Saxophonist John Tchicai earned his widest recognition through his immersion in New York at the peak of the 1960s free-jazz movement, yet the bulk of his professional life was devoted to fostering avant-garde jazz across Northern Europe. Born on April 28, 1936, in Copenhagen to a Danish mother and a Congolese father, he took up the violin at ten, added both clarinet and alto saxophone at sixteen, and concentrated on the latter instrument while studying at Denmark’s Conservatory of Music. By the late 1950s he was already circulating through the North European jazz circuit, which had begun absorbing the first American experiments in free improvisation. In 1963 he relocated to New York City to place himself at the center of that emerging language. There he connected with Archie Shepp and Don Cherry, becoming a co-founder of the New York Contemporary Five; he also helped establish the New York Art Quartet alongside Roswell Rudd and Milford Graves. Additional sessions linked him with Albert Ayler on the recording New York Eye and Ear Control, with the Jazz Composers Guild, and with John Lennon on Life with the Lions, but his most consequential appearance was on John Coltrane’s landmark Ascension. After three intense years he left New York in 1966, returning to Denmark to form the large workshop ensemble Cadentia Nova Danica, which he directed until 1971. He then largely withdrew from performance in order to teach full-time. A return to recording began in 1977 and continued steadily through the 1980s, during which he adopted the tenor saxophone and became a member of Pierre Dorge’s New Jungle Orchestra. In 1990 the Danish Ministry of Culture awarded him a lifetime grant for jazz performance; the next year he settled in California’s Bay Area, where he and his keyboardist wife Margriet established both John Tchicai & the Archetypes and the John Tchicai Unit, ensembles that documented their work throughout the decade. After 2000 he moved back to Europe and took up residence in Southern France. A brain hemorrhage struck him in June 2012; although he reportedly started physiotherapy, he died that October in Perpignan at the age of 76.
