The first pianists who engaged in the avant garde jazz movement of the 1960s faced an overwhelming situation tied to two foundational figures of the music. On one hand, Ornette Coleman had set a standard for groups to dispense with the piano altogether. On the other, Cecil Taylor had carved a new path for the instrument, but one that led to his own, strongly individual music. During the music’s first decade, there were few pianists who found a space to develop an original voice between these two poles. Bobby Few, who died on 7 January 2021 in Levallois-Perret, was one of them.

The early history of avant garde jazz was of a musical form opening up, of new areas of expression being uncovered. Some musicians chose to occupy these areas exclusively, while for others freedom meant being able to leap across a now wider world. Bobby Few belonged to the latter category. Intertwined with the discovery of new modes of expression was the question of the music’s meaning and of its function in a world in crisis. Throughout his life, Few found a simple answer that set him apart: he played music to make people happy.

A simple answer, but a difficult thing to do. Few was primarily known for his work in the Frank Wright Quartet, a band received in 1970s Europe as a representative of free jazz’s outer edges, but his versatility is illustrated by a casual instance of online referencing, a listing of 2002’s Let It Rain, as “children’s music.” This pianist would not have objected. Although possessing an extensive résumé including work with Albert Ayler, Steve Lacy and Sunny Murray, Few was a musician seemingly adverse to projecting a star persona. He embraced performances in small bars in Paris, a city where he spent five decades, assuming the role of the entertainer, singing while accompanying himself in a style that many avant-gardistes would have considered anathema.

“I believe my music is a mix of energy and romanticism. It is more mature today than it was in the 60s, closer to the audience. It is more personal than ever,” Few told Jazz Hot magazine in 2002. “To have personality, you need to have the courage to present your music independently of what others might think. Otherwise, you lose what constitutes your identity trying to duplicate a blueprint. This is how your profound identity can be revealed: nourish it and allow it to assert itself.”

Few’s versatility was nurtured in the industrial Midwest after the Second World War. Born Robert Lee Few Junior in Cleveland, Ohio on 21 October 1935, he was the son of Robert Senior, a maître d'hôtel at a white country club, and Winifred, an amateur violinist. Starting with private classical piano lessons at seven, Few discovered jazz through his father’s copies of Jazz At The Philharmonic records, and started to study the music. While enrolled at the East Technical High School, where mechanics and soldering were taught, he studied theory and composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

In the 1950s, Cleveland possessed a dynamic club scene. With his father helping with bookings, Few began to perform on the local circuit as a teenager with a group called The Metronomes. After high school, Few was already advanced enough to put together a quintet made up of significantly older musicians that experienced some success. Simultaneously, he worked a variety of jobs, including postman, door-to-door salesman and crystal polisher. Cleveland was a regular stop for musicians working on the national circuit. When in town, John Coltrane visited bassist Bob Cunningham, Few’s cousin and bandmate, a relationship that led to several up close encounters. During a Miles Davis gig, pianist Red Garland stopped while he was playing a blues number and offered the young Few a chance to take over. Despite his terrified reply of “no thanks”, Few found himself at the piano, playing in the wrong key and pierced by the trumpeter's infamous glare. Rescued by bassist Paul Chambers, Few eventually left with Davis’s approval.

For a short while, Few mysteriously appeared as Ahbob Wef, while his bassist partner in the East Jazz Trio, Cevera Jeffries, became Ahrevex Siereffe. The group, who posed all-smiles in front of a Cadillac on an advertisement, became between 1961–64 one of the top local bands and garnered a few mentions in the national jazz press. Playing in a style described by Few as “advanced bebop”, the band’s repertoire included Thelonious Monk compositions, which was unusual at the time, and originals that Few would continue playing over the years. Those included “Church People”, a dedication to his Baptist minister grandfather.

An important influence early on was pianist Erroll Garner, who Few described as possessing the water-like fluidity that had previously drawn him to the music of Debussy and Chopin. Elemental motion, like water or a tornado, and a feeling of constant rotation, would become defining characteristics of Few’s mature style, and his distinctive answer to the problem of how to use the piano in a music not based on chord progressions. That style crystallised in late 60s New York. One of Few’s childhood friends, and an occasional baseball and music partner, was Albert Ayler. The saxophonist was never truly at ease in the Cleveland music community, and soon started to travel. In the early 1960s, he had begun to make a name for himself among a small group of musicians in New York’s Village who played the New Thing, that was heard by few and often deeply misunderstood.

At Ayler’s advice, Few moved to New York with Jeffries during the second half of the 1960s. Already 30 and possessing 15 years of experience, Few took this step while his playing was still based on conventional chord progressions. Saxophonist Booker Ervin, who occupied with pianist Randy Weston the floors above Few’s Lower East Side apartment, gave him his first recording break on The In Between, a January 1968 hard bop Blue Note session. Few’s Club appearances included work with former Count Basie saxophonist Frank Foster’s big band at the Village Vanguard, and with saxophonists Jackie McLean and Frank Wright at Slugs’ in the Far East.

