In 1991, musician and composer Clyde Criner III’s ’75 star was on the rise. He had written more than 800 songs and was on the cusp of releasing his fourth album. He had collaborated with a variety of artists, including Carlos Santana, Queen Latifah and the Boys Choir of Harlem. He was in high demand as a “sideman,” playing keyboards live and in the studio with jazz masters such as Archie Shepp, Avery Sharpe and Max Roach. He had toured the U.S., Europe and Japan alongside Dizzy Gillespie, Wynton Marsalis and Bobby McFerrin. He had even performed at Carnegie Hall and the World Trade Center.

Then Criner got sick and, that November, died. There was no funeral, memorial service or obituary to publicly mark his death. Over time, his Williams classmates came to learn that Criner had likely died of complications from HIV/AIDS, which was highly stigmatized at the time. His contributions to the music world slipped into obscurity—until three Williams dorm-mates who became friends with Criner their first day on campus got involved. Determined to shine a new light on him and his achievements, Peter Hillman ’75, with the help of Jim Baker ’75 and Ken Kubie ’75, began the painstaking work of reconstructing Criner’s legacy, piece by piece.

The trio had planned a slideshow tribute to Criner for their class’s 45th reunion in June 2020. But Covid-19 forced Williams to cancel Reunion Weekend. Undaunted, Hillman, a retired lawyer, used the material he gathered from a dozen interviews and countless hours spent scouring the internet as the basis for three videos spanning Criner’s life, from his childhood in Albany, N.Y., to his untimely death. Posted on YouTube and the Class of 1975 web page, the videos collectively have garnered more than 30,000 views.

“We loved Clyde,” Hillman says. “We loved living with him. We learned a lot from him, and we always tried to be there for him. We thought, it’s a shame nobody ever did something to claim him and [give him] his place in the music industry.”

***

Renaissance Man

As the video series tells it, Criner grew up listening to his family’s Duke Ellington records. Fascinated by the piano, he began lessons at age 4. In grade school, he’d stay up late into the night writing his own compositions. He dove into Mozart, Bach, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones as a teenager. He experimented with synthesizers and played his idols’ recordings backward, memorizing each note. He recognized that African American music, in particular, synthesized a variety of traditions—and he wanted to do the same with his work. His parents expected him to become a doctor or lawyer. Instead, he drove to gigs on weekends in a light blue Datsun station wagon.

Criner met Hillman, Kubie and Baker their first day at Williams. They all lived on the top floor of Williams Hall and were constantly in and out of each other’s rooms.

“We all bonded,” Hillman says. “Clyde was just an incredibly charismatic, fun, intelligent, outgoing person.”

Criner’s friends remember him as a consummate prankster with an endearing, gap-toothed grin. He was a mimic with perfect pitch and full of energy. He majored in psychology, but his friends say he was a Renaissance man, equally at ease discussing literature or physics.

His hallmates initially knew little of Criner’s musical prowess. He brought to campus an electric keyboard and a prototype “Minimoog,” one of the world’s first portable synthesizers. But he always wore headphones when he played in his room.

Little by little, Criner began performing with groups at events on campus. He would jam with anyone who played an instrument and was often found at the Rathskeller, back then in the basement of the student union, or in any building with a piano, staying behind long after the doors had been locked.

“Clyde was almost two people,” says Baker, a professor emeritus of internal medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School. “He was really easygoing, and we goofed around a lot. But when he got up on stage, he had this commanding presence and was so capable.”

Criner’s skill drew the attention of the New England Conservatory of Music, where he completed a master’s degree in classical composition in 1977. He then earned a doctorate in education with a focus on Afro-American music at the University of Massachusetts in 1981.

 

His work life involved both making music and teaching, with stints at Long Island University, Bennington College, Pace University and Williams, where he introduced popular courses in the history of jazz and blues, and in jazz improvisation and composition. But finding balance was a struggle. He expressed frustration and disappointment over both the lack of available tenure-track positions and the music industry trying to pigeonhole him into a specific genre. His record label dubbed him the “first Black New Age” recording artist, though he preferred to call himself a “contemporary classic” composer.

After the release of his first solo album, New England, in 1985, Criner was the subject of a profile in DownBeat magazine, an influential publication examining dynamic American music. He talked about blending European classical tradition with jazz and rock as the natural synthesis of his inspirations. He strove to create a sound all his own, he said, adding, “I’ve been getting a lot of flak in New York as to my particular influences.” Some critics called Criner “too original,” while others praised his compositional “sensitivity and maturity” and “strength for expressing universality in human feelings.”

