Loren Pickford

Sometimes a very intense and aggressive player, alto saxman Loren Pickford has often favored a big, robust sound along the lines of Jackie McLean and Phil Woods. Pickford, however, is also a lover of "cool jazz" and explored his softer, more lyrical side in the late '90s. The altoist (who plays the flute and piano as secondary instruments) was born in New Orleans and raised in Fresno, California, but he has also lived in Kansas City, L.A., San Francisco, Paris, New York, and Chicago. As a young musician in the 1960s, Pickford listened to jazz extensively and hoped to someday earn his living playing bop, but it was R&B that often paid the bills. After backing Jackie Wilson on tour and writing horn arrangements for the late soul icon, Pickford went on to back Percy Sledge, the Chi-Lites, Tyrone Davis, Clarence Carter, and other R&B greats of the 1960s and 1970s. It was during the 1970s that he also backed rocker Van Morrison and served as bandleader for the popular CBS sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show. But his passion for acoustic jazz remained, and in the mid-'80s he got a nice break when trumpeter/singer Chet Baker hired him to play piano and/or alto on some live dates. Though playing with Baker (who died a few years later in 1988) called for restraint and an appreciation of "cool jazz," Pickford took a much more forceful approach when, in 1986, he recorded his debut album, Song for a Blue Planet, for Cexton. That album was followed by 1990's equally hard-driving Dancing in the Spirit Fires on Cexton and Elysian Fields on Dinosaur. The late '90s found Pickford living in New Orleans, where he continued to play straight-ahead jazz (both hard bop and cool jazz as well as some Dixieland) and did his share of zydeco, Cajun, funk, R&B, and world music gigs. He remained active as a leader and sideman during the new millennium, releasing three CDs during the 2000s under his own name on his Earth Spirit label, Mid City, River Spirits (featuring Pickford's flute playing on a world music-flavored set), and Arcturus, the latter recorded shortly before Loren and his wife Sheila were forced by Hurricane Katrina to leave their longtime New Orleans home and move to Kansas City, Missouri. Loren Pickford subsequently became a key member of the Kansas City jazz scene, before returning to New Orleans with his wife in January 2010.
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