Dreaming of the Masters

Michael White was an American jazz violinist who was born on May 24, 1930 in Houston and grew up in Oakland. He took up the violin when he was six years old, and his initial career break occurred in 1965 when he played with the John Handy Quintet at their infamous Monterey Jazz Festival set. 

During his long career, White has played alongside John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra, McCoy Tyner, Eric Dolphy, Wes Montgomery, Joe Henderson, and Richard Davis. His music influences and techniques incorporate Western, Middle, and Far Eastern classical music, as well as blues, R&B, and the jazz tradition.  His signature sound was a sort of double stop produced by plucking a string on the neck of the violin while he was simultaneously bowing.  White was among the first to play the violin in an avant-garde jazz setting and in the late 1960s he became one of the first jazz violinists to play jazz-rock fusion with his band The Fourth Way.

White's first album as a leader, 1971's Spirit Dance on Impulse! Records, contained the song John Coltrane Was Here, a tribute to the towering Impulse! figurehead.  Somehow, that LP manifested in our record collection sometime around 1975, our first introduction to Michael White. In the mid 1990s, after a long period of obscurity, he performed in the reunited John Handy Quintet and in 1997, he recorded Motion Pictures, an album with guitarist Bill Frisell.  The song Mechanical Man from his 2006 album Voices won the 6th Annual Independent Music Award for Best Jazz Song. White eventually settled in Los Angeles. 

Michael White died on December 6, 2016.  His creative musicianship and innovative approach to the violin essentially paved the way for other subsequent violinists such as Jean Luc Ponty, Michael Urbaniak, Sugarcane Harris, and Papa John Creach.  His style and influence are still apparent today, in musicians as diverse as Taiwan's C Spencer Yeh.