Christopher Dell, Jonas Westergaard, Christian Lillinger and John Tchicai
Dell, Westergaard, Lillinger featuring John Tchicai
(jazzwerkstatt 128)

THE tenor saxophonist John Tchicai was born in Copenhagen in 1936 to a Danish mother and Congolese father, who had met when they were both waiters at the city’s Aarhus Pleasure Gardens. 

He studied at the Royal Danish Music Conservatory, heard the touring avant-garde jazzmen Archie Shepp and Bill Dixon at a festival in Helsinki and pursued them to New York, where he played alongside them as a member of New York Contemporary Five. In 1965 he played with John Coltrane on the epochal Ascension album session. He also recorded with Albert Ayler, and in 1969 found himself in Cambridge, performing and recording with John Lennon and Yoko Ono: altogether, a beginning in professional music of many dreams. 

During the next two decades, Tchicai spent much of his career in Europe, teaching full time. In 1982 he joined Pierre Dorge’s New Jungle Orchestra in Copenhagen and made some powerful records with them. In the ’90s he returned Stateside to southern California, but kept a presence too in France. Always a free spirit who bonded closely with young musicians, he died in October 2012.