Alice Coltrane – The Carnegie Hall Concert
At the threshold of the sacred and the secular, in February of 1971 the pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane released Journey in Satchidananda before embarking on a live performance at Carnegie Hall as part of a benefit for her favourite swami’s Integral Yoga Institute. The singer-songwriter Laura Nyro and The Rascals were also on the bill, while Coltrane was joined by an all-star cast including the saxophonists Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp, bassists Jimmy Garrison and Cecil McBee, the drummers Ed Blackwell and Clifford Jarvis, plus Kumar Kramer on the harmonium and Tulsi Reynolds on the tamboura. Almost implausibly if it weren’t for longstanding concerns around the audio fidelity of such archived sets, Impulse had commissioned a recording of the Carnegie Hall concert at the time but left it unreleased for all of these years, until Hi Hat a jazz label of dubious provenance issued a 28-minute version of ‘Africa’ as a long-play in 2018.
Now as part of the ‘Year of Alice’ – a yearlong celebration of the artist’s work organised by the Verve Label Group in partnership with The John & Alice Coltrane Home, which commenced back in February with a special night of performances by Ravi Coltrane, Michelle Coltrane, Brandee Younger and more at the legendary Birdland venue in New York City – the full Carnegie Hall concert arrives on Impulse! Records, featuring the title track and the ravishing ‘Shiva-Loka’ from Journey in Satchidananda plus ‘Africa’ and another of her husband’s compositions in the form of ‘Leo’, which was performed by John and the drummer Rashied Ali in the summer of 1966 then recorded shortly before his death in 1967, but only released posthumously in the mid-seventies on Concert in Japan and as an expansion of Interstellar Space.
Atrás del Cosmos – Cold Drinks, Hot Dreams
Sometimes characterised as Mexico’s first free jazz ensemble, between their formation in 1975 and their untimely disbandment in 1983 the trio of the pianist Ana Ruiz, saxophonist Henry West and percussionist Evry Mann as Atrás del Cosmos became a centripetal force within the artistic community of Mexico City, drawing equally from the loft jazz scene in New York City and the surrealist theatre of the Chilean expatriate Alejandro Jodorowsky, holding an eight-month residency at the El Galeón theatre and collaborating with vaunted American improvisers including the trumpeter Don Cherry, who in 1977 afforded a new level of national recognition to the group.
Honing their own improvisatory alignment behind the Cosmos cinema, the trio released just one solitary cassette before they chose to disband. Restored and issued on vinyl for the first time by Blank Forms, the live album Cold Drinks, Hot Dreams catches Atrás del Cosmos plus the bassist Claudio Enriquez on stage in 1980, with Henry West’s saxophone weaving around the ensemble and Evry Mann adding rotund hand drums and a graceful balafon solo to his broad palette of percussion, while Ruiz on the piano has been described as a distinctive amalgam of Horace Tapscott’s meditative radiance, Mal Waldron’s blues minimalism and Cecil Taylor’s percussive touch. As part of the album rollout, to celebrate the reemergence of the group, Ruiz and Mann made a one-off appearance at the end of April alongside the saxophonist Daniel Carter at the Blank Forms home base along Grand Avenue in Brooklyn.
Charles Gayle, Milford Graves and William Parker – WEBO
Following up on last year’s Children of the Forest – a careening series of sessions from the percussionist’s basement workshop in Queens, the last of which took place just nine days before the iconic Bäbi dates – the Black Editions Archive continues to mine the private tape library of Milford Graves, presenting for the first time on record something of a free jazz holy grail. The trio of Graves, the tenor saxophonist Charles Gayle and the bassist William Parker gave just seven public performances between 1985 and 2013, with the third instalment of this vivid and recuperative archival series capturing them in June of 1991 on a two-night stand at the short-lived Lower East Side venue Webo.
Gayle, who had been homeless for a period of around fifteen or twenty years, busking on subway platforms and street corners, had only recently achieved a degree of notoriety for a trio of albums which he recorded in the space of one week and released in short order on the Swedish label Silkheart Records. The only sanctioned release by Graves in the fourteen years since Bäbi and Meditation Among Us – which came out on Kitty Records and helped to consolidate a longstanding collaborative partnership with the Japanese dancer and performance artist Min Tanaka – was as part of a quartet alongside his fellow drummers Andrew Cyrille, Kenny Clarke and Famoudou Don Moye on the 1984 record Pieces of Time.
