Nelson grew up in St. Louis, came up through rhythm and blues bands, and then put in serious time studying composition formally — both at Washington University and at Lincoln University. That combination of street-level gigging and academic training is all over his music. He could swing hard and write a precise, almost classical voicing in the same breath. By the time he landed in New York in the late 1950s, he had something a lot of the bebop generation lacked: a genuine command of large-scale writing.

The album everyone knows is The Blues and the Abstract Truth (1961), recorded for Impulse! with a lineup that included Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, Bill Evans, and Roy Haynes. That is not a band you assemble by accident. The record has this quality of being simultaneously tight and loose — the arrangements give everyone a clear lane but nobody sounds boxed in. The title track alone, with its simple blues form stretched into something more spacious and deliberate, gives you a clear idea of what Nelson was after: structure that breathes.

What sometimes gets lost is how good a saxophonist Nelson actually was. He had a big, slightly dry tenor tone — not as raw as Sonny Rollins, not as searching as John Coltrane, but immediately identifiable. His alto playing leaned cooler and more precise. He was never going to be the most talked-about horn player of his generation, but on his own sessions he held his own against serious company without any apparent effort.

Through the 1960s, Nelson moved increasingly into studio work and television scoring, eventually relocating to Los Angeles. He wrote for shows like Ironside and The Six Million Dollar Man, and scored a number of films. Some jazz purists treated this as a kind of sellout, which was always a bit unfair. Nelson was doing what a working musician with broad skills does — he took the work seriously and he was very good at it. He also kept recording jazz when he had the chance, with sessions for Impulse! and Flying Dutchman that showed he had not lost the thread.

He died in 1975 at 43, which is young enough to make you wonder what the second half of his career might have looked like. He was getting more comfortable moving between the commercial world and the jazz world on his own terms, and his arranging skills were still clearly developing. What remains is a catalog that rewards digging past the obvious entry point — there are later records and sideman appearances that most listeners have never heard, and they hold up.