There are probably arguments that could be made against this
claim, but Sunny Murray is free jazz’s first truly free drummer. Instead of
simply keeping time, Murray’s playing is purely expressionistic, pouring his
entire being into a cacophony of textural percussion. Considering his place in
the free jazz pantheon, it is unsurprising that he cut his teeth in the Cecil
Taylor Unit and then in the Albert Ayler Trio and Quartet, three of the most
important groups in free jazz’s development. While his playing on albums by
these groups, and especially on the Albert Ayler Trio’s fiery Ghosts, is rightfully lauded by fans and
critics, his work as a bandleader is too often overlooked. He recorded two
great ESP-Disks—1965’s Sunny’s Time Now and
1966’s Sunny Murray—while still a member
of Ayler’s band—along with the transitional Big
Chief for EMI/Pathe in 1968 between his stint with Ayler and Archie Shepp’s
invitation to join him at the Panafrican Festival at the start of the next
summer. While Murray’s first three albums as leader are very good, Murray’s
voice is still very much tied to his work with Ayler. Murray’s time with Shepp
and his experiences recording for BYG Actuel freed him of these stylistic
constraints and allowed him to find his own voice as a writer.
Hommage to Africa
is the first of three albums Murray recorded for Actuel, and it is the first of
that label’s records to truly embody the communal and exploratory spirit of
that Paris summer in 1969. Side one, which consists of the piece “Suns of
Africa” in two parts, features a whopping thirteen musicians. Shepp’s entire
sextet makes up the backbone of the ensemble, along with Earl Freeman on
tympani and bells, Kenneth Terroade on flute and tenor saxophone, Arthur Jones
on gong, tambourine, and bells, and Art Ensemble of Chicago collaborator Jeanne
Lee on vocals and bells. Most importantly, three of the four members of the Art
Ensemble play on this record (Joseph Jarman is the only absent member), and
this marks the first collaboration between the New York and Chicago free jazz
camps. With a decade’s worth of recording and publicity, as well as luminaries
like Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Taylor, and Ayler to follow, many of the
New York players were starting to find themselves in a bit of a rut by the end
of the sixties. Great records and performances were still happening, but sonic
and compositional advancements weren’t terribly forthcoming. Enter the AACM in
Chicago, whose members were quietly upending free jazz dogma with their use of
little instruments and focus on negative space and sparse compositions. The
arrival of the Chicago musicians (along with several equally iconoclastic
players from St. Louis) in Paris and then in New York a few years later
revitalized free jazz as a whole and sparked the underappreciated loft jazz
scene on the 1970s. As far as recorded documents go, that all started here on “Suns
of Africa.”
A chorus of bells and Murray’s cymbals open the track and
provide most of the texture for the first half of the piece. They are soon
joined by Kenneth Terroade and Roscoe Mitchell on flutes. These two seem to
switch back and forth between snaking around each other’s sounds and actively
sparring. This first movement in Part 1 is allowed six or seven minutes to
slowly and loosely develop, and it would have made for a memorable piece on its
own. Murray’s role in this movement is strictly complimentary, hanging back and
allowing himself to blend in with the sea of percussion while the two flautists
take the lead. As bandleader, Murray is content to hang around the background
and provide anchoring textures, that is until Dave Burrell arrives like a set
of asteroids, blasting the surface of the song with two quick and startling runs
forcing Murray to take a more active role in the piece. After this initial
appearance, Burrell joins in with the other seven musicians improvising with a
much lighter touch than he would later employ on his Actuel masterpiece Echo. With Burrell in tow, the band
builds ecstatically to herald the arrival of Jeanne Lee on the microphone. Her
vocal part consists of a brief, repetitive, wordless melody that serves as the
song’s centerpiece. Burrell quickly locks into his own counterpoint melody
after a short stretch focused on Lee’s interactions with Malachi Favors’ balafon
and Alan Silva’s bass.
