Sam Rivers Dead: Influential Saxophonist Who Played With Miles Davis Dies at 88

Sam Rivers, the jazz saxophonist who performed with legends like Miles Davis and Billie Holliday and was highly influential in the avant-garde scene, died on Monday, Dec. 26, from pneumonia in Orlando, Fla. He was 88.

Born into a family of musicians, Rivers played piano, soprano saxophone, flute and his main instrument, the tenor saxophone. Influenced by Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, he toured with Holliday in the '50s and joined Davis' band when he moved to New York in 1964. That year, he performed on the live album, 'Miles in Tokyo,' and released his first solo album, the highly regarded 'Fuchsia Swing Song,' on Blue Note.

After his six-month stint with Davis, Rivers would go on to perform with such blues legends as John Lee Hooker and T-Bone Walker. In the '70s, he and his wife Bea became prominent figures in New York's avant-garde jazz scene, opening up their loft as a performance space called Studio Rivbea. Later in the decade, Rivers also served as the composer-in-residence for the Harlem Opera Society.

In the '80s, Rivers spent four years playing with Dizzy Gillespie's United Nations Orchestra before moving to Orlando, where he would play with younger musicians and front his own group, the Rivbea Orchestra.

"Music was his life, music is what kept him alive," his daughter Monique Rivers Williams told the Orlando Sentinel. "My father, in my eyes, was on vacation all his life. He used to tell me, 'I'm working, but I'm loving every minute of it.' Retirement was not in his vocabulary. 'Why do we even have that word,' he used to ask me, 'there should be no such thing.'"