Start with the easy part: Jimmy Giuffre wrote "Four Brothers" for Woody Herman's band, the tune that gave the world that saxophone-section sound — three tenors and a baritone weaving around each other like they were reading each other's minds. It's a swing-era classic, people still study the voicings. If Giuffre had stopped there, he'd be a footnote, a good one, the guy who figured out a neat horn arrangement in 1947.

But he didn't stop there. He moved west, played with Shorty Rogers and the Lighthouse All-Stars, did the whole cool jazz thing competently. Then somewhere in the mid-fifties he got interested in subtraction instead of addition. His trio with Jim Hall and bassist Ralph Pena, and later with valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, had no drums, no piano, and barely any volume. It sounded like chamber music that had wandered into a jazz club by accident — folk melodies, blues fragments, everybody listening hard and playing soft. Traveling Light (1958) is a good entry point if you want to hear what that feels like.

Then he went further still. By 1961 and 1962, working with pianist Paul Bley and a young Steve Swallow on bass, Giuffre was making records like Fusion (1961), Thesis (1961), and Free Fall (1962) that barely sound like jazz at all in the conventional sense — no steady pulse, no chord changes to speak of, just three musicians breathing together in real time. Almost nobody bought these records. They were too quiet to be avant-garde and too strange to be background music, and they landed in a gap nobody was shopping in. Decades later, people figured out this was some of the most advanced small-group improvising of the era, years ahead of where free jazz was headed.

Giuffre never got the attention Ornette Coleman or Cecil Taylor got for pushing boundaries, partly because his version of pushing boundaries involved turning the volume down rather than up. He kept working into the nineties, still interested in space and restraint when most of his contemporaries had moved on or passed on. If you want to understand how quiet a jazz record can get and still hold your attention, this is the guy to go to.