Sunny Murray died 12/8, at the age of 81, in Paris, where he’d lived for decades. Murray was one of the most important drummers in jazz history. He was crucial to the development of truly free jazz, because he broke down bar lines and traditional notions of time, creating — alongside three similarly inclined but stylistically very different players, Andrew Cyrille, Milford Graves and Rashied Ali — a kind of pulse rhythm that didn’t drive the music forward as much as it expanded it until it filled the room, filled your head and your chest, and let it take over your entire body. He also frequently emitted a low, chest-rattling moan while he played, which gave his work even more of a surging, unearthly quality. And he worked with an extremely minimal kit, usually just a snare, a bass drum and a few cymbals; he didn’t care for the sound of toms. But those cymbals sounded like a tidal wave sweeping away the building, and playing with him drove saxophonists in particular to ecstatic heights.