More than ten years their junior, William Parker had won respect in the jazz world as an accompanist for Cecil Taylor and had commenced a fruitful partnership with David S. Ware, but he had yet to establish himself as a leader. Together their two nights at Webo burnished a legend, described as a ‘signal event’ in the nineties resurgence of the New York City free jazz scene, with the first salvo from the painstakingly mastered and packaged concerts establishing the screeching tires of Gayle’s tenor saxophone as Parker plays a nimble and feline bass while Graves clatters about behind the drum set like a cat on a hot tin roof.
After completing a Fulbright Fellowship in electronic music in Stockholm, the nascent composer returned to the United States and accepted a visiting lectureship at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Soon after his arrival he established the California Time Machine as a four-piece ensemble, whose conceptual performances sometimes veered towards the political and showed his newfound penchant for wine, with experiments in tape delay accompanied by the rubbing and clinking of crystal goblets. Missa Umbrarum or the ‘Mass of shadows’ would become his best known work from this period in the early seventies as Lentz devised a ‘music in the state of becoming’, but Song(s) of the Sirens from the same year serves as both an encapsulation of his prior efforts and an augur of the fruits to come, through its use of looped voices and fragmented phonemes culled from the Homeric text. String glissandos and softly murmured labial solicitations give the piece its shimmering aqueous quality, with Lentz later identifying Song(s) of the Sirens as his first salvo in a decade-long recuperation of romanticism.
Tim Rutherford-Johnson in his liner notes to Lips writes that Song(s) of the Sirens contained the seeds of what Lentz’s music became across the seventies and eighties, ‘looped vocals, a text broken into isolated syllables, a stratified musical texture of apparently independent layers, and a sun-kissed harmonic language positioned somewhere between the lounge bar and the ocean’. Straying further from the academy, Lentz could indulge his interest in choral music with San Andreas Fault, a group which initially comprised eight singers who also whistled and played wine glasses, with later iterations revolving around singing keyboardists while adding percussive elements and live electronics.
North American Eclipse or O-ke-wa was a defining piece for the San Andreas Fault, scored for multiple voices, drums, bone rasps and bells, with the performers encircling the audience in an echo of the death ceremonies carried out by the Seneca people of the Great Lakes. With North American Eclipse the composer – who claims partial Seneca heritage and also briefly embraced Catholicism – could elaborate his sense of ritual, with stretched notes and an accumulation of syllables creating a wash of melodic and harmonic shapes. The San Andreas Fault carried Missa Umbrarum and North American Eclipse along with them as they took in the cathedrals and art galleries of Europe across a couple of mid-seventies tours.
Djalma Corrêa – Espontaneamente se Tenta: Aventuras Sonoras de Djalma Corrêa
The Brazilian percussionist Djalma Corrêa is best known for playing alongside so many illustrious compatriots like Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Jorge Ben, Chico Buarque, Maria Bethânia and Gal Costa and for founding the percussive jazz fusion ensemble Baiafro, who collaborated with the vibraphonist Dave Pike, but the prolific performer and composer also held a love for incidental and spontaneous music. A new compilation on the São Paulo label Lugar Alto, with the full title Espontaneamente se Tenta: Aventuras Sonoras de Djalma Corrêa, serves as both a primer and a guide as it winds its way through his tempestuous soundscapes.
A double vinyl which features previously unreleased recordings, most of which were digitized for the first time for this set in collaboration with Corrêa before his passing in December of 2022, the compilation moves from the haunted house theatrics of the electroacoustic piece ‘Evolução (Para Fita e Filme)’ to free jazz excursions like ‘Evolução (Excerto Djalma Corrêa & Banda Cauim)’’which unleashes woodwinds as a flock of shrieking birds to the more quintessentially Afro-Caribbean and bossa nova flavours of ‘Brasil Mal-estar (Excerto Ensaio)’. Then the palate-cleansing ‘Exemplo de Sintetizadores’ plays out as a proto-mixtape or pleasantly chintzy compendium of louche jazz with wispy ambient New Age interludes, stretched out cymbal reverberations and carnival melodies with the spinning nausea of a carousel, winsomely and judiciously described in the album notes as a series of transitions ‘from transcendental drones to astral cha-cha-chas’.
Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou – Souvenirs
Collaborating with Emahoy prior to her death last March at the age of ninety-nine years old, with access to a trove of manuscripts and cassettes which she carried with her in 1986 as she entered into exile in Jerusalem, now the archival label Mississippi Records which bids to fill in our collective blanks has unearthed a gem in the form of the esteemed pianist’s first vocal album. Composed and recorded between 1977 and 1985, sung directly into a boombox at her family’s home in Addis Ababa, the music captures with nostalgia and foreboding the heartaches and uncertainties prompted by the Ethiopian Red Terror, a period of violent political repression carried out by the Derg regime against its opponents. Odes to her motherland and evocations of the meadows and the sky are offset by overcast clouds, presentiments of exile and memories of her lost childhood as chattering birds and the creaking of her piano bench buttress her pliant yet heartfelt and sometimes dolorous voice, with Emahoy singing in Amharic over the familiar shifts of her piano.
In fact Emahoy produced and released a small run of these Souvenirs back in 2013, sold in the form of a compact disc exclusively via her monastery’s gift shop. Following her funeral in Jerusalem last March, as Cyrus Moussavi of Mississippi Records and the pianist and scholar Thomas Feng pored over hundreds of manuscripts and sixty-four cassette tapes, they discovered scores of liturgical songs and Alvin Lucier-style dubs, plus the original Souvenirs masters. It transpired that the gift shop version of Souvenirs had been digitised about ten percent too fast, so to mark Emahoy’s hundredth year the vocal suite gets a deluxe reissue, with a gold cover, a sixteen-page booklet and lyric translations by Ermias Zemichael, restoring an overlooked chapter of her art in all of its plaintive and sensuous glory.
DD. Records became a cult label and their cassettes remain collectors’ items, but the Brighton label Phantom Limb has for the first time reissued some of Yoshimatsu’s key eighties compositions, selecting six tracks which flow together for the compilation Fossil Cocoon. The selections – which include the title songs from albums like Poplar and Pastel Nostalgia plus two tracks from Pre-Chaos, where he accompanied and produced the voice of his former classmate Fumie Yasumura – carry the same sort of compositional structure, with top melodies of a floral or otherwise accented nature overlaying propulsive, motorik guitar licks and beats.
Still those structural similarities are the basis for an enveloping and sometimes intoxicating mixture of sounds and genres, whether Yoshimatsu is adapting the motorised revs of a bass guitar, jerky krautrock rhythms or more overtly playful trends in ambient synthesis. The opening to the winding gait of ‘Jerusalem’ sounds like water being sucked through a hose pipe, before its reverberating drum beat and sloganeering vocals serve as precursors to eighties headliners like The Sugarcubes on those tracks where Einar Örn hogged the microphone or a Disintegration-era Cure.
McCoy Tyner & Joe Henderson – Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs’
A plaintive and painterly rendition of the Carl Fischer and Frankie Laine ballad ‘We’ll Be Together Again’ is up next, a fond tune which was seized upon in the late fifties by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Anita O’Day and Billie Holiday. Tyner recorded it as part of a trio for his third album Nights of Ballads & Blues, and here it is his winding piano arpeggios which carry out the piece, before Henderson bellows on his wistful and dreamy horn as the pianist keeps everything on an even keel, upbeat and duly hopeful. Grimes and DeJohnette make for a handsy rhythm section, forcing the issue a bit more before a finely poised piano solo and an especially deft, pared back showcase by Grimes on his double bass fulfil the promise of the title, with Henderson arriving late once more to supply the nightcap.
‘Taking Off’ on the other hand is pure improvisation, credited to all four of the musicians. It starts out at a fast tempo but they feel their way in until Henderson’s horn becomes untethered, blowing out tornados of sound. The mix here seems a bit muddier in the low end, although it hardly mars the experience as the players take turns soloing, with Henderson wielding his tenor like a cudgel before Tyner twinkles away on the keys. Stretching out the piece over a staggering and heat-seeking twenty-eight minutes, DeJohnette begins to crack into his cymbals with Afro-Cuban and martial beats late in the affair, casting haymakers about his kit and playing drum rolls in a remarkable display of dexterity before a duckwalk on the tenor carries us out the other side and swiftly towards a climax. In the final moments ‘Taking Off’ redoubles its commitment to the groove as Tyner clangs into his keys with a swinging signature.
