Courtesy Jefferson Center

When Don Pullen left Roanoke for North Carolina's Johnson C. Smith College in 1957, he intended to be a doctor.

The then-17-year-old academic scholarship student had something more going for him. He was a very good piano player, though his chops didn't extend beyond the blues, in his estimation.

Very soon after his arrival at college, the world of the 88s began opening up to him. And instead of becoming a doctor, Pullen became a brilliant jazz pianist. His travels and musical adventures won him honors from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Smithsonian Institution, as well as the respect of his peers and critics.

By the time Pullen died in April 1995, of lymphoma, he had performed and recorded with dozens of blues and jazz artists, including Charles Mingus, Ruth Brown, Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Arthur Prysock, Miles Davis, John Scofield and Nina Simone. He had also led his own projects in the studio and in concert, some of which mashed jazz with Brazilian, African and American Indian styles.

And he had reaped critical praise from such publications as Downbeat magazine, The New York Times and the Village Voice.

On Saturday, jazz greats including saxophonist and onetime Pullen colleague Hamiet Bluiett, pianist Jason Moran, bassist Christian McBride and poet Nikki Giovanni will take the stage at Jefferson Center's Shaftman Hall for a rare Roanoke tribute to Pullen. Bluiett, who shared stages with Pullen on Mingus' band, said that this combination of performers playing Pullen's music is a fitting tribute.

"He figured out a way to play piano with his own style and language ... in terms of a different style of playing the instrument, with more of a circular motion in terms of how you dealt with it," Bluiett said last week in a phone interview from his home in New York. "This cat was a great musician. I've never seen him miss a night in terms of playing [his best]. He could always uplift everybody. ... Musicians, public, people, whatever, they all just would go crazy over seeing him play, because it was so exciting and so different, and very high-end, not low-end."

Growing up musical

To reach the musical level that Pullen attained, he felt that it was necessary to leave Roanoke behind. In fact, he only played his hometown once as a professional musician, in 1991. But his years in Roanoke were valuable to him, he recalled in a 1994 interview with Katea Stitt (daughter of jazz saxman Sonny Stitt) for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program.

Jefferson Center obtained the recording and made it available to The Roanoke Times. Here, Pullen's words guide us through parts of his life.

Pullen was born on Christmas Day 1941 to Ernestine Pullen and Aubrey Pullen Sr. His parents went to different churches - his father to what Don Pullen called a "formal, middle-class church," where he became a preacher, and his mother to a "more down and dirty [church], musically speaking, where they would holler and shout and the music would be happy." She was the choir director.

"I preferred my mother's church, because of the music," he told Stitt in the Smithsonian interview.

The Roanoke of the 1940s and 1950s included neither a black radio station nor a station that played black music, Pullen remembered. The family made up for that by singing and playing around the house. But Pullen for a while had to watch what he sang, because his mother didn't want any blues or "that dirty music" in the house.

"I remember walking around the house singing 'I got a woman, way 'cross town,' and she hit me upside the head and said 'boy, you ain't got no woman across town. Don't sing that dirty blues in here.'

"But she came around."

Piano man

When Pullen was about 11, Ernestine Pullen brought home her mother's piano. She, Pullen and one of his brothers began taking lessons, and Don excelled.

"I often wonder what would have happened had she not brought the piano home that day," he said. "But I was singing at that time anyway, so perhaps I would have become a singer instead of a pianist."

But piano it was, and he was having fun with it. At Booker T. Washington Junior High School, he and saxophonist Byron Morris started a band with some classmates. The band had one original tune called "Devil's Music," Pullen recalled with a laugh.

"I have no idea what it sounded like, but I remember we used to play it during assembly in junior high. ...That city, Roanoke, at that time had a lot of very gifted musicians, for a small town, incredibly gifted musicians, in all facets of music. So we had enough there to have us a nice little band, to rehearse and that stuff."

Morris, in a December phone interview from his home in Bowie, Md., said that "everybody was aware that" Pullen "was a child prodigy. All the adults had talked about him."

Pullen grew more when his cousin, noted jazz and blues pianist/organist Clyde "Fats" Wright, came off the road. Wright, who worked with Dinah Washington and Charlie Parker, was also a hit on Roanoke's Henry Street music scene.

"Clyde was a real, bona fide jazz pianist, you know, came back home," Pullen told Stitt. "My knowledge and my ability to play at that time, I thought, was severely limited. Clyde encouraged me, told me I was keeping pace. I was about where I was supposed to be and maybe a little ahead. So he encouraged me a lot.

"He'd take me with him on his gigs and always let me play a number or two on his gigs, you know, so I was like his shadow. ... Clyde was very helpful to me in that way. And I play a lot like him, even now."

Pullen would soon confound attempts to categorize his music.

Creative till the end

Another young Roanoke player of the time, the late bassist Lenny Martin, turned him on to the work of multi-instrumentalists Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy, who were playing what came to be called free jazz and avant-garde. Later, Martin took Pullen on a two-week visit to Chicago, where Pullen met free jazz pioneer Muhal Richard Abrams, whose ears and advice were key.

"I was experimenting with dissonance," Pullen said. "I was playing it the best I knew how, but I didn't know whether it was valid or not, and Muhal encouraged me in that way."

By mid-1954, Pullen was in the middle of New York City's avant-garde jazz scene. His work with such players as Giuseppi Logan and Rashied Ali gave him a noncommercial musician label that was hard to shake through the decades that followed - even after he performed and recorded for three years with the more traditional Mingus band, even after he joined forces with fellow Mingus sideman George Adams to create jazz music infused with plenty of soul and gospel, even after recording with funk icon Maceo Parker.

But many jazz aficionados knew about Pullen and loved his work. One of the most prominent of public jazzbos, comedian Bill Cosby, hired Pullen for sessions, and Cosby's annual Playboy Jazz Festival sets have included Pullen's song, "Jana's Delight."

In an October 2011 interview with Cosby to preview a performance at Virginia Tech, Cosby said that Pullen was a genius.

"He was one of the calmest people I ever met - but man ... when he started to get into what I call those [musical] spritzes, that's when in my brain the Christmas tree lit up," he said. "And of course, you can't be all wrong if Mingus makes you his pianist."

Pullen would move in even rootsier directions toward the end of his life. His projects included The African Brazilian Connection and his final work, the 1995 recording "Common Sacred Ground." The latter featured a group of Kootenai Indians from Montana who drummed, sang and danced, along with African Brazilian Connection players. Each project gave Pullen a deeper understanding of his art, he said.

That final record, he told Stitt, was another satisfying experience. Suffering from the cancer that would take his life, he showed his interviewer a blanket the Kootenai gave him while he was with them in Montana.

"They took it to the sweat lodge and did the chants, so it's supposed to assist me in the healing process. And I sleep in it sometimes," he said, laughing sweetly, "like ...[Linus from the comic strip] 'Peanuts,' with his little blanket around, I carry this one around with me."