Player of woodwind, composer, and educator. Once portrayed as an oddball - for his use of diagrams and numbers for composition titles, the absence of a rhythm section in the Creative Construction Company, and his penchants for chess and John Cage - he's also capable of slightly-askew bebop and homages to "jungle music" (of the Duke Ellington variety). He has sliced and diced the history of jazz, and reassembled it with mischief and a pinch of Boulez and Stockhausen (and Morton Feldman). Racial politics in the AACM relegated him, early on, to its fringes, despite being one of its leading lights at the time.