Andrew White, a profusely gifted and proudly eccentric musician and scholar greatest identified in jazz circles for transcribing greater than 800 of John Coltrane’s saxophone solos, died on Nov. 11 at an assisted-living facility in Silver Spring, Md. He was 78.
The trigger was issues of two strokes he had just lately suffered, stated Nasar Abadey, Mr. White’s longtime drummer.
Mr. White rightly described himself as a person of “various artistic gifts of excess.” To even gesture on the breadth of his profession would require a half-dozen labels: saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, creator, enterprise proprietor, instructor.
He leaves behind one of many largest troves of self-released recordings, books and musical transcriptions by a single musician in jazz historical past.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. White performed electrical bass for Stevie Wonder and the fifth Dimension; English horn with Weather Report; oboe within the American Ballet Theater Orchestra; and saxophone in bands led by McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, each former members of Coltrane’s quartet.
But finally, settling down in his native Washington, Mr. White centered his inexhaustible energies on his personal tasks. On Coltrane’s birthday in 1971, satisfied that the music business had neither an curiosity in his skills nor the flexibility to comprise them, Mr. White began Andrew’s Musical Enterprises Incorporated, a label and publishing home that he ran with the assistance of his spouse, Jocelyne White, an elementary-school instructor.
Over an uninterrupted 49-year interval, Andrew’s Music revealed greater than 1,000 transcriptions; greater than 40 LPs of his personal music, operating from jazz to funk to classical; and quite a few books, together with “Trane ’n Me” (1981), a well-regarded musicological treatise on Coltrane that was translated into German, and “Everybody Loves the Sugar” (2001), an 800-page autobiography.
In “Trane ’n Me,” Mr. White feigned humility, then lower playfully to the chase: “I have been dubbed ‘the world’s leading authority on the music of John Coltrane.’ They call me that, but I’m too modest to make any such claim; however, if you want to pay me, you can call me anything you please except late for dinner.”
Placing an order with Andrew’s Music meant inquiring by cellphone, snail mail or fax machine at Mr. White’s Washington residence, which he known as “the other White House.” Well into his 70s, he continued to go to the neighborhood publish workplace to mail out typewritten brochures and fulfill orders.
The covers of his books and information have been sometimes titled in stark black or gold lettering over a white background. Book textual content was typewritten. But the content material bridled with vitality and humor.
Mr. White was identified to deal with concert events as bodily endurance assessments, and at the very least one present on the Top O’Foolery in Washington lasted for 12 hours straight, carrying out a number of rhythm sections within the course of. He launched most of that efficiency as a dwell set, stretched throughout 9 LPs.
Appreciating his music required some fortitude on the listener’s half, too: His improvisations have been brilliantly refined however sonically extreme, with rapid-fire notes popping out in a caustic, bellowing tone. He knew this made him unappealing to document labels — however he didn’t mourn the lack of alternative.
“I’ve always been interested in exploiting all aspects of what I do,” he advised The Washington City Paper in 1996. “I wouldn’t be able to do that with any record company, because their thing is to pigeonhole.”
And he welcomed the possibility to remain bizarre. All of his work was touched by a ribald humorousness and a style for absurdity, and he teased the divide between self-promotion and self-parody. He not often stood for {a photograph} together with his tongue in his mouth. As he obtained older, the fits he wore solely grew extra flamboyant.
In the promotional materials (self-penned, after all) for “Everybody Loves the Sugar,” Mr. White promised a e book stuffed with “my perennial, suggestive prurience, total political incorrectness and fiendishly pious irreverence.”
His residence workplace, which he delighted in displaying to visitors, was plastered from flooring to ceiling with pictures of topless ladies. On the request of a purchaser whose girlfriend had a selected kink, Mr. White stated, he created an almost hourlong album consisting solely of flatulence.
Andrew Nathaniel White III was born in Washington on Sept. 6, 1942, however grew up in Nashville, the place his father was a minister within the A.M.E. Church and a civil rights activist who went on to function president of the native N.A.A.C.P. chapter.
At 8, Mr. White began on the soprano saxophone, a notoriously tough horn, which brought on him to develop his “iron embouchure,” as he told JazzTimes in 2001. Before lengthy he was instructing himself to transcribe from recordings of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and others and writing his personal music.
When he began Andrew’s Music within the early 1970s, his Coltrane transcriptions have been among the many first issues he revealed. The first 5 volumes, totaling greater than 600 solos, got here out in 1973; a duplicate of them is now housed on the library of Syracuse University.
By the time he graduated from highschool he had realized the alto and tenor saxophones in addition to the oboe and upright bass.
He returned to Washington in 1960 to review music principle at Howard University, with a minor in oboe. As a freshman he co-founded the J.F.Okay. Quintet, a contemporary jazz outfit that rapidly turned heads.
The group established a Monday-night residency at Bohemian Caverns, town’s premier jazz membership, the place the viewers typically included jazz luminaries touring via Washington. Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, a member of Coltrane’s group on the time, turned followers. Cannonball Adderley was so impressed that he helped the quintet get a recording contract with Riverside Records, which launched the group’s solely two albums, “New Jazz Frontiers From Washington” (1961) and “Young Ideas” (1962).
As musical director, Mr. White’s preparations on these information are a grasp class in the usual hard-bop sound of the day, influenced particularly by the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet and the Miles Davis Quintet. But when he fires up a solo, issues go askew. He unlooses excessive and wobbly notes in sprees, and the tonal middle is thrown off.
Critics in contrast Mr. White’s taking part in to that of Dolphy, one other outré alto saxophonist and multi-reedist, however Mr. White noticed it otherwise.
“I don’t have any Eric Dolphy influence,” he advised JazzOccasions. “We were doing what we were doing about the same time.”
“I was listening to him talk while he was explaining this scale and his approach to using this intervallic concept, and my eyes started bulging,” he continued, remembering a dialog that they had at Bohemian Caverns. “What I was thinking while listening to him is that I was working from the exact same scale at the same time. To me it was a coincidence; I’ve told this story to other people, and they say it’s mystical.”
After school, seeing no industrial future as a straight-ahead jazz musician, Mr. White studied oboe on the Paris Conservatory for a yr on a John Hay Whitney Foundation grant, then spent two years on the Center of Creative and Performing Arts on the State University of New York at Buffalo (now the University at Buffalo). He lived in New York within the late 1960s and early ’70s as his work as a aspect musician picked up, then returned to Washington after marrying Jocelyne Uhl in 1970.
They have been married for 41 years, till her loss of life in 2011. Mr. White leaves no fast survivors — only a few thousand revealed artifacts, spilling with spirit.
