John Lurie showed up in New York at the end of the 1970s without much formal training and without much patience for jazz orthodoxy either. He put together a band called the Lounge Lizards, dressed them in suits, and started playing something that sounded like jazz but kept winking at you the whole time. He called it 'fake jazz,' which was a joke and also not a joke. The band could swing hard when they felt like it, but there was always a layer of punk sneer and theater underneath, like they'd read the Charles Mingus playbook and decided to perform it as a bit.

The thing is, the joke had real chops behind it. The Lounge Lizards (1981) holds up because the band wasn't faking the musicianship, just the reverence. Lurie's saxophone playing was blunt and physical rather than technically dazzling, closer to a blues shout than a bebop line, and that rawness is what made the downtown scene take notice. He surrounded himself with serious players, including his brother Evan Lurie on piano and guitarist Marc Ribot, who could bend a chord into something unsettling without breaking a sweat.

Lurie's other life ran parallel to the music the whole time. He became close with Jim Jarmusch and ended up starring in and scoring several of his films, including Down by Law, where his deadpan presence fit the mood as naturally as his saxophone fit a Lounge Lizards arrangement. Later he created and hosted Fishing with John, a deliberately absurd fake-nature show that let him apply the same dry, subversive sense of humor to television that he'd already applied to jazz. None of this was a detour from music so much as the same sensibility finding new outlets.

Lurie stepped back from performing in the 2000s after a long struggle with Lyme disease, and he's spent the years since mostly painting, which turns out to suit his temperament just as well as a horn did. He was never chasing virtuosity for its own sake, and he never pretended otherwise. What he left behind is a handful of records that still sound sly and a little dangerous, made by a guy who treated the whole enterprise of jazz with enough respect to mess with it properly.