The Penguin Jazz Guide (99 page)

The
Complete In A Silent Way Sessions
box was expected to yield a new vision of the work in progress. In the event, they’re interesting but enigmatic. To stumble over a conclusion, hearing the raw material in its entirety makes one thankful for the genius of Miles and Teo Macero in seeing what was essential and what was of less significance. There is nothing here that improves on the released version. Some of the material, like ‘Mademoiselle Mabry’, ‘Frelon Brun’ and ‘Dual Mr Anthony Tillman’, was used to pad out
Filles De Kilimanjaro
and
Water Babies
; more found its way onto
Circle In The Round
. The brooding minor-key ‘It’s About That Time’ was to become known as an anchor for important live sets by the ‘lost’ Davis band.

The real interest lies in the alternative takes of the title-piece and of ‘Shhh/Peaceful’. These are good enough, though one cannot quibble with the decision as to issued takes. The album versions are supplemented on disc three by ‘The Ghetto Walk’, a genuine rarity and perhaps the only thing on the set that in any way significantly alters one’s view of Miles at this period. In many ways it presages the trumpeter’s return to the blues towards the end of his life. Yet this amazing track, which features sterling work from McLaughlin and Shorter as well as from the leader, is confirmation that Miles was never far from the blues. Miles carved out this masterpiece from the most obdurate of material. The albums he created and curated with Macero’s help are timeless. Insights into their genesis are fascinating but ultimately unnecessary. You’ll listen to
In A Silent Way
a hundred times; you might listen to these tracks thrice, and then only to wonder how the miracle was achieved.

& See also
The Complete Birth Of The Cool
(1948–1950; p. 121),
Miles Ahead
(1957; p. 208),
Kind Of Blue
(1959; p. 232),
The Complete Live At The Plugged Nickel
(1965; p. 331),
Agharta
(1975; p. 420)

PHAROAH SANDERS
^&

Born Farrell Sanders, 13 October 1940, Little Rock, Arkansas

Tenor saxophone

Karma

Impulse! 051153-2

Sanders; Julius Watkins (frhn); James Spaulding (f); Lonnie Liston Smith (p); Ron Carter, Richard Davis, Reggie Workman (b); William Hart, Freddie Waits (d); Nathaniel Bettis (perc); Leon Thomas (v, perc). February 1969.

Pharoah Sanders said (1982):
‘Was I playing jazz music, or spirit music, or some other kind of music? I have no idea, but John Coltrane didn’t worry if he was playing jazz music, or something else entirely. Maybe that’s what he left me: something else entirely.’

If the Creator does, indeed, have a master plan, then the role he has written for Pharoah Sanders – the change of name was proposed by Sun Ra, not surprising to hear – is a complex one. Like those other great saxophonists Snub Mosley and Bill Clinton, he hails from Little Rock, Arkansas, and in the ’60s, while Snub was getting by and Bill was obstinately refusing to inhale, Sanders was swallowing great draughts of air to produce some of the most raucously beautiful saxophone sounds of the decade. Having worked with John Coltrane during the latter’s last years, he had acquired licence to stretch harmonics to the utmost, but always, unlike Coltrane, over a hypnotically simple ground, which is why in later years Sanders was able to reinvent himself as the wicked uncle of the club and dance scene.

An ESP-Disk recording was almost
de rigueur
for anyone in the New York avant-garde.
Pharoah’s First
of 1964 is better than most, though it suffers from a very anonymous band. As usual, the leader plays with enough intensity to weld metal, albeit with a softer and broader tone than Coltrane’s. Like his sometime employer, he was taken up by Impulse! and given a freer hand than was strictly good for him. Unlike the admirably disciplined Trane, Pharoah never knows when an idea has run its course, and the half-hour plus of ‘The Creator Has A Master Plan’ (which is basically all there is of
Karma
) can tax the patience if you don’t buy into the concept. Perversely, the shortness of the record, with no extra material on the CD, is another issue, but we generally prefer minding the quality to feeling the width so that isn’t an issue, particularly at this juncture. ‘Creator’ opens with a quotation from
A Love Supreme
, but builds to an intensity that was alien even to Coltrane’s conception. The saxophone part is pretty much front and centre throughout, and though Bob Thiele’s production gives due weight to the other instruments and to Leon Thomas’s full-on vocals there is no mistaking that it’s Pharoah’s gig. The short ‘Colors’ is a makeweight, but on reflection contains as much of promise as the main event. Sanders’s other records for the label also bear investigation, with
Deaf Dumb Blind (Summum Bukmun Unyun)
and
Black Unity
getting the nod over the dismal
Tauhid
.

