Garvin Bushell

Garvin Bushell's career went back to the beginning of recorded jazz, yet in the 1960s he appeared on records with John Coltrane (at the Village Vanguard in 1961) and Miles Davis (as part of the Gil Evans Orchestra). He started playing piano when he was six, switching to clarinet at age 13. Bushell, who was always a technically skilled player and in a more enlightened era would probably have become a classical musician, studied at Wilberforce University and played for shows and in vaudeville. He moved to New York in 1919, toured and recorded with Mamie Smith's Jazz Hounds, and ...