John Handy is a renowned jazz saxophonist whose career has also encompassed composing classical music composition and exploration of multi-cultural music styles, especially from the Indian subcontinent. Handy, who has been strongly associated with San Francisco for most of his career, has played with jazz greats such as Charles Mingus, where he had the unenviable task of following Eric Dolphy in the alto "chair" during his second tenure with Mingus; He had a brief stint with Mingus in 1958 and 1959.

While well known inside jazz circles, it was his performance at the 1965 Monterey Jazz Festival that earned him his reputation as an innovator and a peer among alto saxophonists. Fronting a quintet of four young, virtually unknown musicians, Handy opened with the half-hour piece If Only We Knew, which opens with his solo exploration that bursts into a swinging group piece showcasing the violin of Michael White and the guitar of Jerry Hahn.

This was the first of three critically acclaimed albums for Columbia in the mid 60s. Never content to rest on formula or convention, Handy recorded several R&B tinged albums, a Karṇāṭaka classic Karuna Supreme with Ali Akbar Khan, and led another group, Class, whose hook was three women violinists who also sang.

During the 1990s, he relaunched the quintet that brought him to fame in the mid-60s. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.