David Murray was born and raised in Oakland, California, where he began his first studies in music under the tutorship of his own mother, Catherine, and which he left in 1975 in order to pursue a career in jazz. In New York, he began to collaborate with countless musicians of many different styles and aesthetical affiliations (Don Cherry, Anthony Braxton and Sunny Murray, among many others) but, at a time still dominated by the impact of the avant-garde movement, it soon became notorious that, despite his full comprehension and respect for such trends, the young saxophonist’s more natural means of expression was closer to bebop than from free jazz. In 1976, David Murray founded his first group as co-leader, the World Saxophone Quartet, alongside Oliver Lake, Hamiet Bluiett and Jullius Hemphil and began a particularly collaborative phase with, among other influential jazz and rock musicians, Max, Roach, Randy Weston and the band Grateful Dead, while at the same time composing soundtracks for cinema and theater. During the following decades, Murray became notorious for being one the precursors of emerging musical forms such as jazz fusion, world music and pan-African music due to his several projects with musicians from very different backgrounds, namely the group QuestLove Afro-Picks, featuring Tony Allen, legendary drummer of Fela Kuti’s bands. In parallel, his personal work kept bifurcating steadily into many different formats and artistic intentions – like, for example, his reinterpretation and rearrangement of great jazz composers, among them Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole, or the collaborations with pop music stars such as singer Macy Gray or hip-hop producer Kanye West. In more recent years, David Murray has been focused on his partnership with vocalists and his own-led ensembles, alongside fundamental musicians of contemporary jazz such as Jason Moran, Geri Allen or Gregory Porter, just to name a few.

In Guimarães Jazz’s 2022 edition, David Murray will revisit the repertoire of his innovative Octet, an iconic group in his career that is currently considered by many music critics as one of the most influential ensembles of the 1980’s and 1990’. A formation whose original line-up of musicians included jazz luminaries such as Henry Threadgill or Buth Morris and The Octet Revival features a group of highly-skilled musicians of very different ages and aesthetical affiliations, such as percussionist Hamid Drake or bassist Brad Jones, and casts, according to Murray’s words, an “ecumenic” glace over one of the many innovative contributions to the music of a composer with four decades of work at the highest level of jazz.