& See also
Crescent With Love
(1992; p. 568)

CHARLIE HADEN
^&

Born 6 August 1937, Shenandoah, Iowa

Double bass

Liberation Music Orchestra

Impulse! 051188-2

Haden; Don Cherry (c, f); Michael Mantler (t); Roswell Rudd (tb); Bob Northern (frhn, perc); Howard Johnson (tba); Perry Robinson (cl); Gato Barbieri (ts, cl); Dewey Redman (as, ts); Sam Brown (g, thumb p); Carla Bley (p, perc); Andrew Cyrille, Paul Motian (d, perc). April 1969.

Maverick composer Conlon Nancarrow, who fought with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, said (1985):
‘These Civil War songs are part of my bloodstream, and these versions of them quicken my blood. You rarely hear music like that now.’

The man from Shenandoah helped redefine modern jazz with Ornette Coleman’s quartet and gave a new impetus to jazz bass. Haden is the ultimate timekeeper, bending and stretching the pulse, but never losing impetus. He is also the most lyrical of soloists, and his heartbeat tone has been heard at the centre of literally hundreds of important sessions.

Haden began performing as a child in a family radio show, singing country music, but polio damaged his throat and face and he took up the bass instead. He moved to Los Angeles at the end of his teens and was soon involved in West Coast jazz and in the early experiments of Paul Bley and Ornette Coleman. Haden played on Ornette’s classic Atlantic recordings, and subsequently with the Ornette repertory group Old And New Dreams, but then branched out into his own music.

Ten years after making
The Shape Of Jazz To Come
, his best performance with Coleman, Haden formed the Liberation Music Orchestra, using arrangements by Carla Bley and members of her and Michael Mantler’s Jazz Composers Orchestra. The LMO was a striking blend of collectivism and radical individualism. Ensemble was everything, but solos were everything, too. The record includes a stirring version of Ornette’s ‘War Orphans’, as well as Haden’s own defiant/elegiac ‘Song For Che’, but the main event is a suite of anarchist and revolutionary songs from the Spanish Civil War. On the opening section, ‘El Quinto Regimiento’, Brown, Cherry and Haden himself are featured, followed by Rudd in the middle section and the almost caustically toned Barbieri in the conclusion, ‘Viva La Quince Brigada’. The bassist dominates ‘Song For Che’, with Cherry and Redman in support.

A short introduction (by Bley), an interlude, an improvised ‘Ending To The First Side’ and a final ‘We Shall Overcome’ give the album a suite-like character, but, that said, there has been no attempt to prettify the music. Haden writes lyrically, but has the courage to play these pieces as if in the field. The recording is attractively rough and ready, and one can easily imagine the music being played in a shell-pocked building behind the lines.

Haden reconvened the Liberation Music Orchestra in 1982, but
Ballad Of The Fallen
lacked the bite of the original. Some put this down to a slackening of conception and conviction, citing the bassist’s latter-day preference for the more melodic sound of Quartet West and the more intimate and personal setting of duo improvisation, but this misses the point:
Liberation Music Orchestra
is no less lyrical than the later work and it in turn is no less muscular than the work of the ‘revolutionary’ phase.

& See also
Quartet West
(1986; p. 509),
Beneath The Missouri Sky
(1996; p. 600)

NOAH HOWARD

Born 6 April 1943, New Orleans, Louisiana

Alto saxophone

The Black Ark

Bo’Weavil 24CD

Howard; Earl Cross (t); Arthur Doyle (ts); Leslie Waldron (p); Norris Jones (Sirone) (b); Muhammad Ali (d); Juma (perc). 1969.

Noah Howard said (1983):
‘I chose the alto saxophone because it’s the closest instrument to a singing voice, and that’s what I tried to do on the
Black Ark
recordings, to sing myself.’

