This Is The Cover Of My Next Book

Also, 5 great albums by American artists on Italian labels...

May 22, 2024

In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor cover — Coming soon to a bookstore somewhere…

WE HAVE COVER ART. This is it, folks: my next book. In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor will officially be coming out this summer from Wolke Verlag in Berlin. I’ll have much more news soon, including ways to pre-order it, links to reviews, etc., but for now: BEHOLD. I can’t even adequately explain how excited I am. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done, and I can’t wait for you all to BUY IT and read it.

From the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, some of the greatest jazz on Earth was made in Italy. The Black Saint and Soul Note labels provided creative support and exposure to visionary artists who couldn’t get American labels to put their records out. Their collective catalog includes titles by Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Bill Dixon, Roscoe Mitchell, David Murray, Max Roach, Cecil Taylor and many others, and has remained in print pretty much constantly for the last 40 years. A few years ago, they put together a series of budget-priced single-artist box sets, many of which I snapped up, and still pull off the shelf on a regular basis.

Anyway, Black Saint and Soul Note are now adding their releases to Bandcamp, and on May 3, the most recent Bandcamp Friday (a day on which the site foregoes its usual cut of sales, passing all proceeds on to labels and artists), I bought a bunch of titles I didn’t already have, plus a couple on a third label, Red. I’ll discuss some of them below.

Hamiet Bluiett was a baritone saxophonist from St. Louis, a founding member of the Black Artists Group alongside Julius Hemphill, Lester Bowie, Oliver Lake and others. His was not traditionally a lead instrument, but he made it one on albums like Endangered Species, We Have Come to Save You From Yourselves, and the astonishing Birthright: A Solo Blues Concert. Resolution, from 1978, features an astonishing band: Bluiett on baritone sax, clarinet, and flutes, Don Pullen on piano, Fred Hopkins on bass, and Billy Hart and Famoudou Don Moye on drums and percussion. The first piece, “Happy Spirit,” is nearly 15 minutes long, and is as thoughtfully “free” as the Art Ensemble of Chicago and as soulful as mid-Seventies Charles Mingus. Buy it.

Trumpeter Baikida Carroll was another key member of BAG, playing on Hemphill’s Dogon A.D., Lake’s NTU: Point From Which Creation Begins, and the BAG live album In Paris, Aries 1973. He didn’t record often as a leader, though. Shadows and Reflections is his third album, from 1982, and features Hemphill on alto and tenor sax, Anthony Davis on piano, Dave Holland on bass, and Pheeroan AkLaff on drums. Holland is surprisingly prominent in the mix, while Davis and AkLaff are tamped down by comparison. Carroll’s playing is as rich and vibrant as the late Lee Morgan, and his extended solos have a calm if exuberant logic. Hemphill, on the other hand, spits his notes out like they’re burning his tongue. Buy it.

The Leaders were a group of avant-garde all-stars: Lester Bowie on trumpet, Arthur Blythe on alto sax, Chico Freeman on tenor and soprano saxes and bass clarinet, Kirk Lightsey on piano, Cecil McBee on bass and Famoudou Don Moye on drums. (Early, unrecorded lineups included Don Cherry on trumpet and Don Pullen and Hilton Ruiz on piano.) They made one album, 1986’s Mudfoot, for the tiny Blackhawk label, followed by two more — 1988’s Out Here Like This… and 1989’s Unforeseen Blessings — for Black Saint. The thing is, these guys were all fully paid-up members of the Church of Real Jazz; Blythe had made an album called In the Tradition, Bowie had radically reworked jazz and pop tunes with his Brass Fantasy ensemble; and all the others knew the rules backwards and forwards, the better to break them when the moment called for it. So Out Here Like This… is not a collection of blaring free jazz eruptions, it’s a set of complex, well-thought-out original compositions — two each by Bowie and McBee, one each by Freeman and Lightsey, and a version of keyboardist David Durrah’s “Loves I Once Knew” — that step right up to the edge of bebop but still manage to stay inside the lines, as it were. Buy it.

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Saxophonist Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre was a key early member of the AACM; he was part of the ensembles on Roscoe Mitchell’s Sound and Muhal Richard Abrams’ Levels and Degrees of Light. His debut as a leader, 1969’s Humility in the Light of Creator, is an astonishing document of Afro-spiritual jazz played by an ensemble that includes trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, pianist Amina Claudine Myers, bassist Malachi Favors, and others. He recorded infrequently, though; 1979’s Peace and Blessings was only his fourth album. A studio session with a live photo on its cover, it features three musicians I’ve never even heard of: Longineu Parsons on trumpet, flugelhorn, and recorders; Leonard Jones on bass; and King L. Mock on drums. All but one of the compositions are by McIntyre, and include a reworking of “Hexagon,” from Humility… On first listen, this could seem like a rehash of old ideas: some bebop heads, some free blowing, blah blah blah. But Mock’s crisp, militaristic, almost punk-rock drumming and Jones’ guimbri-like bass give it an edge that makes it worth a listener’s time. Buy it.

Dannie Richmond was Charles Mingus’s drummer for over 20 years, from 1957 until the bassist’s retirement from performance, and death in 1979. Given such a steady situation, it’s unsurprising that he rarely recorded as a leader; his 1965 Impulse! album “In” Jazz for the Culture Set included versions of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” and Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” performed by a band that included Toots Thielemans on harmonica and guitar, Jaki Byard on piano, Jimmy Raney on guitar and Cecil McBee on bass. After Mingus’s death, he joined tenor saxophonist George Adams and pianist Don Pullen in their quartet, alongside bassist Cameron Brown; they made something like a dozen albums in less than a decade, but honestly I prefer the two albums Adams and Richmond made with trombonist Jimmy Knepper, pianist Hugh Lawson, and bassist Mike Richmond, 1980’s Hand to Hand and 1983’s Gentlemen’s Agreement. Dionysius was Richmond’s final album as a leader, recorded five months after Gentlemen’s Agreement with trumpeter Jack Walrath, saxophonist Ricky Ford, pianist Bob Neloms and Brown on bass. It was released on the Red label, and has recently been remastered and reissued. The first side contains three blazing, high-energy originals by the bandmembers, while the second side offers new versions of two Mingus compositions, “Three or Four Shades of Blues” and “Peggy’s Blue Skylight.” Richmond’s beat absolutely snaps throughout. Buy it.