Tony Malaby

Influenced by figures spanning John Coltrane and Archie Shepp through Roscoe Mitchell, tenor and soprano saxophonist Tony Malaby commands attention as a probing yet authoritative performer and writer who navigates inside and outside approaches with equal assurance. Arriving in New York City from his native Tucson during the mid-1990s, he quickly embedded himself in the downtown milieu through both sideman work and leadership roles. His first proper outing under his own name arrived in 2000 as Sabino, where a quartet drew bracing post-bop lines together with folk inflections rooted in his Mexican-American background. The 2003 trio recording Adobe, featuring Paul Motian and Drew Gress, earned international praise. While maintaining his own ensembles on the road, Malaby contributed to groups led by Mark Helias, Mario Pavone, Kris Davis, and Motian, among others; in 2005 he joined Charlie Haden & the Liberation Music Orchestra for Not in Our Name. The 2007 improvised trio session Tamarindo united him with William Parker and Nasheet Waits, and the 2017 live date New Artifacts captured performances alongside Mat Maneri and Daniel Levin. During 2019 he appeared on five separate albums, among them Zoning with Nick Fraser, Davis, Ingrid Laubrock, and Lina Allemano. In 2021 Malaby joined Ben Monder and Rainey for the spontaneous Live at the 55 Bar, and the following year he reconvened Sabino—with Monder taking Marc Ducret’s guitar chair—for The Cave of Winds.

Born in Tucson, Arizona, in 1964, Malaby remained there through his formative years and first visited New York in 1990 while enrolled at William Paterson College in New Jersey. During that initial stay he encountered organist Joey DeFrancesco, who retained him as a sideman for a full year. The early 1990s also placed him in various Charles Mingus ghost bands and alongside reedman Marty Ehrlich in a unit that featured Michael Formanek on bass and Tom Rainey on drums, initiating enduring associations with both musicians that flourished throughout the decade.

Malaby’s earliest co-leader date surfaced in 1993 when he and trombonist Joey Sellers cut Cosas for Nine Winds. In 2000 he led the avant-garde Sabino quartet again, now documented under his own name with Ducret, Formanek, and Rainey, foregrounding his post-bop lens refracted through Mexican folk traditions. A six-year, four-album partnership with pianist Mario Pavone commenced on 2002’s Mythos. The 2003 trio Adobe with Gress and Motian further illuminated his avant-garde inclinations and drew acclaim from jazz writers worldwide; Motian reciprocated the next year by including Malaby on the ECM session Garden of Eden. Prolific side work between 2003 and 2007 encompassed Apparitions with Rainey, Gress, and Michael Sarin plus two Alive in Brooklyn projects alongside Angelica Sanchez and Rainey. Tamarindo, Malaby’s first Clean Feed release, emerged in 2007 with Parker and Waits, inaugurating a lengthy affiliation with the label.

In 2008 he appeared on Ancestors, completing his quartet of Pavone albums, and issued Full Contact with Joachim Kuhn and Daniel Humair while also releasing Warblepeck by the Tony Malaby Cello Trio featuring Fred Lonberg-Holm and John Hollenbeck. The 2009 quartet album Paloma Recio marked his New World debut and included Waits, bassist Eivind Opsvik, and Monder; that same year the Stéphane Kerecki Trio with Tony Malaby released Houria, the first of several joint ventures incorporating compositions by Olivier Messiaen alongside originals by the saxophonist and pianist.

Constant touring across the United States and Europe yielded further recordings. Tamarindo Live surfaced on Clean Feed from Lisbon in 2010, Pas de Dense with Humair and Bruno Chevillon appeared on Zig Zag, and the improvised duo Haptein with guitarist Richard Bonnet came out on France’s Hôte Marge. In 2013 Malaby joined Bogotá’s avant-garde collective Los Toscos for Kalimán and appeared on No Difference for Songlines with Gordon Grdina, Helias, and Kenton Loewen. That year also saw the ambitious nonet project Novela, arranged by Davis, who also played piano; the ensemble delivered radically reimagined earlier works with Hollenbeck, Ralph Alessi, and Formanek among its members. Additional European commitments included Big Four’s Mind the Gap in 2014, while two sessions for Lithuania’s No Business label produced Niño/Brujo with cellist Christopher Hoffman and Juan Pablo Carletti plus A Way a Land of Life with Rob Mazurek, Jason Ajemian, and Chad Taylor. Clean Feed hosted two more 2014 releases: Somos Agua reuniting Waits and Parker, and the expansive Scorpion Eater by Tony Malaby’s Tubacello with Hoffman, tubaist Dan Peck, and Hollenbeck. Too Many Continents with Davis and Fraser followed on Clean Feed in 2015, and the Paloma Recio band reassembled for 2016’s Incantation Suite. New Artifacts, another Clean Feed live improvisation with Maneri and Levin, appeared in 2017.

On Valentine’s Day 2018 Formanek’s Elusion Quartet recorded Time Like This for Intakt in upstate New York with Davis and drummer Ches Smith. Later that March, Los Toscos invited Malaby back to Bogotá, resulting in the digital-only La Vigilia de Las Flores (Lado Vigilia) issued the next year; 2018 also brought Clean Feed’s release of the 2017 live date Traveling Moving Breathing with guitarist Samo Salamon and drummer Roberto Dani, as well as the trio set Head Under Water with saxophonist Rob Burke and bassist Helias on FMR. In 2019 Malaby participated in the collective Zoning for Astral Spirits alongside Fraser, Davis, Laubrock, and Toronto trumpeter Lina Allemano, while a duo Offering with bassist Rob Clutton emerged on Canada’s SnailBongBong Records.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic halted most activity in 2020, Malaby initiated weekly outdoor gatherings beneath a turnpike overpass near his New Jersey residence, yielding the digital-only Turnpike Diaries, Vol. 1 with distanced contributions from Helias, Formanek, Smith, and saxophonist Tim Berne. In 2021 he recorded the fully improvised Live at the 55 Bar with Monder and Rainey. Those same underpass sessions prompted the 2021 studio date that became The Cave of Winds, reuniting most of the original Sabino personnel—Formanek, Rainey, and Monder in Ducret’s stead—whose music balanced post-bop, modal frameworks, and free improvisation. Pyroclastic issued the album under the billing Tony Malaby & Sabino in January 2022; afterward Malaby relocated from New York to Boston upon joining the faculty of the Berklee College of Music.