One night in the 1970s, Clint Eastwood walked into Tyler's Beer Garden on Magazine Street in New Orleans and heard a saxophonist move through tenor, alto and soprano sax, clarinet, flute and bagpipes inside a single set.

That musician was James Rivers, the Treme-born multi-instrumentalist who spent more than five decades leading New Orleans club bandstands. Rivers died July 5, 2026, in New Orleans at 89, and his playing lives on in two of Eastwood's films: 1984's "Tightrope," shot in New Orleans, and 1988's "Bird," the director's biography of Charlie Parker, according to NOLA.com.

A typical Movement set could move from jazz standards to blues, R&B, rock and roll and country inside the same hour, according to OffBeat Magazine, with Rivers switching horns between numbers and, on some nights, closing on the bagpipes. He was also a regular presence at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival for decades, going back to the festival's early years, per NOLA.com.

He was born April 18, 1937, in the Treme neighborhood, one of six siblings, and started playing music at age 8. Rivers attended Walter L. Cohen High School before graduating from Booker T. Washington High School, then went on to study at the Houston School of Music.

In the 1950s he found work as a touring sideman, backing the Impressions, Jerry Butler, and Huey Smith and the Clowns. His saxophone turns up on New Orleans R&B staples from that era, including Al Johnson's "Carnival Time" and Frankie Ford's "Sea Cruise." A car accident while on the road with Huey Smith and the Clowns put him in the hospital, and once he recovered, Rivers formed a band of his own. By 2019, according to OffBeat Magazine, that group, the James Rivers Movement, had been fronting his shows for fifty years.

The Movement built its home in a rotation of New Orleans clubs: Tyler's Beer Garden on Magazine Street, Mel's Lounge in the Faubourg Marigny, Fat Harry's on St. Charles Avenue, and Sylvia's on Freret Street. It was at Tyler's, by Rivers' account, that Eastwood first heard him play. The connection produced two film credits and, in 1995, an onscreen appearance in Eastwood's "The Bridges of Madison County." Rivers also cut his own records in these years: the album "Ole" in 1978, "Thrill Me" in 1981 at Allen Toussaint's Sea-Saint Studio, the single "Disco Lady" in 1976, and "I'm the Man" in 1996.

The bagpipes were a later addition, and an unlikely one for a New Orleans horn player. Rivers took up the instrument after spotting a marching band playing them during a televised football game, and ordered a set through Werlein's music store despite not knowing one make from another, according to New Orleans Magazine. That first set proved to be an inferior model that left him struggling for breath; a sturdier pair he found soon after held air far more efficiently, and he taught himself the rest by ear from records. He kept working the instrument into his shows for years, building a full jazz arrangement, improvisation included, into a 2013 Jazz Fest set, and he made a bagpipe rendition of "Amazing Grace" a regular feature of his sets. "I am not really a bagpiper, but a musician who learned how to play one," he told writer Jason Berry at the 2017 Jazz Fest.

Rivers traced some of that discipline to solitary nights by the water. "Sometimes I used to practice and go out at night to Lake Pontchartrain, in contemplative moments, where it would be quiet and listen at the waves and the water," he told Berry, his co-author on the book "Up from the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II." "Just to be alone, like to hear the different sounds of the water beating against the seawall, and I could meditate. You'd be surprised at the things you can work out."

Onstage, that meditative streak gave way to showmanship. Berry, a friend of more than 50 years, recalled Rivers leading patrons out of Sylvia's on impromptu second lines. "He sometimes led patrons out of Sylvia's, second-lining down the street. Once he got on the Freret bus, serenaded the driver for a few blocks, got off at Napoleon Avenue and met his dancing tribe on the way back. He was a showman of seamless ease. Off stage, he was an easy-going gentleman, a delight to hang with."

Rivers never left the city that raised him, and across nearly seven decades on its bandstands, its clubs never stopped needing what he could do: sit in on a session, hold down a horn chart, or pull a room out onto the sidewalk behind him. What remains is a catalog few New Orleans musicians can match: saxophone lines cut into "Carnival Time" and "Sea Cruise," four solo albums stretching from 1978 to 1996, two Clint Eastwood soundtracks, and a bagpipe rendition of "Amazing Grace" that turned up, without fail, somewhere in the set.