Shaw grew up in Newark, New Jersey, surrounded by serious music from an early age — his father sang gospel, and the local scene was rich enough to push a young player fast. By his late teens he was already in New York, serious enough to catch the attention of Eric Dolphy, with whom he briefly worked before Dolphy's death in 1964. That early connection to the avant-garde was real and lasting. Shaw never became a free jazz player exactly, but he absorbed enough of that openness to keep his playing from ever getting too comfortable.

What makes Shaw distinctive is the interval choices. Where most hard bop trumpeters lean on thirds and blues-based lines, Shaw was constantly reaching for fourths and tritones, building phrases that feel angular without sounding academic. It's music that keeps you slightly off balance in a good way — you think you know where the line is going and then it turns somewhere unexpected. Woody Shaw Concert Ensemble at the Berliner Jazztage (1976) is a good place to hear this clearly. The writing is open and spacious, and Shaw's solos have this logic to them that rewards repeated listening.

He had a productive run with Dexter Gordon as a sideman in the mid-1970s, and that experience playing in a hard-swinging context alongside a giant of the music clearly did him good. His own albums for Columbia in the late 1970s — Rosewood (1978) chief among them — caught him at a peak. Rosewood (1978) especially is the record to start with: it has the whole band locked in, the writing is excellent, and Shaw sounds absolutely confident without being showy. Louis Hayes and Ronnie Mathews are both on that record and worth your attention in their own right.

Shaw also had a long and important relationship with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, the kind of hard bop training ground that sharpened his rhythmic instincts without cramping his harmonic ideas. He moved between that world and the more experimental circles around Horace Silver and later Jackie McLean with unusual ease, which tells you something about how broadly musical he was. McLean in particular recognized something in Shaw early and gave him room to develop.

His later years were hard. He lost his sight progressively due to a genetic condition, and the circumstances of his death — struck by a subway train in New York in 1989 — were awful. He was 44. The discography he left behind is deep enough that you can spend real time in it, and the best of it holds up completely. If you've been sleeping on him because the name doesn't ring as loud as Miles Davis or Freddie Hubbard, that's exactly the kind of gap this music was made to fill.