Sax Is Bold As Love: George Adams 85

George Adams/Don Pullen Quartet - Saturday Night In the Cosmos

I've returned from the gnashing East Coast grief-fest and will finish out the month with two jazzy posts in a row, starting with this legendarily underrated figure.

He was born in 1940, so today would have marked his 85th birthday, had he not died over three decades ago.

Beginning in the road band of Sam Cooke, it took him about a decade to establish himself as a top tenor saxophone on the scene.

It was really at the point he jumped from the band of Roy Haynes, into that of Charles Mingus, that he began to surface aboveground and emerge to a wider audience.

He was often heard in the company of musicians from that group, in various permutations, for the remainder of his career.

After Mingus he joined Gil Evans' Orchestra for a few years, then moved on to McCoy Tyner's orbit before launching perhaps his most beloved group, with Mingus alumnus pianist Don Pullen.

This band toured endlessly and recorded several seminal platters over the course of the 1980s, until George Adams passed away in 1992 from respiratory issues.

Here's an essential slab of scrumptious sound from that aggregation, taped at the onset of the Eighties in Germany and Austria. Look out for another Mingus veteran -- the great Dannie Richmond -- manning the skins with an instantly identifiable touch all his own.

George Adams/Don Pullen Quartet 

Liederhalle

Stuttgart, Germany

3.17.1981

01 Saturday Night In the Cosmos

02 Don't Lose Control

03 Dionysus

04 Newcomer

05 More Flowers

06 Earth Beams (bonus track, Vienna 3.22.1981)

Total time: 1:38:49

disc break goes after Track 03

George Adams - tenor saxophone, flute & vocals

Don Pullen - piano 

Cameron Brown - bass 

Dannie Richmond - drums

sounds like a master, off-air FM reel capture of the original WDR broadcast

the bonus track was extracted from a YouTube file of the incomplete 

opening track of a master Austrian FM broadcast from a few days later

retracked, edited, repaired, denoised & remastered by EN, April 2025
586 MB FLAC/direct link

I will be back in 24 hours with the most recent deceasing, unsurprisingly also in the Jazz realm.

But let's not get ahead of our dead, OK? Please don't miss out on this essential and very representative concert featuring today's birthday guy George Adams and his cohorts, melting the minds of the masses using only their magical musical maneuvers!--J.

4.29.1940 - 11.14.1992