Noah Howard

Among the more elusive presences in free jazz, alto saxophonist Noah Howard left so few studio documents and passed so many years abroad that his artistic trajectory stays hard to reconstruct, even after fresh attention to his catalog surfaced in the late 1990s. Born in New Orleans in 1943, he first encountered music through church performances as a youngster. His initial instrument was trumpet, the one he used while serving in the armed forces during the early 1960s, before he changed to alto and joined the nascent free-jazz scene. Albert Ayler supplied his strongest influence; Howard’s first recordings under his own name appeared on the pioneering ESP imprint in 1966 with the albums Noah Howard Quartet and At Judson Hall. Frustrated by the limited acceptance his work and the broader avant-garde received stateside, he moved to Europe and settled first in France. In 1969 he performed alongside Frank Wright, then in 1971 he cut Patterns with Misha Mengelberg, Han Bennink, and additional musicians, releasing the session on his own AltSax imprint. He made occasional sides for FMP during the mid-1970s and, in 1979, taped the track “Message to South Africa” for the French Mercury subsidiary, though the piece remained unreleased because of its political stance. During the 1980s and early 1990s he briefly explored jazz-funk, yet those experiments stayed mostly unrecorded. By the late 1990s he had returned to free jazz and began issuing discs on imprints beyond AltSax, among them CIMP’s 1997 release Expatriate Kin, Cadence’s 1999 album Between Two Eternities, Ayler’s Live at the Unity Temple, and Boxholder’s 2001 set Red Star. After 2000 he resumed working with AltSax, issuing Dreamtime in 2003 and Desert Harmony, a collaboration with Jordan’s Amir Faqir, in 2007. The added exposure finally brought wider acknowledgment of his role as an early innovator in the avant-garde. He died suddenly on September 3, 2010, while on holiday in the South of France.