Oliver Nelson

Oliver Nelson was born on the fourth of June 1932 in St. Louis, Missouri, to a musical house — a brother on saxophone, a sister at the piano. He had the piano at six and the saxophone at eleven, turned professional at fifteen in the territory bands — Jeter-Pillars, George Hudson, Nat Towles — and at eighteen sat in Louis Jordan's reed section. The Marines took him to Japan and Korea with the Third Division band; home again, he studied composition and theory at Washington University and Lincoln University, completing his master's in 1958.

New York gave him Erskine Hawkins and Wild Bill Davis, the Apollo's arranging desk, tenor tours with Quincy Jones, and six Prestige albums of his own. Then, on the twenty-third of February 1961 at Van Gelder's studio, he set seven men around his horn — Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, George Barrow, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, Roy Haynes — and recorded The Blues and the Abstract Truth. "Stolen Moments" became a standard the day it left the sleeve, and the album now rests in the National Recording Registry. His pen served everyone: Jimmy Smith's Walk on the Wild Side, Wes Montgomery, Billy Taylor, the big-band suite Afro/American Sketches.

Hollywood called in 1967 and he became one of television's most sought-after composers — the theme of The Six Million Dollar Man his best-known signature, with seasons of Ironside and episodes of Columbo and Night Gallery under his baton, and films from Death of a Gunfighter to Skullduggery. He wrote the Berlin Dialogue for Orchestra for the Berliner Jazztage, put Patterns for Improvisation on every serious student's stand, and his 1969 clinic at Washington University seeded a generation — Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, Hamiet Bluiett among the students.

The pace exacted its price: a heart attack took him in Los Angeles on the twenty-eighth of October 1975, at forty-three. Honored be Oliver Nelson, who wrote the truth abstract and played the blues plain.