And then the horns come in. Roscoe Mitchell’s first notes on
the alto sax are the most gorgeous fifteen seconds of this song, and five more
quickly join him in Lee’s melody—filling in for Lee while she takes a break to focus
on her bells. Mitchell, Shepp, Terroade, Clifford Thornton, Grachan Moncur III,
and Lester Bowie take turns, in no particular order, breaking away from the
melody to solo, and at times five seemingly unrelated solos nearly drown out
the melody held by a lone horn. Lee’s vocals return briefly, and she moves in
and out as needed. Burrell continues to anchor the piece with his piano melody,
and the horns build and build until they reach a peak, and then all of the
sounds bleed away. Lee returns unaccompanied for the brief Part 2, and when she’s
rejoined by the horns, it’s for a melancholy new melody devoid of solos. Bells
and Burrell’s piano make occasional appearances like specters haunting the
background of the piece. After all of the joy the band finds in Africa for most
of “Suns of Africa,” they can’t fully escape the horrors in the continent’s history
and their own detachment from the culture as a result of slavery. After
gleefully basking in the continent for fifteen minutes, it is fitting that they
would end things resigned to their psychological, physical, and cultural
distance from it.
“Suns of Africa” is one of the high watermarks of the BYG
Actuel catalog, and it is one of the great examples of free jazz at its least
abrasive.[1]
Unfortunately, it sets the bar prohibitively high for side two. “R.I.P.,” the
first of two songs on the latter side, doesn’t quite match up to these high
standards, but it works as both a continuation of the melancholy of “Suns of
Africa Part 2” and a nice warping of Albert Ayler’s frighteningly unhinged
marching songs. The bells from side one are absent here, as are most of the Art
Ensemble members. Instead, we’re left with the Archie Shepp Sextet with
Mitchell and Terroade replacing Shepp on sax. Like “Suns of Africa,” “R.I.P.”
is built around a recurring melody during which the horns break away for
frequent solos seemingly without a predetermined order. The melody here is
rather ugly, and the ten and a half minutes the listener has to spend with it
is a bit too long. Still, the soloing, and especially the interplay between
Mitchell and Terroade,[2]
is just as impressive as on “Suns of Africa,” and Burrell’s playing, which
points toward his own future work as leader, is amazing. Unfortunately, Alan Silva’s
bass is almost completely submerged under the horns. For a band that was so
good on the previous side at providing space for every musician, even when
there were thirteen of them, Silva’s inaudibility is the major disappointment
of this song. Still, while Silva doesn’t get to play much of a role, Murray steps
up on this song and takes a much more assertive role throughout. The song also
ends with Murray’s only solo on the record. It’s not Murray’s best solo of his
recording career, but it is a great example of how he was able to eschew rhythm
in favor of pure sonic expressionism. He’s also able to play extremely quickly
without raising his volume at all. Not many drum solos are able to feel understated,
but Murray pulls that off here. It’s a credit to Murray that he seemingly felt
no need to dominate the proceedings when the pieces he wrote called for him to provide
texture rather than outplay everyone else.
The drum solo leads right into “Unity,” a song that is much
more in line with the understated beauty of “Suns of Africa” while maintaining
the gloomy feel that has dominated the record since Part 2 of that piece. As on
the other songs, the standout performance here is not by Murray. Instead,
Clifford Thornton’s cornet balances beauty and sorrow better than any other
performer on this song. Even when the song’s melody disappears entirely, the
relationships fostered by most of the players’ time in Shepp’s band allows them
to maintain an almost telepathic ability to play off of one another. Considering
the Pan-African focus of much the Actuel musicians’ music, it is initially
strange that such an unhappy song would be titled “Unity,” but considering the
anticolonial and intertribal strife that dominated and still dominates much of
Africa, true unity is an improbable goal at best. In spite of his ideals,
Murray seems aware that this ideal is unattainable, but he closes the book on
these negative thoughts, and on the record, with a lone cymbal crash at the
end. The ideal of a Pan-African community, and a truly communal Black artistic
environment, would live on in these musicians even after this piece. The latter
at least was attainable for those brief few months at the BYG studios in the
second half of 1969, where musicians who had never played together before could
come together in the name of a common musical ideology.
Note: Unfortunately, “R.I.P.” seems to be the only song from
Hommage to Africa on YouTube, so I
don’t have the option to embed one of the better pieces.
Coming up in the
weeks ahead:
Actuel 04: Archie Shepp – Yasmina, a Black Woman
Actuel 05: Gong – Magick
Brother
Actuel 06: Claude Delcloo & Arthur Jones – Africanasia
Actuel 07: Michel Puig – Stigmates
Actuel 08: Burton Greene - Aquariana
[1]
Dave Burrell and Alan Silva handle abrasiveness with aplomb on their own Actuel
records.
[2] It’s
a shame that Terroade only recorded one album as leader during his entire
career. While BYG may not have been very consistent at paying musicians, they
must be credited for giving people who would never before or since have an
opportunity to lead, Terroade included, the studio time and supportive
atmosphere to do so.
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