Howard was a chorister back home in New Orleans, and that rapturous lyricism has never gone away, even if he is associated with the avant-garde. He moved to California in his late teens, but he never quite shook away his church roots. A permanent move to Brussels and reliance on his own AltSax imprint certainly affected his visibility, but for some reason his brushfire sound never caught on, even if
The Black Ark
has become an iconic modern recording. The avant-garde of the ’60s was over-populated with saxophonists, and Noah seems to parade his influences somewhat like his biblical namesake, two-by-two. There was a hint of Dolphy-and-Ornette, then Trane tempered with Marion Brown’s wavery pitching: all of it adding up to something different and idiosyncratic, but not always fully realized.

Originally released on the Freedom label and only briefly as a Japanese CD issue,
The Black Ark
had become a collector’s item and something of a cult object among free-jazz fans. That situation sometimes leads to disappointment when a record resurfaces, the reality not quite matching up to the promise, but even with no extra material the return of Howard’s best-known recording confirmed its integrity and longevity.

The playing is very much in a late-’60s free idiom, with the ostensible theme – Latin on ‘Ole Negro’, playful on ‘Queen Anne’, oriental on ‘Mount Fuji’ – quickly abandoned in pursuit of some fine balance between flat-out soloing and free ensemble playing. Doyle, as so often, pushes the boat out a shade too far, most irritatingly on the opening ‘Domiabra’, where his statement cuts across Howard’s own excellent solo. The key to work of this kind often lies in the rhythm section. There is a hint of phasing on drums and percussion which gives the music a spacey aura, a not unknown device at the time, but given the title inevitably reminiscent of Sun Ra and the Arkestra. This is perhaps too scorched earth an aesthetic to align comfortably in that direction, but it’s an interesting reference point.

SUNNY MURRAY

Born James Marcellus Arthur Murray, 21 September 1936, Idabel, Oklahoma

Drums

Sunshine & An Even Break (Never Give A Sucker)

Fuel 2000 061215

Murray; Lester Bowie (t); Arthur Jones, Roscoe Mitchell (as); Byard Lancaster (ss, as, bcl, f); Archie Shepp (ts); Kenneth Terroade (ts, f); Dave Burrell (p); Malachi Favors (b). 1969.

Saxophonist Tony Bevan has performed with Sunny Murray in the UK:
‘The first free drummer, with Albert Ayler, and also the great listening drummer, in that great listening trio. Even when he’s playing at full pelt (which he often is) within the surging power is an extraordinary level of detail that shows he’s completely aware of what’s going on around him, and can turn the music on a sixpence. A brilliant, hilarious, joyous man.’

Murray played traditional jazz for a time but at 23 started working with Cecil Taylor and appeared on the celebrated 1962 Café Montmartre recordings. He also gigged with John Coltrane and was featured on Albert Ayler’s
Spiritual Unity
recording. The assumption is that these masters introduced Murray to free drumming. In fact, he brought something unique to the table, a sense of rhythm influenced by Native American music, and a sense of the drumkit as an integral instrument, rather than a set of discrete sound-sources. It was Murray who sparked a particular direction in the free jazz of the ’60s. Like most innovative Americans of the period, he found the United States violent and restrictive, and moved to Paris towards the end of the ’60s, and remained in Europe when many of his contemporaries started to drift back ‘home’. For the moment, though, as for the membership of the
Art Ensemble Of Chicago, France afforded playing and recording opportunities that were simply not available in the US.

An Even Break
and
Sunshine
were both recorded for BYG and have since been reissued together. Murray had previously recorded in America for ESP. On
Sunshine
he again introduces an otherwise unknown hornman. Terroade plays one trio track (‘Real’) with Murray and Favors, while the rest of the set is devoted to two larger groups on ‘Flower Trane’ and ‘Red Cross’, the latter Sunny’s only real repertory piece. Not much longer in duration,
An Even Break
was his finest hour of the fast disappearing ’60s. ‘Giblets Part 12’ and the rollicking ‘Invisible Rules’ are the equal of anything on the first disc and the shorter, more pointed compositions are a perfect study for Murray’s integrated percussion. Even on a relatively crude recording, the dynamics are quite extraordinary, everything given due weight and presence, no part of the kit dominating, an almost continuous roll of sound on every track.