HE’S truly one of the great, if also greatly underestimated, tenor saxophonists in the century of jazz. Ricky Ford, now a septuagenarian, has spent much of his musical life living outside the US in France.

His huge achievement as a 20-year-old, of being invited to join the Duke Ellington Orchestra to fill the vacant chair of Duke’s recently departed legendary tenorist Paul Gonsalves, happened shortly after the maestro’s own death, when his trumpeter son Mercer Ellington inherited the leadership of the orchestra.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1954, Ford grew up in a professional household. “My father was an attorney-at-law, my mother was a nuclear medicine specialist,” he told me. “At 12 I studied drums and played melodica. I started to play saxophone in 1968 and I never looked back. After a few gigs at Wally’s Paradise in Boston, I joined Mercer Ellington in late 1974.”

He studied at the New England Conservatory, and after his second year Ellington tenure he continued a rich jazz life when joined Charles Mingus, staying until 1977, when he began to play in a band led by Mingus’s powerhouse drummer, Danny Richmond, followed by stints with Lionel Hampton and the South African pianist, Abdullah Ibrahim.

Among his albums are jewels like American-African Blues and Manhattan Blues, with the brilliantly protean piano of fellow Massachusetts virtuoso, Jackie Byard, and a luminous joint album with Yusef Lateef, where the two tenorists play tribute to their great saxophone compadres from Sonny Rollins and Joe Henderson to Stanley Turrentine and Wayne Shorter.

“I always loved Yusef,” he exclaimed: “He came to hear me during a concert at Amherst. After the concert he asked me to record with him.”

For one night in February he crossed from Paris to play with a trio of London-based musicians at Soho’s Pizza Express. You couldn't keep me away!

“The pianist, Emile Hinton, is my former student and bassist Larry Bartley and drummer Rod Youngs are two musicians I greatly admire,” he told me.

It was a powerful session, coinciding with the release of his latest album, Paul’s Scene, remembering the saxophonist he replaced in the Ellington Orchestra.

“Once an Ellingtonian, always an Ellingtonian!” he declares in the album’s sleeve notes, remembering his first concert with the orchestra: “The guys made me play on every tune. I’d stand up there and all these cats had their heads down, just listening. They couldn’t believe what they heard. ‘Where’d this guy come from? He knows the whole book!’ they said to each other.”

In Soho, Ford’s horn gushed with life-force, with his power of improvisation in the strongest, most muscular fettle. Beginning with the Kenny Graham opus Mabulala (Graham, an Ealing-born composer, arranger and saxophonist, is a musician whom Ford particularly admires), and moving on to Fer, inspired by a Turkish maqam melody (Ford taught for several years at Istanbul’s Bilgi University). He also blew hard and breathily through Reggae 7, illustrating another aspect of his jazz cosmopolitanism, well appreciated by his London bandmates. There was a beautifully serene rendition too of McCoy Tyner’s Search for Peace.

As for the Paul’s Scene album, Ford has some powerful confreres, with fellow veteran drummer Barry Altschul, bassist Jerome Harris and pianist Mark Soskin, and they play with a rousing energy and musicality, empathetically tuned in to Ford’s sinewy sound — hear Altschul’s accompanying drums explosion to Ford’s onslaught in Fer, showing that neither the hornman’s vigour nor the drummer’s might have diminished an iota over the years.

Seven of the compositions are Ford’s, but there is a remembrance to the father of the tenor saxophone, Coleman Hawkins in The Stockholm Stomp, and the pianist Hank Jones in Paris Fringe. Ellington is represented by his enigmatic tune Frustration. Ford shows his ballad excellence on I Can’t Wait to See You and Angel Face, and the title track takes you back to the serpentine flow and Cape Verdean life-beauty of Gonsalves’s unique and unforgettable sound.

What is it about the ever-changing timbre yet eternal heartsblood of the tenor saxophone? ‘Everything is always evolving in terms of music and playing the saxophone. When I was younger the general idea was to be your own voice. Years later, as a result of teaching, you start to appreciate what you stayed away from, in the search to find your own sound.’

Ford has certainly found it: a unique and unmistakable combustion of sonic brawn and tender, creative beauty.
    
Paul's Scene: The Wailing Sounds Of Ricky Ford is released by Whaling City Sound.