Turrentine grew up in Pittsburgh — the same city that produced Ahmad Jamal, Ray Brown, and Art Blakey — and he came up fast. He was playing professionally as a teenager and by his early twenties had already done stints with Lowell Fulson and then Max Roach. That background in blues-rooted rhythm and blues bands shaped everything about how he approached the saxophone. He never lost that feel, even when he was recording for Blue Note and running with some of the sharpest modern jazz players around.

His Blue Note years in the 1960s are the core of his catalog, and they hold up extremely well. Albums like Up at Minton's (1961) and Dearly Beloved (1961) show exactly what he was about: a huge, slightly raspy tone, phrases that breathe and swing without rushing, and a bluesy sensibility that keeps everything grounded. He wasn't trying to dazzle you with technical acrobatics. He wanted to make you feel something, and he usually did. His then-wife Shirley Scott played organ on many of these sessions, and that pairing became one of the defining sounds of soul jazz — tenor and organ locked in like they'd been rehearsing together for years, which of course they had.

The organ combo format suited Turrentine perfectly. There's a directness to it — no piano filling in the harmonies, just the organist holding down the bottom and the tenor out front doing the work. He recorded with Jimmy Smith too, and those sessions have a particular electricity. The Tiger (1967) and related recordings with Smith show two heavyweights who knew exactly how to push each other without getting in the way. The music is gutsy and straightforward in the best possible sense.

By the early 1970s, Turrentine moved toward a more commercial sound — smoother production, funk-influenced grooves, pop crossover ambitions. The CTI Records period brought him wider audiences and some genuinely enjoyable records, even if they divided listeners who preferred the rawer Blue Note stuff. Sugar (1970) became his best-known album from this era, built around a lush, accessible sound that still had enough of his blues feeling to avoid feeling hollow. Some jazz purists wrote this period off, but that's a bit unfair — he was still playing well, just in a different room.

What you want to tell someone before they dig in is this: Turrentine is not a difficult artist. You don't need to do homework before you press play. His music asks nothing of you except that you pay attention, and it rewards that attention every time. Start with the Blue Note records, get comfortable with that sound, and then follow the thread wherever it leads. He made a lot of records — more than fifty as a leader — and the quality stays remarkably consistent. That's not an accident. That's someone who knew what he was doing and kept doing it.