Wall of Sound

David Murray Trio: Live At The Peace Church
Danola DA001

David Murray (ts);
Fred Hopkins (b);
Stanley Crouch (d)

1. Beauty from Elsewhere 23:26 (David Murray)
2. Future Sally’s Time* 8:21 (David Murray)
3. Low Class Conspiracy / Turquoise Cement Flower 14:42 (David Murray)

*Future Sally’s Time was originally presented over two sides of the vinyl LP, and so there is an abrupt stop and start in the middle of the track exactly as it appeared.

Recorded live in concert at St Mark’s Church NY 1976

This LP has been a rather illusive David Murray recording for me. In fact adding it to my collection (as far as I am aware) now completes a set of commercial recordings by Murray as leader or co-leader. This is certainly his rarest release. It has been long out of print, second hand copies hardly ever come up for sale, and dealer prices are some what inflated. But thanks to the generosity of a fellow Murray fan I now own the final piece of my Murray odyssey. Thank you so much, Dale.

The record was also worth the wait, because Murray’s performance does not disappoint. This was a trio of musicians that played together, but not what one could consider a stable band. The recording is one of the few to feature jazz and cultural critic Stanley Crouch on drums soon after his arrival in New York. He was to make a much bigger name for himself as a rather opinionated journalist, but he has always been rather self-effacing about his drumming skills. I think he acquits himself perfectly well here. Although Murray is the strongest player, with Fred Hopkins in rather more subdued mood than usual, Crouch gives interesting percussion fills, and a clear grasp of the music. He had been a mentor and teacher to Murray in California, and his role is equally supportive here.

Although the sleeve notes make the point that the approach of musicians on what the writer calls “the New Jazz, Avant Guard Jazz, or Free Jazz” scene was away from the traditional role of leader and sidemen, Murray is credited as author of all the themes here, and dominates throughout. There are no alternating solos here, with Murray improvising strongly throughout a number supported by Hopkins on plucked and bowed bass and Crouch’s fills. Hopkins does have some solo space on ‘Future Sally’s Time’ but he remains uncharacteristically introverted. His playing circles downwards like water running out of a plug hole.

The statement of themes is far more diffuse when compared with recordings of the same pieces made within a few months of this date, but his often plaintive playing dominates. I struggle with musicological comparisons, but just jumping between different sections of different tracks suggests that they are more part of one approach to improvising ideas than distinct as themes.

As I’ve noted in an earlier post, Low Class Conspiracy was an oft used phrase in the Murray lexicon at the time, and it seems particularly associated with projects involving Crouch, so I’m guessing he coined the phrase. Here it is used for the name of one theme in a longer improvisation, is a very different performance from that on the LP of the same name, and is run into ‘Turquoise Cement Flower’. I can’t actually tell off my first few listens through where one stops and the other starts. The surreal title of the latter part wasn’t used again, and the style of titling is notably different from the far more personalised approach Murray usually took, even within the titles on this LP. Does that suggest the name didn’t come from Murray?

‘Future Sally’s Time’ is somewhat closer to his usual personalising approach, but still has that sense of abstraction. I’m not aware of another recording of ‘Beauty from Elsewhere’, and again there doesn’t seem to be the strong writing common to almost all the rest of his work.

This is a far more pensive performance than his other records of the time, with far fewer of the usual gospel ecstatic moments that Murray would become associated with, and far less of the flash than one finds on contemporary concerts made in Europe.

The title of the album is significant, not simply because it indicates that the music was recorded at St Mark’s Church in Manhattan, but that this fact reveals something interesting and significant about the jazz scene in New York at that time. During this period Murray and his fellow musicians are often referred to as members of the ‘loft scene’, and music like this termed ‘loft jazz’. The term, of course, referrers to the reuse of industrial spaces as domestic residences and artistic venues outside the mainstream of commercial live music. Murray played extensively in these venues, and a number of his early releases were recorded at places like Ladies Fort and Rivbae, and Crouch ran his own venue from the loft he lived in. Many musicians, though, have expressed their annoyance at the term ‘loft scene’ because they felt it inaccurately limited an understanding of the spaces in which the new music was made; and fighting against limitations on understanding were a central tenant of musical practice of this time.

The Peace Church, though, was one of a whole series of equally important venues outside the lofts where musicians played. While the postwar jazz clubs may have had very little space for the new jazz, these venues were integrated into other cultural activities and neighbourhood politics. The Peace Church had been a significant location for anti-Vietnam war activity and other radical political causes in the 1960s, and these ideas are embedded in the notion that it was also host to creative musicians in the 1970s.

