Rooted in Roanoke

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The story below is from our January/February 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you! 

Roanoke native Don Pullen was a renowned jazz pianist known for his innovative fusion of gospel, blues and avant-garde styles.

Roanoke native Don Pullen was one of the most esteemed pianists in the history of jazz. Pullen traversed a wide range of sounds from gospel to blues to jazz. In the jazz idiom, he gained recognition as a genuinely global performer. Pullen first came to wide notice as a member of Charles Mingus’ band. He later incorporated Avant Garde, African, Brazilian and Native American sounds into his work. Pullen excelled and innovated on the piano and the Hammond organ. In addition to Charles Mingus, he worked with a who’s who in the jazz and blues worlds such as Nina Simone, Ruth Brown, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Maceo Parker and John Scofield.

“Don Pullen developed a surprisingly accessible way of performing avant-garde jazz,” according to AllMusic. “Although he could be quite free harmonically, with dense, dissonant chords, Pullen also utilized catchy rhythms, so even his freest flights generally had a handle for listeners to hang on to.”

Donald Gabriel Pullen was born on Christmas Day 1941 in Roanoke. The son of Rev. Aubrey Spencer Pullen and Ernestine Marvely (Rucker) Pullen, Don was one of five children in a close, deeply religious and musical family. The Rev. Aubrey Pullen served as the minister at Reed Street Baptist Church and was also a talented guitar player and dancer. His wife was a renowned singer and music director who was well known for her service to church communities in the Roanoke area.

Pullen took up the piano at age 10 after the piano from his grandparents’ home was moved into his parents’ place on Fairfax Avenue. A neighbor, Audrey Whitlock, and his cousin, Clyde “Fats” Wright, a well-known Roanoke musician, were his primary teachers. Pullen joined the school choir at Harrison Elementary and started to sing and play keyboards at both his father’s church and Sweet Union Baptist Church, where his mother served as choir director.

Pullen’s interests started to venture beyond sacred music at Booker T. Washington Junior High School, as he grew interested in more contemporary sounds. During his freshman year at Lucy Addison High School, he discovered jazz and sought out opportunities to watch performers at local clubs and also to perform. At times, he snuck out of his home to visit the city’s jazz clubs. In high school, he was a member of the jazz and music appreciation clubs as well as the choir. Unsurprisingly, his classmates named him “Most Musical” in his senior yearbook at Lucy Addison.

Pullen was an excellent student and graduated near the top of his class in 1959. He earned an academic scholarship to attend Johnson C. Smith College in Charlotte, North Carolina. He matriculated with hopes of becoming a doctor but soon changed his major to music. He found a vocation in music at Johnson C. Smith, honing his skills as an artist in the college’s performance studios. He also joined up with a cluster of local musicians who educated him in the history of jazz.

After graduating with his bachelor’s degree in 1963, Pullen moved to Chicago and then New York to pursue his muse. Pullen played increasingly experimental jazz piano with Avant Garde compatriots, including drummer Milford Graves and saxophonist Giuseppi Logan, the pair with whom he recorded his first two albums. By day, Pullen earned a living as an arranger and an organist on rhythm and blues recordings for several New York labels.

Don Pullen gained his greatest recognition as a pianist playing alongside Charles Mingus, arguably the greatest bassist in jazz history, during the mid-1970s. Pullen was part of the last great iteration of Mingus’ band, recording two of Mingus’ most revered albums, “Changes One” and “Changes Two,” in a marathon session for Atlantic Records. After a long battle with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Mingus died in 1979.

Beginning in the late 1970s, Pullen formed a highly-acclaimed jazz quartet with fellow Mingus veteran, saxophonist George Adams. The Pullen-Adams quartet gained wide esteem for their recorded work and live performances around the world.

No matter where he went, Roanoke was home for Don Pullen. Keith Pullen, one of Don’s four children, remembers fondly the time he spent with his father and family in Roanoke. Though Keith grew up primarily in New Jersey, he spent most of his summers in Roanoke at his grandparents’ home.

