Collin Walcott

Walcott was born in New York City on April 24, 1945.[1] He studied violin and tympani in his youth, and was a percussion student at Indiana University.[2] After graduating in 1966, he went to the University of California, Los Angeles, and studied sitar under Ravi Shankar and tabla under Alla Rakha.[1]

According to critic Scott Yanow of Allmusic, Walcott was "one of the first sitar players to play jazz".[2] Walcott moved to New York and played "a blend of bop and oriental music with Tony Scott" in 1967–69.[1] Around 1970 he joined the Paul Winter Consort and co-founded the band Oregon.[1][2] These groups, along with the trio Codona, which was founded in 1978, combined "jazz improvisation and instrumentation with elements of a wide range of classical and ethnic music".[1]

Walcott also played on the Miles Davis 1972 album On the Corner,[1] had three releases under his own name on ECM Records,[2] and taught at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.[1] Walcott was killed in a bus crash in Magdeburg, East Germany, on November 8, 1984,[1] while on a tour with Oregon.[2]

Author David James Duncan wrote retrospectively in 1996 about an Oregon concert he attended in Cascade Head in his piece "My One Conversation with Collin Walcott". Duncan described Walcott as sitting "buddha-style" on stage, surrounded by instruments. Along with an electronic drum kit "to his north", Walcott "had five different tablas to his south, a sitar to his east and a bewildering semicircle of rattles, chimes, clackers, bells, whistles, finger-drums, triangles and unnameable noisemakers to his west. He was the first Western 'jazz' percussionist I'd ever seen sit flat on the floor like an East Indian."[3]

• Sitar in jazz

• Official website