The partnership with Wright was a turning point for Few, who had heard Cecil Taylor but did not know how to approach free playing. “I got with Frank Wright and he offered to work on this new approach. It was as sudden as a gift from heaven,” Few told Jazz Magazine. “My style completely changed, I started to play in a new direction. And after six months, I was completely into it,” Already a well-rounded musician, Few did not fill a blank slate with avant garde techniques. Rather, he expanded and inflected an already strong command of various jazz styles. A significant change from his Cleveland days was the setting in which the new music could be played: without much public exposure, it was by default “art music”. 1969 completed the shift in Few’s career. After his first important international job – in Scotland and Jamaica with hit singer Brook Benton – Few played his first major New York concert in the summer of 1969 at Carnegie Recital Hall with Frank Wright. He also recorded with Ayler on Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe for the Impulse! label, the saxophonist’s last album before his death, which included singing and radio-friendly arrangements.

In late 1969, Few, saxophonist Noah Howard and drummer Muhammad Ali travelled to France to play a festival organized by BYG Records to launch its now classic Actuel series with a bang. It featured an extensive roster of cutting-edge free players next to rock bands such as Pink Floyd. Linking up with Frank Wright, the Howard-Wright Quartet became one of the festival’s sensations. Recordings and noted appearances in Paris followed, including at Le Chat Qui Pêche, a key club of the capital. Shortly after the group’s arrival in France, Few met his second wife and partner of 50 years, Simone.

In a Downbeat review of a two and a half hour New York performance, Robert Palmer described it as “Like a trip back into time, but with the sharp immediacy of the present,” capturing some of the group’s uniqueness. “Wright played a spiritual tune straight out of the Protestant Hymnal, lovingly and with feeling. Then he and Howard fell into powerful blues riffing again jumping off from a very simple, distilled phrase. With Few’s funky chording behind them and Ali kicking things along, the quartet sounded like a 1950s rhythm and blues band, freer to be sure, but with the same power, inflection and drive. Few played a fantastic solo that transmuted soul stylings into a polytonal explosion of interweaving lines, with the down-home feeling intact, and the horns returned to riff out a flag-waving finale.” After bassist Alan Silva replaced Howard, the Frank Wright Quartet settled in France and cemented a reputation for unmatched energy. “I’d see them play in Paris and would almost blank out,” saxophonist Glenn Spearman told Cadence. “They would reach heights, they’d have six, seven hundred people packed in the American Center every other Friday. There was no comparison.” The band, renamed Center Of The World, toured extensively in the Europe of the 1970s. Its prolonged work was a rarity in the avant garde field. Through a cooperative self-production platform the group released its own recordings as well as individual members’ projects.

What did it all mean? “For me, Frank Wright’s ensemble is a dance band,” pianist François Tusques once remarked. Few’s latter day trademark “Let It Rain” theme was also dance music. For Bobby Few, the swirling, intense free music of the 1970s was an expression of “love, joy, and happiness,” no different in essence from his straight-ahead explorations of the short song form with drummer Noel McGhie in the 1990s or with his last trio with bassist Harry Swift and drummer Ichiro Onoe.

Few remained a go-to pianist for projects in the “black classical music” tradition – a term he preferred to free jazz – taking place in Paris. New York’s Vision Festival, the closest thing in avant garde jazz to an institution honouring the music’s historical pioneers, featured Few in a solo recital in 2000. The concert was documented by Boxholder, the label responsible for most of the pianist’s output in the decade, often with saxophonist Avram Fefer. The next year, a reformed Center Of The World performed during an evening dedicated to the memory of Frank Wright.

In the 2010s, in addition to his own group, Few worked regularly with saxophonist Jacques de Lignières. Few appeared on screen and contributed to the soundtrack of Michel Gondry's L’Écume Des Jours, a 2013 adaptation of Boris Vian’s 1947 novel Froth On The Daydream. In 2017, he was the subject of a documentary titled Bobby Few: Musical Hurricane. The pianist’s most improbable credit was probably pretending to play an Elvis Presley song with a cast on his arm in a 2014 Heineken beer commercial shot in Hong Kong.

Soprano saxophonist and fellow American expatriate Steve Lacy, whose sextet Few joined in the 1980s and with whom he made more than 20 recordings, was among his greatest admirers. “I was crazy about Bobby right away,” Lacy said in The Wire 225. “He was the first pianist I heard after Cecil that had something to say of his own... he was a pianist that had his own thing post-Cecil and was not hung up on Cecil. In fact, he wasn’t hung up on anything.” Bobby Few set out to do a difficult thing, play music to make people happy. He could say that he had reached his goal, going down his own path. “For me, the spirit of jazz is first and foremost to express oneself freely,” he wrote in Au Duc Des Lombards. “Then, one should not repeat oneself. One should be able to improvise, to continue to seek, to move ahead without a safety net, sometimes even without knowing what path to take. What matters is to go there; to move ahead using the spirit of the void to fill in the spirit of nothingness, make the two meet so that something comes out of it.”

Subscribers can read Phil Freeman’s interview with Noah Howard, covering the BYG Actuel years and collaborations with Few, via Exact Editions. Pierre Crépon’s Bobby Few playlist can be enjoyed here.