Herbie Nichols Transcriptions

Biography of Herbie Nichols

Herbie Nichols was an American jazz pianist and composer, a brilliant yet tragically overlooked innovator whose advanced harmonic and rhythmic ideas predicted aspects of free jazz and have earned him significant posthumous acclaim . To support himself, he worked primarily in Dixieland bands, but his own distinctive compositions uniquely blended bebop with Caribbean rhythms and harmonies inspired by modernist composers like Béla Bartók . His small but influential recorded legacy includes the jazz standard "Lady Sings the Blues," written for Billie Holiday, and has since been championed and expanded upon by later generations of avant-garde musicians.