If you only know one thing about Jimmy Lyons, know this: he was the alto saxophonist standing next to Cecil Taylor for almost his entire adult musical life, from around 1960 until his death in 1986. That's a long marriage in a music where most bands don't last five years, let alone twenty-five. Taylor's piano could be a hurricane, all clusters and sprays of notes with no obvious handholds, and Lyons was the one guy who could ride inside that storm without getting swept away.

What made Lyons work in that context is that he never actually abandoned bebop. Listen closely and you can hear Charlie Parker underneath everything — the way he shapes a phrase, the swing he keeps even when the rhythm section has stopped keeping conventional time. Most alto players who went into free jazz either rejected bebop outright or never had it in their ears to begin with. Lyons kept it as a private language and then applied it to music that had no chord changes to resolve against. It's an odd combination on paper. On record it sounds completely natural, almost inevitable, like he found a door nobody else noticed.

He shows up on the Cecil Taylor records people actually own — Unit Structures (1966) and Conquistador! (1966) — holding his own against a band that includes two bassists and a drummer playing in fragments. But don't stop there. Lyons also led his own dates, smaller and more intimate than anything with Taylor's name on it, where you get to hear what his alto sounds like without a piano detonating behind him. Nuba (1980) is a good one to track down — quieter, more spacious, with his longtime partner Karen Borca on bassoon giving the music a strange, woody color you don't hear much in this corner of jazz.

He never became a star, and that's partly just bad timing — free jazz saxophonists who weren't named Ornette Coleman or Albert Ayler had a hard time getting attention, and Lyons spent decades essentially as somebody's sideman, even if that somebody was one of the most demanding bandleaders in the music. But musicians who played with him talk about him with real respect, not polite respect. He wasn't chasing innovation for its own sake. He was just playing Charlie Parker's language at a speed and intensity Parker never tried, inside a band that gave him nowhere easy to hide.