BOOKER ERVIN

Candid Recording(s):

and also appears on:

Reincarnation of a love bird (CCD 79026)

Biography:

Booker Ervin was born in Denison, Texas on October 31, 1930. As a boy, he wanted a saxophone, but his mother couldn’t afford to buy him one, and accordingly gave him his father’s trombone. He played the instrument from the age of eight but finally put it down aged thirteen. When he joined the Air Force in 1950, he started to express himself musically again, borrowing a tenor and teaching himself the horn and soon leading his own Combo.

Three years later, Booker was discharged and then went to study at what is now Berklee School of Music to become technically fluent on the horn. The subsequent years saw Booker working around Dallas, Chicago, Oregon and Denver, where he stayed for some eighteen months. He finally made it to New York in May 1958 and joined Mingus that November.

“Being with Mingus,” he recalls, was very important to me. I became aware of harmonic possibilities that I’d never heard before and having to play his charts freed me imaginatively and technically. I became much more flexible all over the horn.”

All the time he was with Mingus and on his own jobs since, Ervin had inexorably been building a style of his own. Lester Young, had been his first major influence and later there were Dexter Gordon, Sonny Stitt, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane.

His first album on Candid (‘That’s It’) in 1961, presents Ervin leading a free-blowing date largely based, on new material.