David Murray Solo: Organic Saxophone
Palm 31

David Murray tenor saxophone

1. Body And Soul (dedicated to Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster) (Johnny Green)
2. Chan Pour Une Nouvelle Afrique Du Sud (David Murray)
3. Ballad For Matthew and Maia Garrison (David Murray)
4. Hope/Scope (dedicated to Mary Hope Lee) (David Murray)
5. All The Things You Are (dedicated to Ntazake Shange) (Jerome Kern)
6. The Prominade Never Stops (dedicated to George Brown) (David Murray)
7. Monica In Monk’s Window (Stanley Crouch)

Recorded February 6 & 7, 1978 live at the Theatre Mouffetard, Paris

Recorded by Jef Gilson

This recording is one third of a concert recorded in Paris in 1978. The other two parts were released on the Italian Red and British Cadillac labels. The Cadillac Conceptual Saxophone is, amazingly, still available commercially from the label. When you order you’ll get a vinyl copy from the original pressing. Let me know if you’d like one.

Organic Saxophone was released by Jef Gilson – who also recorded the concert – on his Paris-based Palm label. I’m guessing Gilson selected from the takes at the concert because this is the best programmed of the three LPs. Romantic ballads intersperse with sharper, wilder, performances, and the whole is very satisfying indeed. The recording is excellent for a live performance, although there is a very strong pre-echo of the sound explosions to come in each of the quiet moments in Murray’s solos. This is most likely the result of ‘print-through’ where the magnetic signal encoded on the tape is passed on to the next layer of the tape wound on the reel. I must try and see if I can find out the full running order of the concert. I did try and see if there were any aural clues to the order, but it defeated me. It would be marvellous to have the whole two days of recordings featured on the three LPs made available as one release in performance order. I know that at least one of the masters still exists.

It’s the music that makes this recording, though:

This is the first time on record that Murray tackles a standard (well two, actually). ‘Body and Soul’ is dedicated to Hawkins and Webster, indicating the importance Murray placed on investigating the saxophone techniques of the masters of the instrument. Murray plays the theme with all the romanticism that made the Hawkins’ rendition a jukebox hit forty years before. From that point on, though, it’s an exploration of both the musical possibilities of the piece and the saxophone. Just as Hawkins had transformed what was possible on a tenor, Murray looks to go beyond even that. However, this is a lovely, tender, rendition which would set a pattern for his later exploration of the ballad in the jazz tradition.

‘Chant for a New South Africa’ is a wonderful, well titled, piece. He seems to be exploring the sort of counter-point used so effectively in the World Saxophone Quartet, but here from one soloist. Quite remarkable. It is both a meditative chant and a blow of frustration, punctuated with saxophone and verbal cries. He was seldom as overtly political in the naming, or playing, of a composition.

It is interesting how many of Murray’s recordings have dedications. His music always sounds very personal to me, and the dedications tend to suggest the relationship between his selection of music, his playing, and his personal relationships. I tend to a degree of speculation when trying to map out the dedications, and I’d be very interested to hear if I’ve got any of these right (or wrong), but they suggest a network of fellow musicians and friends who stimulated and supported his work. Ballad for Matthew and Maia Garrison feels a very personal piece, and I’m guessing that it’s named after the bass player and dancer siblings born to Coltrane’s bassist, Jimmy Garrison, and his wife, the dancer Roberta Garrison. The younger Garrison’s would have been ten and seven at the time of the recording, and the dedication suggests something of the creative world in which Murray operated at the time.

Hope/Scope is a much tarter piece featuring lots of Murray’s squeals and low to high leaps and runs, and the fast alterations between quiet and high volume. It feels right that this would be for the poet and writer Mary Hope Lee, whose poem “on not bein” is often a part of compilations of African American women’s writing. I’d like to think her ‘A Song for David’ from the following year was a reciprocal dedication. Murray reused the theme a further seven times on record in a variety of settings for quartet, octet and duo’s with piano players Dave Burrell and then Donald Fox. Murray’s later playing is even more ecstatic than it is here, and usually set against piano clustered discords. Such an observation rather undermines the view that Murray became more mainstream as his career progressed.

