Bunky Green, a staunchly intrepid alto saxophonist and composer who inspired generations of musicians as a jazz educator in both institutional and informal settings, died on March 1 at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. He was 91.
His death was confirmed by Jewel Green, his daughter, who did not provide a cause.
During a long and eventful career, Green had several brushes with mainstream recognition. In his early 20s, he played in bassist Charles Mingus’ band, stepping into an alto saxophone chair vacated by Jackie McLean. He later recorded as a leader for the Cadet and Vanguard labels, enlisting aces like trumpeter Clark Terry and drummer Elvin Jones. But as a nonconformist largely indifferent about the spotlight, Green evaded the hallmarks of commercial jazz success.
“He’s kind of an unsung cat,” Steve Coleman, one of his prime inheritors on alto saxophone, tells WRTI. “Whenever I play his music for young people, they’re always like: ‘Wow! How come I’ve never heard of this guy?’”
Among the multiple answers to that question is one simple fact: Green made a deliberate choice to focus his efforts on jazz pedagogy. He taught at Chicago State University from 1972 to 1989, before moving to Jacksonville to become director of the jazz studies program at the University of North Florida. He served as a president of the International Association for Jazz Education, which inducted him into its Jazz Educators Hall of Fame in 1999. Several years later, he was inducted into the DownBeat Hall of Fame for Jazz Education.
Still, Green’s body of work resonated with those who knew where to find it. Coleman, who knew Green as a larger-than-life presence in Chicago, was one such musician; he pestered Green for lessons but was routinely turned away. (“I don’t want to teach you because you don’t need lessons,” Coleman remembers him saying.)
Another such musician is Rudresh Mahanthappa, who was studying at the Berklee College of Music in the early 1990s when a saxophone teacher handed him a copy of Green’s 1979 release Places We’ve Never Been.
Mahanthappa was floored by the album — in particular, a drone-based composition titled “East & West,” its opening track. “This is exactly what I’m going for,” Mahanthappa remembers thinking. “Like, how do you play stuff that’s grounded in the tradition but looking forward as well? It just spoke to me so directly.” He tracked down and telephoned Green, who was by then on the faculty at UNF, and they later met during an IAJE Conference in Chicago.
“East & West” was informed by a trip that Green had taken in the mid-1960s to Algiers, where he heard a musician playing the mizwad, a traditional single-reed bagpipe, over a drone. Up to that point, he had based his style on a bebop language inherited from Charlie Parker. Resolving to broaden his point of view, Green developed his own approach to intonation and timbre.
“He did all this manipulation with the tone that created almost a microtonal feeling,” Coleman explains. “He had some very unique fingerings on the saxophone, some stuff that’s very non-standard.” Coleman points to Green’s composition “Spacing,” which was recorded on a 1977 Elvin Jones album titled Time Capsule.
In addition to tone, Green had a distinct relationship to time. “He had a unique time feel,” says Coleman. “I used to call it the rubber-band feel, because he would fall way behind the beat, and then all of a sudden, snap back in place.”
Coleman had a chance to document these elements of style when he organized the recording date for Green’s 2006 album Another Place. Recorded two years earlier with Jason Moran on piano, Lonnie Plaxico on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums, it’s an intergenerational summit that honors Green as an elder with his fastball still intact. The album received a five-star review in DownBeat, among other accolades, setting the table for a late resurgence.
Vernice Green, Jr. was born in Milwaukee, Wis., on April 23, 1933, to Vernice and Louhelen Green. He learned to read music in the concert band at Roosevelt Junior High (now Roosevelt Middle School of the Arts), and developed his craft from older musicians on the local scene.
As Green recalled in a 2010 interview with NPR Music, his brief tenure with Mingus was an education unto itself. “I learned what I to this day utilize as my approach: That there’s no such thing as a wrong note,” he said. “It depends on where you move, harmonically, after you play a note. Because if you didn’t have any tension, then there would be no release factor. If everything was so smooth, it would be terrible.”
Green emphasized this principle among others in his teaching. “I studied with him when he first came to UNF, and in a jazz school environment where it’s inherently competitive, it wasn’t about that with him,” recalls Al Maniscalco, a saxophone student who became a close friend. “It didn’t matter that you weren’t the top player in the top band, it was being the best player that you could be, as you.”
Along with Jewel Green, surviving family members include another daughter, Cheryl Green; a son, Vernice Green III; and nine grandchildren. (Another son, Daryl, predeceased him.) Their mother — Bunky’s first wife, Shirley Green — died in 2009. His second wife, Edith Green, known as Edie, died in 2016.
Several years after the warm reception to Another Place, Green was once again featured on an album spearheaded by one of his protégés — in this case, Mahanthappa, who put their dual alto frontline at the heart of a supergroup with Moran, bassist François Moutin, and drummers Jack DeJohnette and Damion Reid. The album, Apex, was met with overwhelming praise, landing Green and Mahanthappa on the cover of DownBeat, and to major festivals around the world.
“Bunky was always a super humble guy,” Mahanthappa reflects. “I think it was meaningful to him. But he was one of these guys that just kind of took everything in stride.”
In an interview with Anil Prasad in 2012, Green made much the same point, appreciatively citing Apex and his partnership with Mahanthappa as an ongoing collaboration. He also connected his musical output back to his teaching. “From the very first day, I have my students understand that the real school is the street — it’s as simple as that,” he said, drawing from his own experience. “You can get an instrument and become an advanced player, but you have to get into the nightclubs or other environments where you’re playing the music. You have to venture into an environment where things aren’t all planned and you’re living very much in the moment.”
