajectory in jazz, largely because he never developed a sustained commitment to the music as a full-time pursuit. During World War II, while still in his teens, he performed with the orchestras of Bobby Sherwood, Sonny Dunham, Shorty Sherock, Hal McIntyre, Woody Herman (1943–1944), Tommy Dorsey, and Johnny Bothwell. By 1945 he had become a regular presence on 52nd Street, and between 1946 and 1948 he led his own recording dates. In 1948 he made a strong impression with Tadd Dameron’s ensemble, yet by the start of the following decade his engagement with jazz had begun to fade. He appeared on sessions with Gerry Mulligan in 1951 and Terry Gibbs in 1952, worked briefly with Buddy Rich, and led his own group from 1953 to 1955. After spending 1956 and 1957 in Paris and reuniting with Mulligan for another recording, he withdrew almost entirely from the scene. A lone return to the studio occurred in 1982 with an album for Uptown.

Before that fleeting reappearance, the phrase “drop out” accurately captured Eager’s existence, which unfolded on a scale of Walter Mitty–like fantasy. Although he attributed his waning involvement in jazz chiefly to Charlie Parker’s death in 1955 and, with greater reluctance, to the effects of drugs, his energies turned instead toward skiing, romantic pursuits, and automobile racing. He reentered the United States in 1960 to take part in Charles Mingus’s Newport Rebels festival and to compete in races alongside sports journalist Denise McCluggage. The following year his passion for speed brought him to Florida, where he finished tenth overall in the twelve-hour endurance event at Sebring. He also spent time at Harvard participating in Timothy Leary’s LSD experiments and later claimed in interviews that he had encouraged Leary to move beyond controlled laboratory settings toward the freer, more exploratory “trips” that later characterized the drug’s cultural use. Heroin addiction, however, proved another powerful distraction, though it never wholly extinguished his musical instincts. In the 1970s he mingled with celebrities in California and joined informal sessions with Frank Zappa. By the 1980s he had resumed performing with renewed seriousness, touring Europe with Dizzy Gillespie and, after relocating to Florida, appearing regularly in concerts across the state. Allen Eager died of liver cancer on May 13, 2003, at the age of seventy-six.