“It was good times for me, visiting or living here when I was younger,” Keith, who now resides in Roanoke, says. “The neighborhood was friendly.” He remembers his grandparents as deeply caring and committed to their family and friends. Don Pullen left Roanoke in the summers when he had to tour but Keith and his sister Tracey often stayed in the area for the whole summer. The relative quiet of Roanoke fit Don’s personality when he got the chance to spend time in his hometown.

“He like to read. He was into medicine and science. He was kind of introverted coming up. For fun, it was reading and exercising. Those were two big stress relievers,” Keith Pullen remembers of his father. In 2020, Keith Pullen wrote and published a memoir about his relationship with his Dad called Son of a Legend, which is available on Amazon.

Keith remembers the difficulty of his father often being away from home on tour but making the most of his time together with his family.

“It was four, five, six months at a time. What I remember most vividly is that he would come back with currency, foreign exchange, different kinds of money, souvenirs, gifts. Wherever he went, he would come back with something from there for my sister and I,” he says. He also remembers his father often being jetlagged for days after returning home.

Pullen performed a homecoming show in Roanoke in December 1991, the first time he performed professionally in the city since the mid-1960s. Before the show, he told the Roanoke Times and World News it would be one of the most “nerve-wracking gigs I’ve had.” Never before had he looked out on a crowd in his professional career and seen so many familiar faces.

An enthusiastic crowd at the Roanoke Civic Center offered lusty applause for a trio that consisted of Pullen, bassist Santi Debriano and drummer Cindy Blackman. All three offered impressive solos over the course of two sets. Pullen capped the evening by dedicating one of his signature tunes, “Ode to Life,” to his first piano teacher in Roanoke, Audrey Whitlock.

Earlier that day, Roanoke Vice Mayor Howard Musser declared December 13, 1991, to be “Don Pullen Day.”

The concert benefitted the Friends of Roanoke Symphony scholarship fund, which was named in honor of Marionette Sprauve, the organization’s first president and a mentor to many young African American musicians in Roanoke over the course of the 20th century.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Don Pullen gained his widest recognition as a performer. On two occasions, Downbeat, the gold standard of jazz publications, named him the “Talent Most Deserving of Wider Recognition.” He earned fellowships from the Smithsonian and the National Endowment for the Arts for his contributions to jazz. On multiple occasions, he was asked to perform at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

Pullen battled lymphoma in his later years but continued to record remarkable music. In 1993, his “Ode to Life” album with the African-Brazilian Connection was recorded as a tribute to his longtime musical partner George Adams, who died in 1992. “Ode to Life” was one of the best-selling jazz recordings of 1993. The group’s 1993 performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland was later released as an album. Pullen’s final album, recorded just months before his death, included vocals by the Chief Cliff Singers from the Kutenai peoples of Montana, a well-known group of traditional Native American vocalists. The album, “Sacred Common Ground,” appeared on many year-end “best of” lists in 1995. Till the end, Don Pullen recorded music that was not only cutting edge and globally minded but also deeply personal.

“He has a few songs that he named for special people in his life. My mom, my two brothers, one of whom passed, and my sister,” Keith Pullen said. He cites “Double Arc Jake,” which Don Pullen named after Keith, whom he nicknamed “Jake” or “Jake-Bone,” as one of his favorite songs by his father.

Pullen died on April 22, 1995, at his home in East Orange, New Jersey, at age 53. He was honored widely throughout the jazz world and his funeral was held at First Baptist Church in Roanoke. In 2011-2012, Roanoke’s Harrison Museum of African American Culture hosted an exhibit on his life filled with images, testimonials and the sounds that this extraordinary pianist and Roanoker created. The exhibition culminated in a concert featuring some of Pullen’s best-known works at the Jefferson Center. Among the performers that evening was saxophonist Byron Morris, a lifelong friend who began playing with Pullen decades earlier at Booker T. Washington Junior High School.

Decades after his death, Don Pullen remains one of the legendary pianists in jazz history and his legacy remains rooted in Roanoke.

The story above is from our January/February 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!