US jazz musician Henry Grimes died last week. Born in Philadelphia on 3 November 1935, Grimes took up double bass in high school. He studied at Juilliard and by the mid-1950s was an established jazz musician, playing with Sonny Rollins, Thelonious Monk and Lee Konitz, among others, and as second bassist alongside Charles Mingus.

In the mid-1960s Grimes performed on many key free jazz albums, including Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures, Don Cherry’s Complete Communion, Symphony For Improvisers and Where Is Brooklyn?, Pharoah Sanders’s Tauhid, Archie Shepp’s On This Night, and Albert Ayler’s Live At The Village Vanguard. The Henry Grimes Trio album The Call, featuring Perry Robinson and Tom Price, was released in 1965 by ESP Disk. Two years later, in 1967, he left New York and disappeared under the radar for more than 30 years. Many rumours of his whereabouts, and even his death, circulated until he was tracked down in Los Angeles in 2002 by social worker-cum-jazz fanatic Marshall Marrotte. He'd stopped playing, Grimes said, in order to “gain perspectives. It was a way of imposing self-isolation.” He instead spent time writing poetry – signs along the road was published by buddy's knife jazzedition in 2007 – and working in various non-music related jobs.

Soon after, he returned to the stage with the help of William Parker, who gave him a double bass. Grimes quickly made up for lost time. In 2003 he was awarded a returning hero's welcome at Vision Festival in New York. He subsequently toured extensively and recorded albums with David Murray, Hamid Drake, Marc Ribot, Rashied Ali, Marilyn Crispell, Paul Dunmall, Andrew Cyrille and others, as well as taking up a number of residencies and teaching posts offering workshops and master classes. In 2016 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Arts for Art/Vision Festival. He died from Covid-19 complications on 15 April.

Read Marshall Marrotte's interview first printed in the pages of The Wire 227 and available now for free via Exact Editions. After that, read Howard Mandel's report in The Wire 290, documenting Grimes's return.