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Artist
Hamiet Bluiett
12+ albums
free jazzjazzsaxophoneAvant-GardeAvant-Garde Jazz
about
Hamiet Bluiett (Brooklyn, Illinois, September 16, 1940 - October 4, 2018) was an American jazz baritone saxophonist, clarinetist, and composer. Bluiett co-founded the World Saxophone Quartet. He also played bass saxophone, E-flat alto clarinet, E-flat contra-alto clarinet, and wooden flute. Bluiett also worked with Charles Mingus, Sam Rivers, Babatunde Olatunji, Abdullah Ibrahim, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye a.o.. Hamiet Bluiett was born just north of East St. Louis in Brooklyn, Illinois (also known as Lovejoy), a predominantly African-American village that had been founded as a free black refuge community in the 1830s, and which later became America's first majority-black town. As a child, he studied piano, trumpet, and clarinet, but was attracted most strongly to the baritone saxophone from the age of ten. He began his musical career by playing the clarinet for barrelhouse dances in Brooklyn, Illinois, before joining the Navy band in 1961. He attended Southern Illinois University Carbondale. In his mid-twenties, Bluiett heard Harry Carney (the baritone player in the Duke Ellington band) play in a live concert in Boston, which also made a strong impression on the young Bluiett, providing an example of a baritone saxophonist who played as soloist rather than accompanist. Following his time in the Navy, he returned to the St. Louis area in the mid-1960s. In the late 1960s Bluiett co-founded the Black Artists' Group (BAG) of St. Louis, Missouri, a collective dedicated to fos
