Greg Osby came up in St. Louis playing in R&B and funk bands before landing in New York in the early 1980s, and you can hear both worlds in his alto sound — the technical rigor of bebop lineage filtered through a rhythmic sensibility that owes as much to James Brown as to Charlie Parker. He fell in with Steve Coleman and a loose cluster of musicians who called what they were doing M-Base, a term nobody outside the group ever fully agreed on, but the music itself was clear enough: layered rhythms, angular melodic lines, and a stubborn resistance to the idea that jazz had to sound like it did in 1959.

What makes Osby's playing distinctive isn't flash. He's not a saxophonist who's going to overwhelm you with speed or volume. Instead there's a dryness to his tone, a way of placing notes slightly off the beat so the whole thing feels like it's leaning forward. Listen to how he phrases on 3-D Lifestyles (1993) or Black Book (1995) — the lines twist in ways that don't resolve the way you expect, and that's the point. He wanted improvisation that sounded like thinking, not recitation.

His run on Blue Note through the 1990s and early 2000s produced a body of work that never got the wide audience it deserved outside serious jazz circles, partly because it demanded attention rather than offering easy pleasure. Banned in New York (1998) captured his working band live and unvarnished. St. Louis Shoes (2003) was a smart detour — reworking tunes by St. Louis-associated composers like Scott Joplin and Miles Davis through his own harmonic lens, proof he could honor tradition without imitating it.

Osby has also spent real energy on the next generation, both as a bandleader who hired young players before anyone else noticed them — Jason Moran among the most notable — and later running his own label, Inner Circle Music, as a launching pad for musicians who didn't fit neatly into major-label categories. That instinct, to build rooms for people who think differently, might end up being as important as anything he recorded himself.