(saxophone) was born in 1938. Marchel Ivery was a staunch proponent of what has become known as the “Texas tenor” saxophone sound – a ribald, full-throated approach that married roadhouse ebullience to technical chops. Mr. Ivery died Tuesday 13 November 2007 at age 69 at Presbyterian Hospital after a brief and unexpected illness. Other Texas tenors included giants like Arnett Cobb, David “Fathead” Newman and Illinois Jacquet, and Mr. Ivery was certainly of their ilk. Art Blakey, with whom he served in the ’80s, called him “fire personified.” Even though he made a decision to stay in Dallas for family reasons, he still cut a wide swath in the jazz world. Local drummer Andrew Griffith played with Mr. Ivery since the early ’90s. Marchel played with Lightning Hopkins. “For me, coming up to Dallas in 1985 from Houston, he was a guy we all looked up to,” says Shelley Carrol, another great and underappreciated local sax man. “He never had a mean word to say. He might be tough, but he always put it with an encouraging word. We played together two Mondays ago, and we just played and laughed. In addition to forming the backbone of now-defunct local jazz label Leaning House, Mr. Ivery was a mainstay of the Sammons Jazz program, which took a refurbished waterworks pump house and turned it into a musical nexus. “He was a big part of Sammons since the beginning, in 1989,” says executive director Joanna St. Angelo. “And he’s been with us ever since. His joy in playing was matched only in the joy he inspired in the audience.”