Peter Apfelbaum grew up in Berkeley at a moment when that city was practically designed to produce musicians who refused to stay in their lane. He picked up saxophone, started messing with keyboards and percussion, and by his early twenties had assembled a loose, shifting group of players he called the Hieroglyphics Ensemble. It wasn't a conventional jazz band so much as a traveling orchestra for ideas — reggae horns next to Ethiopian scales next to funk grooves next to free improvisation, all stitched together by charts that felt more like invitations than instructions.

The connection that shaped him most was with Don Cherry (1988), the trumpeter who'd spent decades chasing a borderless idea of what jazz could absorb. Apfelbaum played in Cherry's bands and clearly absorbed the older man's whole worldview — that African music, Indian music, Caribbean music, and bebop were all branches of the same tree, not separate categories to be kept apart. You can hear that lesson in everything Apfelbaum has done since, whether he's leading his own large ensemble or sitting in as a sideman.

He's spent a lot of his career being the person other musicians call when they want color and texture rather than a straight-ahead horn solo. He's worked with Charlie Hunter, contributing to that guitarist's groove-heavy, genre-blurring records, and he's logged time with drummer Jack DeJohnette, whose own restless curiosity made for an obvious fit. Apfelbaum plays keys as comfortably as he plays saxophone, and that flexibility is part of why bandleaders keep bringing him in — he fills whatever gap needs filling, melodic or rhythmic, without making a fuss about it.

If you're new to him, don't go in expecting a tidy introduction to a single sound. Apfelbaum's music can feel like a party that's slightly too crowded, in the best way — too many ideas, too many rhythms, somehow making room for all of them anyway. Start with a Hieroglyphics Ensemble record and let it wash over you before you try to pick apart the influences. He's not chasing purity. He's chasing the feeling of a room full of different musics getting along.