If the Festival Actuel is any indication, the founders of
BYG intended their Actuel imprint and their brand as a whole to represent
forward-thinking global music in any genre, with free jazz being the particular
focus. Had financial mismanagement and the insane overreaching that came with
holding such a gigantic festival so soon after the label’s founding not tanked
BYG, it is not unreasonable to believe that BYG Actuel could have become one of
the avant-grade musical leaders on the European continent. With these lofty
ambitions, the first Actuel release had to set the tone and the standard of
quality for the albums ahead and draw attention to the brand new subsidiary
label. A minor public relations coup resulting from signing an established
artist was certainly a helpful bonus as well. The label got all of this with “Mu” First Part, the first of two duo
albums by Ornette Coleman Quartet alums Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell.
“Mu” First Part
seems oddly sequenced at first, with two and a half songs on each side. The
album could easily have been resequenced, but this would have interrupted the
excellent flow of the album and it would have weakened the initial sonic impact
that one gets when the needle hits the grooves and Cherry’s pocket trumpet
squeaks out a jarring set of notes at the beginning of “Brilliant Action.”
These squeaks are short-lived, as Cherry quickly moves into something less
immediately abrasive. Cherry’s playing throughout this song as wonderful and
casually virtuosic. It sounds like he was furious while they recorded this
song, but this emotion is counteracted by the thin tone he gets from playing a
pocket trumpet rather than a full-size trumpet. For an album with Cherry’s name
on the cover, the first song is completely dominated by Blackwell. Early on,
Blackwell operates in a Gene Krupa-esque mode, and the flurry of percussion
frequently crowds Cherry out of the way, forcing him to catch his breath and
come back in later spewing fire in order to be heard. Later on, Blackwell’s
playing is skull rattling if played at even a moderate volume, and he changes
his rhythmic foundation so frequently that it’s hard to grab hold of the song.
Ed Blackwell proves why he was one of the first, if not the first great free
jazz drummers, never letting any rhythm rest of too long, constantly shifting
and dodging Cherry’s trumpet playing.
“Brilliant Action” is as forceful and heady as the title
suggests, making the smooth transition into the much quieter “Amejelo” surprising
for how not jarring it is. Cherry switches from pocket trumpet to flute and
Blackwell calms down considerably, sticking mostly to a relatively consistent
rhythm on snare and bell. Occasionally during the song, he shifts his style
completely to match the volume and energy level of Cherry’s flute playing
before returning to the original rhythmic template. Their interplay is great,
and the African influence (that Cherry would continue to explore on future
releases and that can be found on a lot of the Actuel records by other artists)
is so palpable here, especially at the end of the song when Cherry plays some
bells and does some clapping that dances through Blackwell’s rhythms. On this
song especially, it’s very clear that these guys had played together for a long
time before this session. Their connection is almost telepathic; every time
Cherry makes a subtle change in his tone, Blackwell adjusts the rhythm and vice
versa. Cherry is listed as the leader on the record, but it’s really hard to
tell who is leading the other. This is really a recording of equals.
Split into two parts (3 and 6 minutes, respectively) over
the two sides, “Total Vibration” is both an excellent centerpiece for the album
and a welcome return to the energy of “Brilliant Action.” The drums from “Amejelo”
continue into this song but quickly fade out and are replaced by a Cherry
pocket trumpet solo. This song is more halting than “Action,” frequently stopping
and starting, but it retains the power of that first song. Cherry favors short
runs here, with brief pauses in between each one. He really knows the power of
negative space in his trumpet playing, and he is great at balancing sustained
notes with lightning-fast runs. Meanwhile, Blackwell focuses primarily at developing
compelling polyrhythms between the cymbals and drums. Around 3:45 Blackwell
pulls back a bit and leaves a lot of space for Cherry to pull out the best solo
on the record. It’s the longest period of time on the entire album that Cherry
plays trumpet without leaving a space for Blackwell to solo, and Cherry takes
advantage of this by folding early twentieth century New Orleans-style trumpet
into his playing. The results exude a sorrow that isn’t found much elsewhere on
the album or on Cherry’s other albums from this period.
