Herbie Nichols: 3 January 1919 - 12 April 1963

Tonight, Plushmusic cameras record Simon Nabatov’s tribute to fellow New Yorker Herbie Nichols…

“Do you know that I’ve never been written up? I read the magazines and I see write-ups on everybody. All kinds of guys have articles written on them, and I know that I must be better than some of those guys. I know some people who think I’m important, musically. Well I don’t know about that, but they say I’m a nice guy but I don’t carry myself right. Now what does that mean? Anyway, I’ve never been written up.”

Quoted in A.B. Spellman, Four Lives in the Bebop Business (1985).

Herbie Nichols was born in 1919 in New York of immigrant parents from St. Kitt’s and Trinidad. His career began in 1937, and he spent much of his early years playing Dixieland to earn a living. By the mid-1940s, he drifted toward bebop, but his abstract expressionist playing style was ahead of its time. His friend and contemporary Thelonious Monk was out there, but at least you could play him. What, though, was a jobbing pianist to do with Nichols’ mash-up of bop, Dixieland, and West Indian music with harmonies derived from Erik Satie and Béla Bartók?

Nichols didn’t record much. His compositions were too long, too hard to absorb: record producers felt Nichols’ music wouldn’t click with jazz-buying public. For the most part they were right – but Nichols did touch the hearts of fellow jazz musicians. His best-known song, Lady Sings the Blues, was recorded by Billie Holiday.

In 1947 Nichols begged Blue Note to record him. Eight years later, co-founder Alfred Lion finally relented, and Nichols recorded his own compositions in five sessions for Blue Note between May 1955 and April 1956. Occasionally, he lectured on his own music and performed some trio selections, but for the most part he was an accompanist for traditionalists. He died in 1963.