Robin Kenyatta

Robin Kenyatta ( born March 6, 1942 in Moncks Corner, South Carolina as Robert Prince Haynes, † 26 October 2004 in Lausanne) was an American alto saxophonist and flautist.

Kenyatta grew up in New York. His music was inspired by Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Ben Webster, his tone resembles that of Gato Barbieri. Initially he was played into contact with avant-garde musicians such as Bill Dixon, Roswell Rudd, Alan Silva or the Jazz Composer's Orchestra, but also with the Sonny Stitt bop -influenced. In 1969, he first went to Europe because there he was able to realize better than in the United States, initially for three years in Paris. Since the mid- 1970s, he taught at the Ecole de Musique Jazz Actuelle in Lausanne before there founded the Hello Jazz Music School.

In 1970, he played The Girl from Martinique a Wolfgang Dauner, Arild Andersen and Fred Braceful that significantly differs from its shortly thereafter recorded, commercially far more successful American plates; later he worked with such greats as Dizzy Gillespie, BB King, Dr. John or George Benson together, played at the Montreux Jazz Festival, but also went on a European tour with his own groups. Since 2002, Kenyatta was back in the U.S., where he worked at Bentley College in Waltham.

Kenyatta had come in October 2004 for a gig in Switzerland, where he died, however, before.