David Murray came out of California and landed in New York's loft jazz scene right when that world was exploding with young players who had no interest in waiting for a major label's permission. He was barely in his twenties and already had a tone that filled a room without a microphone — thick, vocal, a little raw at the edges, like he'd swallowed the entire history of the tenor saxophone and was digesting it out loud. You hear Paul Gonsalves and Ben Webster in there, you hear Albert Ayler's shrieking upper register, and somehow it doesn't sound like a pastiche. It sounds like one guy who refused to choose.

What made Murray different from a lot of his free jazz peers is that he never abandoned the song. Even his wildest skronking solos tend to circle back to a melody you can hum, which is probably why his records from the Black Saint and Soul Note years hold up so well. Ming (1980) is a good entry point — a big, ambitious octet record that swings hard and screams when it needs to, with writing dense enough that you keep hearing new things on repeat listens. He was prolific in a way that's almost comic; the man has led dozens and dozens of sessions across small groups, octets, and big bands, and he rarely phones any of it in.

He's also a founding member of the World Saxophone Quartet, which took the radical idea of four reed players with no rhythm section and turned it into something that could groove, holler, and harmonize like a church choir having an argument. That group, alongside Hamiet Bluiett, Oliver Lake, and Julius Hemphill, gave Murray a showcase for his arranging instincts outside his own bands, and it's some of the most purely enjoyable avant-garde jazz ever recorded — accessible without being watered down.

Murray never really fit the narrative that free jazz was a dead end or a museum piece. He kept writing for big bands, kept digging into Caribbean rhythms and African music, kept collaborating with poets and singers, and kept playing bass clarinet like it was a second voice rather than a novelty. If you only know him as a honking tenor screamer, you're missing most of the story — he's a composer and bandleader first, and the horn is just the loudest way he has of saying what he means.

Put him on for a friend who thinks avant-garde jazz is all noise and no feeling. Murray's playing has too much blues in it, too much actual melody, for that argument to survive more than a few minutes.