James Blood Ulmer, whose jabbering electric guitar and enthralling vocal warble made him a singular force in free-funk and avant-garde jazz, died on June 3 at the Upper Eastside Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in New York City. He was 86.
His death was confirmed in a statement from his family, which noted that "his music was fearless, and so was his spirit."
Fearlessness was fundamental in Ulmer's music, which came firmly rooted in the blues but could often sound heat-warped, hallucinatory and feral. These qualities, along with an openness to possibility, endeared him to the free-jazz forefather Ornette Coleman, with whom he started collaborating in the early 1970s. Ulmer became the most devoted acolyte of Coleman's concept of Harmolodics, which frees musicians from strict adherence to a key. The system, which perplexed many musicians and critics, made instinctual sense to Ulmer, who tuned each of his six strings to the same note.
He developed a style that blended drones with dissonance, composure with abandon, and found musicians who could range as far and freely as he did — vanguardists like the tenor saxophonist David Murray and drummers Ronald Shannon Jackson and G. Calvin Weston. Covering a show by this cohort in 1979, the New York Times critic Robert Palmer praised "the freshest and most visceral new music this reviewer has heard lately." Two years later, marking the release of Ulmer's album Free Lancing, Palmer declared him "the most original electric guitarist to emerge since the late Jimi Hendrix."
Ulmer shared with Hendrix a sense of intrepid danger in his guitar solos, along with the expressive timbral and textural devices that often call the word "psychedelic" to mind; his vocal style could evoke Hendrix's, too. But he was altogether more daring with tonality, and in performance he was a wildcard: he could dig into a syncopated funk pocket in one moment and succumb to a fever dream in the next.
Born Willie James Ulmer in St. Matthews, South Carolina on Feb. 8, 1940, he was the eldest of eight children, and received his first guitar from his father, the Baptist preacher James David Ulmer, at age four. He sang alongside his father in the Southern Sons Quartette, but left the ministry after growing enamored of rock 'n' roll and the blues.
After high school, Ulmer moved to Pittsburgh, backing R&B groups like the Savoys and the Del Vikings on guitar. He subsequently lived and worked in Columbus, Ohio, and Detroit, Mich., before moving to New York in 1971. He held a steady gig in the house band at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem for the better part of a year, and formed bonds with avant-gardists like drummer Rashied Ali and saxophonist Arthur Blythe.
Through Blythe, who had achieved a measure of prominence working with the Gil Evans Orchestra and drummer Jack DeJohnette (among others), Ulmer found his way onto a major label. He played on Blythe's Columbia albums Lenox Avenue Breakdown and Illusions, and was soon offered his own record deal. He released three albums for Columbia or CBS in as many years: Free Lancing (1981), Black Rock (1982), and Odyssey (1983).
The last of those introduced a working band by the same name, with Charles Burnham on violin and Walter Benbow on drums. Among its standout tracks was a song that Ulmer had initially recorded in 1980 for the British label Rough Trade: "Are You Glad to Be in America?"
During this stretch in the '80s, Ulmer was so breathlessly lauded in the music press that it inevitably brought pushback. The critic Greg Tate was among those who pushed, respectfully. "Blood doesn't play sensuous, explosive space-blues lines like Hendrix," he wrote in The Village Voice in 1981. "What he does play is shrill, disjointed fragments, nervous bits and rickety pieces tied together by a staggered but wryly swinging thematic sensibility." This piece, "Knee Deep in Blood Ulmer," would later be the very first in Tate's lauded collection Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America. It landed on an admiring assessment, pinging off two transmitters of American musical originality: "Imagine Andrew Hill refiltered through Mississippi Fred McDowell and you've got a handle on how Blood's eccentric guitar fits in with the many ridims."
Ulmer's career stretched well past this most visible period, and into other musical byways. He released more than two dozen albums after his years on Columbia's label, occasionally delivering a landmark like Harmolodic Guitar with Strings in 1993. During the early aughts, he made a series of well-regarded blues albums produced by fellow guitar slinger Vernon Reid; among them are Memphis Blood: The Sun Sessions (2001) and No Escape from the Blues: The Electric Lady Sessions (2003).
He played his final concert at the 2024 Detroit Jazz Festival, retiring soon after due to deteriorating health. The previous year, during a two-night residency at Solar Myth in Philadelphia, he played a solo guitar-and-vocals concert that distilled all of the deep, dark mystique in his sound, including soul cries of ruefulness and redemption.
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