Remembering Ted Curson (1935-2012)
Remembering Ted Curson for JazzTimes Magazine:
[Ted Curson] first emerged during a period when everything was in flux, when the idiomatic boundaries were wholly permeable, and that aesthetic openness fueled his whole life. His playing displayed his hard-bop roots in Philadelphia (where he grew up alongside Lee Morgan), while maintaining the flexibility to work with avant-gardists like Cecil Taylor and the New York Contemporary Five (where he and Don Cherry split duties in the trumpet chair). He co-led a criminally neglected small ensemble throughout the ’60s with tenor saxophonist Bill Barron; that group combined harmonic sophistication with innovative structures and impassioned playing, in a way that rendered irrelevant the binary arguments between form and freedom.
Read the full article at jazztimes.com.