American jazz pianist and composer, born January 3, 1919 in New York, died April 12, 1963, San Juan Hill, Manhattan, New York.
Nichols originally played in bop groups, but is best known today for his own highly original compositions, program music which combines bop, Dixieland, and West Indian music with harmonies derived from Erik Satie and Béla Bartók.
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While this innovative pianist-composer shares a fascination for disjunctive harmonies, complex rhythmic interplay, and oblique vocalized melodies with his better-known contemporary, Thelonious Monk, Herbie Nichols's more elongated gait and linear propulsion suggest 20th-century classicism and the polyphony of New Orleans, much as Monk's more jagged phrasing seems to extend on devices originated by icons of the Harlem stride school and the bent-note inflections of rural blues guitarists. These Blue Note sides represent the complete output of five visionary sessions Nichols recorded for producer Alfred Lion in 1955-1956, and reflect the pianist's profoundly drumlike aesthetic in which melodies derive directly from complex root syncopations. Nichols's ability to orchestrate percussive passages on the fly inspires a thrilling level of contrapuntal interplay from drummers Art Blakey and Max Roach that serves to transform his intricate song-forms into edgy, propulsive drum concertos. More significantly, Nichols eschews empty riffing in favor of a deconstructionist approach in which thematic ideas are recast in a spacious, loping, orchestral style that make medium strolls like "Lady Sings the Blues" and minor gallops such as "Riff Primitiff" so darkly romantic and hypnotically swinging, as if Nichols could keep extending and elongating his azure melodic elisions for eternity. --Chip Stern
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Herbie doesn't improvise extended melodies over the changes; he tends to stay close to the head with constantly changing emphases and all kinds of little side-trips. This music is a landmark of modern jazz piano and composition. -- Jazz Times