The San Lucas Band – La Voz de las Cumbres (Music of Guatemala)
The Ayler tone is apparent and overwhelmingly so from the very first moment of La Voz de las Cumbres (Music of Guatemala) by the San Lucas Band. With its duelling trumpets and horns which in staccato fashion barely tether to the unbridled march of a military band melody, here accompanied by crashing cadences of percussion and a contrapuntal threnody of strings, the record is strikingly redolent of Albert Ayler’s peak years on ESP-Disk where he played alongside the likes of his brother Donald, Charles Tyler, Gary Peacock and Sonny Murray on the classic albums Spiritual Unity, Bells and Spirits Rejoice, a period which culminated in the clangorous rancour and cosmic affirmations of his Impulse! debut Albert Ayler in Greenwich Village as the saxophonist reached the summit on ‘Change Has Come’ and ‘Truth Is Marching In’.
In fact the music caught on these cult 1974 recordings of the San Lucas Band stretched back some five decades, all the way to their founding in the mountain village of San Lucas Tolimán in 1922. Situated on the southeastern shore of Lake Atitlán, the village is home to a significant population of Kaqchikel, one of the indigenous Maya peoples of the Guatemalan highlands. A brass band which by 1974 was being led by the violinist Bernardo Meija, on La Voz de las Cumbres (Music of Guatemala) the San Lucas Band played funeral dirges and popular songs which chafe at rhythmic constraints and ramble outside the confines of Western scales, the marked similarities with the free jazz of Ayler on ‘marchas’ cuatro, tres and seis giving way to a broader and more lyrical palette which shows the influence of Italian opera, the local culture of military band music, the invention and development of the chromatic marimba, Semana Santa ceremonies and the other assorted spiritual practises of the Kaqchikel. Drawing from such a wide and longstanding repertoire, for the album Meija was joined by Guiellmo Campo Mendoza on the cornet, Alejandro Cos Coquix on the euphonium, Manúel Meija Mucia on the alto saxophone, Jesús Garcia Hernandez on the snare drum, Alberto Campa on the bass drum and Ermerjildo Cos Murcia on cymbals.
Recorded in 1974 by Kathryn King and Linda O’Brien, the album by the San Lucas Band captured a fast disappearing musical tradition and was nominated for a Grammy following its release in 1975, ultimately losing out to Muddy Waters in the best ethnic or folk category. The fourth world trumpeter Jon Hassell and the double bassist Charlie Haden, who played alongside Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Keith Jarrett and Alice Coltrane and founded the Liberation Music Orchestra, subsequently named Music of Guatemala as one of their favourite records. Now for the first time the album has been reissued by the Geneva seeker and stalwart Les Disques Bongo Joe, in a package which includes the original liner notes and insert photographs.
Séance Centre – Triángulos De Luz Y Espacios De Sombra
A new compilation from Séance Centre – which has mined the library of the Palo Alto multi-instrumentalist Jon Iverson and spotlighted the hallucinatory Night of Power of the homebrewed New Jersey duo Abdur Razzaq and Rafiyq – and the archival project Smiling C focuses on an obscure network of Mexican electronic and electroacoustic composers from the eighties and early nineties. Culled from a contemporary wasteland of cassette tapes, private presses and public access television stations and billed as an ethnomusicological pursuit where ancient Mesoamerican traditions, pre-Hispanic ocarinas and flutes, ritual chants and the teponaztli and huéhuetl drums of the Aztecs warped and weft the tapestries of ambient music, the seventeen tracks of Triángulos De Luz Y Espacios De Sombra stretch from slapped cajon percussion and other Afro-Caribbean rhythms to proggy chord changes, brassy banda and New Age or Fourth World aesthetics.
From the glistening Afro-Caribbean incantation of ‘Brisa’ by Antonio Zepeda and Eblen Macari to the progressive rock chords of ‘Dafne’ by Armando Velasco, on the track ‘Clarion’ by Macari strummed strings, mallet percussion and shakers stand in for synth pads and kicks on what might otherwise pass as a quintessential slice of eighties synth-pop. There is a bit of Peter Gabriel or even Phil Collins about some of the tracks, with their twinkling keys, temperate drums and abundance of gated reverb. The tresillo pattern and the bass tumbao are ubiquitous and there are six-stringed serenades, windswept reeds and lucid field recordings, with ‘Non Observan’ by Germán Bringas a late standout as the producer and improviser takes an incessant synth-pop beat and pairs it with bifurcating, chanted folk vocals, percussive squiggles and louche jazzy squalls, inspired by the likes of Fred Firth and John Zorn while serving as a prelude to his opening of Jazzorca, which remains an important venue for free jazz and experimental music in the heart of Mexico City.