The treatment of ‘All the Things You Are’ mirrors that of Body and Soul. A romantic statement of the theme and some lovely flights of playing that bring out the edge of a standard that’s often given a saccharin treatment. It’s dedicated to Murray’s then partner, poet Ntazake Shange, with whom Murray had been performing in New York for much of the previous year, and there are suggestions that they worked together in Europe during June 1977 (West 1977). I don’t know of any recordings of these performances, but I’d sure like to hear them if they exist. It’s pretty much an avant-lovesong.

Murray’s own ‘Promenade’ and Stanley Crouch’s ‘Monica In Monk’s Window’ finish off the LP. The latter has a jolly theme which I think is pretty good writing from the EngLit-teacher-turned-drummer-turned-cultural-critic. Murray certainly does an excellent job with it in this five minute or so performance. As far as I am aware this is the only recording of both pieces. The earlier number is dedicated to George Brown, who I assume is the same GB who plays drums on the January Quartet Paris concert that appears on Last of The Hipman and Let the Music Take You [I featured Hipman in an earlier post here]. If you know anything more about George Brown I’d be very interested to hear.

References:

Mary Hope Lee (1979): ‘A Song for David’. Callaloo, No. 5, Women Poets: A Special Issue (Feb., 1979), p. 89

Mary Hope Lee ‘on not bein’ collected in Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (eds) (1981): The Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Women of Color Press.

Hollie I West (1977): ‘The Development of a Bright Star’ Washington Post 12th June 1977.

Here’s another instalment in my ongoing examination of Murray’s recorded output.

Red Records VPA129

David Murray Tenor Saxophone
Lawrence ‘Butch’ Morris Trumpet
Johnny Dyani (spelt Dyiani on record sleeve) Bass
George Brown Drums, percussion

Monk’s Notice (James Newton) (21, 41)
Patricia (David Murray) (13, 17)
Last Of The Hipmen (David Murray) (10, 34)

Recorded in concert in Rouen on January 30th 1978

Produced by Alberto Alberti and Sergio Veschi

Mixed at Studio 67 Bologna March 1978

This is another very early recording from Murray, this time with a full quartet. It’s one of a number released on European labels, and recorded in France or Italy during 1978. Five LPs were produced out of two concerts: one on the 30th January at Rouen University, and one over two nights on 6th and 7th February at the Theatre Mouffetard, Paris. There’s some evidence that Murray’s manager at the time, Kunle Mwanga, arranged for the recordings, and then sold tapes to different independent jazz labels. The 30th January date resulted in Let The Music Take You (released on [and still available from] Marge Records in France) and this record, released on Red Record based in Milan and currently not available commercially. The February solo performances were released on three vinyl LPs on different labels.

The record gets its title from one of the tracks, although the track’s called ‘Last of the Hipmen’, the album sold as Last of the Hipman. As the album title doesn’t seem to make much sense (it certainly wasn’t the last that we heard of Murray), and only appears on the album sleeve, I’ve always wondered if it was a typo. They mis-spelt Dyani anyway.

During this time there was no real stability to Murray’s bands. Butch Morris was clearly in Europe with Murray at this time because he appears on the February Milan Studio recording that was released by Black Saint as Interboogieology and an August live recording in London (released as The London Concert). Expatriate South African Johnny Dyani was heavily involved in the London new jazz scene at the time, and he appears on this date, The London Conference and the recording for 3D Family on September 3, 1978 live in concert at Willisau Jazz Festival (available on hatArt). Dyani seems to have made a big impression on Murray, and he dedicated recordings to him over the years using Dyani’s African name of M’Bizo. I know nothing about George Brown, and it seems unlikely from his playing here that he was the same G Brown who played Bop drums in the 1960s in the US.

As I noted in an earlier post ‘Monk’s Notice’ is a James Newton composition also recorded for Solomon’s Sons almost exactly a year before, and the two Murray compositions were often featured in other recordings (‘Hipmen’ in 1981 and 1987; ‘Patricia’ in 1977, and 1986).

The record company is also worthy of some note. Red Record was (and still is) run by Sergio Veschi in Milan, and started recording and / or releasing free jazz as part of the Italian left cultural movement. It’s likely that the red in question was therfore the symbol of left-wing politics in Europe. Better known today for musicians like Bobby Watson, the label is a key institution of Italian and European jazz, and supporter of the American avant-garde (more details at www.ijm.it/wp/whos-who/sergio-veschi).

I rate this as one of Murray’s most interesting records of the 1970s.