Johnny Griffin Quartet

Born John Arnold Griffin III on 24 April 1928 in Chicago, Illinois, the saxophonist received his early training on tenor at Du Sable High School under Walter Dyatt, the same instructor who had shaped Gene Ammons and Von Freeman. While still in his mid-teens he entered the Lionel Hampton R&B-oriented big band, later spending time in a comparable ensemble directed by Joe Morris. Throughout the closing years of the 1940s and the opening years of the 1950s he performed alongside an array of mainstream and bebop figures such as Philly Joe Jones, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell and Arnett Cobb. Following his military service he became a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in 1957, rejoined Monk, and formed a co-leadership with Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis; the pair styled themselves the “tough tenors,” a label that later came to define an entire school of tenor saxophone playing.

Residing in Europe during the first half of the 1960s, Griffin frequently backed visiting American jazz artists and, between 1967 and 1968, performed with the multi-national Clarke-Boland Big Band. The 1970s found him traveling widely, most often unaccompanied yet occasionally reunited with Davis and Cobb, while in the 1980s he made sporadic appearances with the Paris Reunion Band. An inventive and intensely competitive soloist, he maintained an apparently inexhaustible flow of ideas, frequently executed at blistering tempos. His approach reflected the influence of his bebop colleagues and forebears, establishing him among the foremost hard bop tenorists of the 1970s and 1980s. Recordings made for the Antilles label in the 1990s with drummer Kenny Washington stand out for their vitality and substance.