Reassessing some free jazz drummers

There was a period of about five years where I was listening to a lot of early free jazz— Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp. Ornette (and his circle) is the only one I still listen to with any regularity. As an aesthetic and way of playing free music is still very much with me— a lot of it has been assimilated into mainstream modern jazz— but it's just one thing I do, and I don't listen to a lot of real out music. 

Here I want to revisit some players I listened to in that period, and decide if there's anything there that's for me, now. I'm only making judgments for myself. I'm looking for people who do this kind of playing effectively, in the traditional sense, and who have some kind of musical personality that is appealing to me, and who have something special to say on the drums. I'm not an avant-gardist— I don't listen to music for the purpose of processing my negative feelings about it, I don't accept absolutely anything as legitimate art. 

Ed Blackwell and Billy Higgins
The first players to do what was termed free jazz, with Ornette Coleman. Both solid mainstream bebop players doing real gigs outside the avant-garde— they're almost not even thought of as avant-garde. I don't think Blackwell ever really breaks away from being a groove player. Higgins may be the most humane voice in drumming— he always sounds like pure music. I talk about them both amply elsewhere on the site.   

Ornette Coleman - Art of the Improvisors / This is Our Music / Change of the Century
 

Sunny Murray
Sunny is a strange case— I feel like there's some kind of personality disorder at work. He's the originator of that no-time white noise approach to free playing. There's some warmth there, I get a feeling of Baby Dodds around some of his later playing. See the record I posted yesterday.

Albert Ayler - Spiritual Unity
Cecil Taylor - Nefertiti, The Beautiful One Has Come  

Andrew Cyrille
A great presence as an artist and creative percussionist. I've mainly listened to his old records with Cecil Taylor and a few newer things, and seen him play in person, but I don't have a real good idea of what he sounds like. It's strange. He's done a ton of creative music and I need to listen to him more. Cecil Taylor's Conquistador! is a free jazz classic. 

Cecil Taylor - Unit Structures, Conquistador! 

 

Milford Graves
Uses the tom toms a lot, with a strong African, polyrhythmic feeling— that's a feeling you can actually try to copy, and I do. 

Paul Bley - Barrage
David Murray - Real Deal 

Playing here with John Zorn in front of a painting by Jackson Pollock:

Sunny Murray, the bebop tradition, and Milford Graves

“Take it easy, now... there's no work in this shit, they're gonna jump on your ass...” 
— Sunny Murray to a young, interested, Hans Bennink


 Here's an interview by Dan Warburton, with one of the original free jazz drummers, Sunny Murray. It's most interesting to me as a piece of archeology into the attitudes of these players, who seemed at the time to be making such a large break with previous music, and who are often regarded as not maintaining, shall we say, traditional technical standards. But Murray clearly feels himself to be part of the same tradition as some more mainstream players (even if McCall and Blackwell were thought of as avant-garde at the time) and having less connection to another great early free player, Milford Graves, who he felt was coming from someplace else:

[...] I like Milford a lot, but basically I have the attitude of a bebop drummer regarding what I feel about music and other drummers. Milford didn't come from bebop at all. I love Roy Brooks, and Louis Hayes with those beautiful mahogany-looking hands, Eddie Blackwell that could just swing your head off, Steve McCall was the best surprise with the left hand I ever heard, Dennis Charles he'd just chug-a-lug you for ever. [...] You know, it's traditional for a drummer to be opinionated about other drummers, because there are some basics and roots in jazz drumming and there's a whole generation today that hasn't had to deal with those rules or laws, aesthetically or spiritually, or go through the kinds of pressures I had to go through, Louis Hayes, Dennis Charles, Eddie Blackwell, Steve McCall had to go through... It wasn't something unpleasant, it was an education.

More after the break:

DBMITW: Ed Blackwell, more Milford

I've got several wordy pieces kicking around the drafts folder right now, but I'm working on the 2012 Book of the Blog today, so it'll be a minute before you see them.

In the mean time: you really don't hear people play their ride cymbal with Ed Blackwell's driving feel these days:



Also, in case you didn't make it to the end of the Milford Graves post, this duo record with David Murray is really great— one of my new favorite duo records:

Milford Graves

Hey, there's more of pioneering free jazz drummer Milford Graves up on YouTube than there used to be. I think he's my favorite of the early way free guys, and I wish he was on more stuff. You sometimes get the feeling with that music that there's not much going on beyond the massive expending of energy, but there's real music going on with Graves. He's got a special kind of pulse, and melodic sensibility you don't hear in the straight wall-of-sound guys. There's some fairly difficult listening here, but be sure to check out the very last thing, at least.

A nice track from his 1977 record Babi, which I had never heard before:




For years, this solo album was just about the only thing I could find with him on it— well, this, and Paul Bley's Barrage, which I found as a random lucky score. He tends to do a lot of vocalizing as part of his thing:



More after the break:

A treasure trove: WKCR Soundscape project

I just googled this up, from the WKCR 89.9 New York radio site: a duo performance by Ed Blackwell and saxophonist Charles Brackeen, recorded in 1980 at:

Soundscape[,] a New York performance venue founded and curated by Verna Gillis. Between 1979 and 1983, Soundscape offered specialized programming of Latin Jazz, Afro-Cuban music, avant-garde improvised music, and “world music” performers from many nations. Many Soundscape shows were recorded and the library of recordings has been donated by Gillis to the WKCR permanent archives, for broadcast on air and to be made available on the web.

There are a bunch of other interesting things- a group called Commitment, featuring Denis Charles, who we talked about a few days ago, a Sunny Murray solo performance, a Rashied Ali duo concert, a very cool Tito Peunte concert, and more.

And digging a little deeper into the WKCR site, there's also a page of interviews and in-studio performances by people like Don Cherry, Milford Graves, Archie Shepp, Lee Konitz, Dewey Redman, and others. Definitely worth spending a bunch with this one.