James Blood Ulmer, avant-garde electric guitarist and singer, has died at 86

James Blood Ulmer, whose jabbering electric guitar and enthralling vocal warble made him a singular force in free-funk and avant-garde jazz, died on June 3 at the Upper Eastside Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in New York City.He was 86.His death was confirmed in a statement from his family, which noted that "his music was fearless, and so was his spirit."Fearlessness was fundamental in Ulmer's music, which came firmly rooted in the blues but could often sound heat-warped, hallucinatory and feral.

These qualities, along with an openness to possibility, endeared him to the free-jazz forefather Ornette Coleman, with whom he started collaborating in the early 1970s.Ulmer became the most devoted acolyte of Coleman's concept of Harmolodics, which frees musicians from strict adherence to a key.

The system, which perplexed many musicians and critics, made instinctual sense to Ulmer, who tuned each of his six strings to the same note.He developed a style that blended drones with dissonance, composure with abandon, and found musicians who could range as far and freely as he did — vanguardists like the tenor saxophonist David Murray and drummers Ronald Shannon Jackson and G.Calvin Weston.

Covering a show by this cohort in 1979, the New York Times critic Robert Palmer praised "the freshest and most visceral new music this reviewer has heard lately." Two years later, marking the release of Ulmer's album Free Lancing, Palmer declared him "the most original electric guitarist to emerge since the late Jimi Hendrix."Ulmer shared with Hendrix a sense of intrepid danger in his guitar solos, along with the expressive timbral and textural devices that often call the word "psychedelic" to mind; his vocal style could evoke Hendrix's, too.But he was altogether more daring with tonality, and in performance he was a wildcard: he could dig into a syncopated funk pocket in one moment and succumb to a fever dream in the next.Born Willie James Ulmer in St.

Matthews, South Carolina on Fe...