Like the previous songs, “Total Vibration” segues straight
into “Sun of the East” with no pause. Cherry repeats a melody a few times and
then Ed Blackwell gives him some time to stretch out beyond this initial
melodic framework. This track has the least Ed Blackwell on it and the longest
periods of Cherry playing completely unaccompanied of any song on the album. The
title of the song is significant in that it signals the increasing dedication
to non-Western music that he would fully develop a few years later. This song
has Cherry’s most plaintive playing on the album a couple of minutes in over a
clop-clopping beat from Blackwell. That stretch sounds like it could be played
during some exotic desert scene in an old movie, but this is short-lived as
Blackwell picks up again and Cherry returns to the original melody, just
faster, louder, and more forceful. Cherry’s playing rises in intensity like the
sun over the course of a morning. As if to continue this cycle of daytime, the
song switches emphasis toward drums and bells halfway into the song as Cherry
and Blackwell move away from the midday heat and toward the placid coolness of
the evening. The bells also signal the shift back to flute, and Cherry’s
playing is airy and arid. This song has a very not-traditionally jazz feel to
it that sounds as if it could be a freer version of an Ahmed Abdul-Malik song.
After the only between song pause on the album, it ends with
its shortest song, “Terrestrial Beings.” It starts with bell, then a pause,
then Cherry moves to the piano. He’s not doing anything overly technical on the
piano, but it’s very pretty and expressive. Blackwell is just adding accents,
long cymbal sounds and occasional small fills. One minute and forty seconds in,
the piano turns from muted and pretty to fucking hip, sounding like library
music designed for a detective movie, but that doesn’t last long before he goes
back to the prettier mood of the beginning of the song. Compared to the first
and third songs especially, Blackwell’s barely here until 3 minutes in when
Cherry’s playing gets angular for a bit and Blackwell amps things up to meet
Cherry. Their interplay and the way it builds at the end of the song is amazing,
but then the record just kind of ends. You can tell that this isn’t the whole “Mu” statement. It’s incomplete without
part 2, which wasn’t issued until much later (about thirty Actuel volumes later,
actually), so Mu remained incomplete
in listeners’ minds for some time.
This is a transitional album for Cherry, as he was moving
from the sound of his landmark mid-sixties Blue Note albums that were very much
an extension of his work with the Ornette Coleman Quartet to his excellent mid-seventies
world music-indebted records (Organic
Music Society, Brown Rice, etc.).
Cherry and Blackwell didn’t show up on any other BYG Actuel records outside of
the two Mu albums, so they weren’t
part of the community vibe of much of the rest of the label’s output and aren’t
the most representative case in examining the label. In spite of this lack of
direct interaction with the rest of their labelmates, the looseness and
spontaneity that characterize so many Actuel records, where anyone who wanted
to play that day could play, is present on this album. While there are only two
players on Mu, it sounds as if Cherry
and Blackwell walked into the studio and just played two short, mostly
improvised sets that were released unedited as the two Mu volumes. Also, while this is a great album, this is not the best
release that BYG put out. In fact it falls somewhere in the middle of the label’s
catalog quality-wise, which says a lot about the overall value of Actuel’s
output. I’ll be getting to one of their absolute best in a few weeks, and I’ll
be knocking around a couple of their worst not long after.
Coming up in the
weeks ahead:
Actuel 02: Art Ensemble of Chicago – A Jackson in Your House
Actuel 03: Sunny Murray – Hommage to Africa
Actuel 04: Archie Shepp – Yasmina, a Black Woman
Actuel 05: Gong – Magick
Brother
Actuel 06: Claude Delcloo & Arthur Jones – Africanasia
"Brilliant Action"
"Terrestrial Beings"
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