“Samuel Carthorne Rivers Jr. creates scenes, has done everywhere he’s parked himself during a 50-year-plus career in music devoted to embracing the unknown.” That’s how a DownBeat writer described Sam Rivers (1923-2011), the jazz innovator born in El Reno, Oklahoma, on this day in 1923. Scenes from his extraordinary career included playing tenor sax with Miles Davis in Japan in 1964, spending several years touring with Dizzy Gillespie in the late 1980s, and composing a ballad inspired by and named for his wife, “Beatrice.”