Gus Martins, a longtime friend and former journalist, says Criner was “highly respected and admired” by his fellow musicians, who described Criner’s talent as “on another level” in their interviews with Martins. The two met in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where Criner was performing with his ensemble Clouds.

“Clyde could do almost anything musically that he wanted to express,” Martins says. “Everything pointed to him potentially becoming one of America’s great composers.”  

Reunions

Not long after New England was released, Hillman and Kubie met up in New York City to attend Criner’s debut at Carnegie Hall. They settled in among the 250 or so audience members in the grand auditorium, excited to hear the new original pieces and arrangements with accompaniment by the Boys Choir of Harlem and flutist Koichi Aiba.

As the lights went down, Criner took his place at a Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument), also known as “an orchestra in a box.” On this high-tech combination of a digital synthesizer, music sampler and keyboard, he launched into “The Face of Hearts” off the new album.

During such performances, Criner leaned his compact frame over the keyboard, fingers moving swiftly. The spotlight glinted off his glasses, which would slide down his full, dimpled cheeks when the rhythm intensified. Hillman recalls how still the audience was—almost transfixed.

“It was an incredibly moving program,” Hillman says. “The pieces individually and as a whole were at once somber and optimistic, fearful and joyful.”

Afterward, Hillman and Kubie slipped backstage to meet Criner and his wife, Aisia de’Anthony. The foursome sat on the floor eating takeout and catching up.

Hillman recalled “that absolutely extraordinary evening” many times in the decades that followed. “I was just on cloud nine that the kid I met when we were 18 was doing his professional thing,” he says. “And I got this vicarious thrill from the progress he was making.”

The classmates continued to follow Criner’s career. He released a second album, Behind the Sun, in 1988, with The Carlos Santana Band premiering his song “Kinesis” at Lincoln Center. Santana, Omar Hakim and Victor Bailey joined Criner as special guests on his third album, The Color of Dark, which Criner debuted before an audience of 10,000 at the World Trade Center. What would have been his fourth album, Two Worlds, brought back the Harlem boys choir along with rapper Queen Latifah and South African musician Hugh Masakela. The album was never released.

By then, Criner’s classmates were in touch with him only sporadically. Hillman was building his career at the Manhattan law firm Chadbourne and Parke; Kubie was handling national sales for The Metro Packaging Group; and Baker was at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, working as an immunologist on the front lines of the AIDS epidemic. They didn’t know Criner was sick or, initially, the cause of his death.

“I feel guilty that if we were able to communicate with him more, we might have been able to do something,” says Baker, who ultimately lost more than 200 patients to HIV/AIDS. “It was a very different time, a very painful time.”

Hillman, Baker and Kubie wanted to publicly recognize Criner and his contributions to music, and their 45th reunion seemed an appropriate milestone. They got to work on a slideshow about him, one of several moments celebrating the Class of 1975—Williams’ first fully coeducational class and one of the most racially diverse.

When Reunion Weekend was canceled, the project pivoted to video. Hillman found willing sources in the musicians and journalists he interviewed. And he rallied the class to hire a professional production engineer for what would become three videos, the last of which was posted in late 2024.

“Musicians were very happy to finally talk about Clyde,” says Hillman, alluding to the reluctance to talk about HIV/AIDS in the 1990s. “I could tell that they’d been keeping to themselves their feelings about how inventive he was, how he could hear things that others couldn’t hear and go places others weren’t brave enough to go, and how sad they were that he left us so early.”

He asked those who played with Criner to imagine what would have happened if he’d continued composing. Their answer, Hillman says: “He would have been writing soundtracks and symphonies.”

Martins, meanwhile, emphasizes Criner’s empathy: “He kind of walked in two worlds,” he says. “He thought about people, and the world he lived in, and it came out when he wrote music. Clyde could transmit pain into hope and bring some peace.”

Not long before he died, Criner was the subject of an interview with Long Island University Magazine. “Music is music,” he told the writer. “So what if it’s from the 15th century? From Tibet or West Africa or the Caribbean, from Béla Bartók or Thelonious Monk or the Baptist Pentecostal Church? Have people changed that much? We’re all human beings.”

 

Heather Hansen is an award-winning, independent journalist and author based in Colorado. Her latest books are Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone and Wildfire: On the Front Lines With Station 8.