Norris Jones became Sirone sometime in the late 1960s, around the same time he landed in New York and found himself in the thick of the loft jazz scene. He'd come up in Atlanta, and by the time he hit the city he already had a sound — big, woody, aggressive when it needed to be, but always listening. That combination made him one of the most sought-after bassists for musicians who were tearing up the rulebook, people like Cecil Taylor and Marion Brown, who needed someone who could hold a free improvisation together without flattening it into something safe.

The group that defines him is the Revolutionary Ensemble, the trio he formed with violinist Leroy Jenkins and drummer Jerome Cooper in 1971. No horns, no piano — just violin, bass, and drums, which on paper sounds like a chamber music experiment and in practice sounded like nothing else happening in jazz at the time. Sirone's role in that group was almost architectural. Jenkins could fly off into pure sound and Cooper could switch instruments mid-set, and Sirone was the one who made sure the whole structure didn't collapse. Listen to their records from that decade and you hear a bassist who understood that holding things down didn't mean playing it safe.

He also spent real time with Cecil Taylor, including stretches in the 1970s where Taylor's music demanded a bass player who could match that density of sound without getting buried in it. That's not a job for someone who plays it cautious. Sirone had the strength and the ear to stay present inside music that was often happening at full volume and full speed, finding pockets of groove and tension that a lesser player would have missed entirely.

Later in his life he moved to Berlin, where he kept working and teaching, staying connected to the European improvised music scene that had always been hospitable to American free jazz players. He never became a household name, and that's fine — he wasn't chasing that. What he built instead was a body of work that other bassists studied closely, because he showed there was a way to play free music that stayed rooted in blues and swing even as it blew past every other convention. If you want to understand how a rhythm section can function without a piano telling everyone where the harmony is supposed to go, start with the Revolutionary Ensemble and work backward from there.