Arthur Doyle was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1944. He was inspired to play the saxophone as child, after watching Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington play music on television. He received a degree in Music Education from Tennessee State University. His first professional performance was with trumpeter Walter Miller, a Sun Ra alumnus. He often performed with Gladys Knight & the Pips, among others, in the R&B genre as well as in jazz. Although he performed primarily in Nashville early on in his career, he did go on tours that took him as far as Detroit. Doyle was not initially interested in free jazz, but after a performing for a Black Panthers festival he gradually gravitated toward free jazz, and sometimes appeared in concert with Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra. Arthur Doyle's first recorded appearance was on Noah Howard's album The Black Ark. He would later appear on Milford Grave's album Babi Music, and Alan Silva's Desert Music, as well as performances with The Blue Humans. His first recording session as a leader was on Alabama Feeling, released in 1978. He appeared on a number of recordings in the 1990s and throughout the first decade of the 2000s as a leader, solo artist, or sideman. His last performance was recorded in 2013 and released on DVD. Thurston Moore was a fan of Arthur Doyle, and spoke highly of Doyle's first album as a leader when he published his list of important free jazz albums. Arthur Doyle's name appeared on a Sonic Youth song, "Kim Gordon and the Arthur Doyle Hand Cream" from their album Sonic Nurse. According to Thurston Moore, the song:
juxtaposes the two extremes of Sonic Youth's eclectic mix of influences. "We could, on the one hand, be interested in a popular figure as ubiquitous as Mariah and on the other hand, we're obviously interested in people that are working on the fringes of the musical world. We operate much more on the fringes and with people from that world as our peers than we do in the world of the big-time music business. Our peers are mostly people from the underground."
Discography
2013 A doc of Arthur Doyle's final tour is made entitled THE LIFE LOVE AND HATE OF A FREE JAZZ MAN AND HIS WOMAN directed by Jorge Torres-Torres.
