Since bursting onto the scene with Little Women back in 2007 – an innovative noise jazz ensemble which featured the twin horns of Jones and the future Battle Trance tenor Travis Laplante plus the increasingly ubiquitous Anteloper drummer Jason Nazary, with Ben Greenberg making way for Andrew Smiley on the guitar by the time of the quartet’s first full-length album Throat in 2010 – the Man’ish Boy epic has served as the chief creative outlet for the alto saxophonist Darius Jones as a leader.
Starting with Man’ish Boy (A Raw & Beautiful Thing) the series has explored Jones’s upbringing in Virginia, as themes of community and perseverance wrought through everyday churchgoing and the ecstasy of gospel choirs have been tinged with the spectre of personal and collective traumas, which Jones strives to work his way through by way of therapy, collaboration and creative expression, drawing attention not only to the textural possibilities of his medium but to artistic practise as a model for black mental health.
His burly vibrato can shift or hover as though suspended in mid air to encompass tender ballads, those martial tones which might readily evoke some of his spiritual jazz forebears marrying up with more rapt and candid spurts on his horn. His music has variously broached underground hip hop, funk and soul or even the headlong angst of metal with reverence for the history of his chosen outlet, as Jones through the course of his Man’ish Boy epic has steadily transgressed the trio format.
For the titular Man’ish Boy (A Raw & Beautiful Thing) the alto saxophonist reached out to a couple of venerable elder statesmen in Cooper-Moore and Ra Kalam Bob Moses, while its follow-up Big Gurl (Smell My Dream) saw him team with near contemporaries in Adam Lane and Jason Nazary and Book of MƦbul (Another Kind of Sunrise) likewise alongside Matt Mitchell, Trevor Dunn and Ches Smith marked his quartet’s debut. Then for The Oversoul Manual he solicited Amirtha Kidambi, Sarah Martin, Jean-Carla Rodea and Kristin Slipp to form the Elizabeth-Caroline Unit, as they lent their vocals to fifteen songs which he composed to be performed a cappella, described by Jones as comprising an ‘alien birthing ritual’.
Le bĆ©bĆ© de Brigitte (Lost in Translation) returned to the quartet setting as Sean Conly stepped in for Trevor Dunn while the French singer and lyricist Emilie Lesbros recited one of her own compositions as arranged by Jones. And as the title suggests, with Raw Demoon Alchemy (A Lone Operation) he stepped out solo, in the midst of personal and political estrangement capturing a late tour stop in Portland where he performed pieces by Georgia Anne Muldrow and Ornette Coleman plus the standard ‘Beautiful Love’, before capping the set with his take on Roscoe Mitchell’s incendiary ‘Noonah’ then the celestially expanding and oft-covered classic ‘Love in Outer Space’ by Sun Ra.
The former gospel choir director and longtime educator whose most recent post is as an assistant professor of music at Wesleyan University has also collaborated with Eric Revis, William Parker, Nasheet Waits and Fay Victor, and he has released two albums of ‘cosmic lieder’ in a duo with Matthew Shipp, the veteran pianist who also combines a certain technical and conceptual rigour with real emotional candour, while the 2013 release Life in the Sugar Candle Mines inaugurated a lasting partnership with the Detroit beatmaker Gerald Cleaver, on a lengthy set which also featured Brandon Seabrook, Cooper-Moore and Pascal Niggenkemper and was attributed collectively to the band Black Host.
Brimming with some of that conceptual bravura while still capable of holding the listener in his thrall, last year Jones created a Fluxkit for anywhere art in the company of Jesse and Josh Zubot, Peggy Lee, James Meger and Cleaver as part of a commission for Western Front, an artist-run centre in Vancouver.
And he featured on two more of the year’s best records in the form of America: The Rough Cut by Allen Lowe, where his alto saxophone vied with the likes of Roswell Rudd and Ray Anderson as the album closer ‘At a Baptist Meeting’ snatched and chafed towards spiritualism, after Lowe had busied himself with a ragtag history lesson while diagnosing the failing state of the blues; plus Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the Garden by Matana Roberts, another project which is now well into its second decade as the reedist and mixed-media artist tackled the timely issue of reproductive rights, telling in swaying and spellbinding fashion the story of a woman in their ancestral line who died following complications from an illegal abortion.
Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye) is the seventh chapter of nine which are eventually intended to complete the Man’ish Boy epic, as Jones turns his distinctive alto – described byĀ The New York Times as ‘widely dilated, yet so rough it could peel paint’ – to five original compositions plus a new arrangement of the Parchman Farm spiritual ‘No More My Lord’.
Resuming his partnership with Cleaver – who has been on a tear over the past year as 22/23 and The Process used electronics to explore the Motor City’s redoubtable spirit of innovation, while his familiar bass has featured on stunning albums by Kenneth Jimenez, Eva Novoa and Steph Richards plus Live at the Adler Planetarium by Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra and the blacksmiths, the flowers with Fred Moten and Brandon LĆ³pez over two nights in Brooklyn – for Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye) the saxophonist is joined for the first time by the regular Cleaver collaborator Chris Lightcap on bass, as Jones returns with a benchmark trio.
The record opens onĀ ‘Affirmation Needed’ with a flat tone, which carries barely the hint of a tremor over Gerald Cleaver’s rock-steady drums. Jones’s saxophone sounds especially reedy, like the drone of a bagpipe but his pitch steadily ascends and his blowing gets more ragged, enough to strip the bark off a tree with traces of Albert Ayler’s spiritual aplomb. As the drums skitter and the bass holds steady, his horn winnows and bellows then carries us out of a brief bass solo on the deck of a steamship through a series of foghorn blasts. And in the final minute of the track Jones wrings these squealing sounds out of his instrument, like a violist or cellist gnawing on an edge string or a kettle whistling away at the height of its boil.
Drum rolls play off the spurts of the saxophone in the opening moments of the second composition, before the rhythm section of Cleaver and Lightcap roll and slide into a steady groove, cymbals and the clopping of claves allying with Lightcap’s bass to form a rippling undercurrent as Jones figures ‘Another Kind of Forever’ as something furtive and nether, riding the waves through his stygian squawks.
‘No More My Lord’ manages to both harness and inhabit the original performances of the spiritual, which were captured by the ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax on 9 February 1948 at the Mississippi State Penitentiary which is otherwise known as Parchman Farm. On that wintry day at the penitentiary – a notorious place already synonymous with brutality, which would soon acquire a gas chamber and become a maximum security facility – an inmate named Henry ‘Jimpson’ Wallace sang ‘No More My Lord’ twice, the first time with choral accompaniment, alongside other prison songs like ‘This Old Town is Along a Railroad’ and ‘Murderer’s Home’.
For their take on Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye) the trio manage to incorporate the staticky distortions of Lomax’s recordings and their harrowing percussive thump, produced by an axe being steadily swung into a block of wood, by means of an equally grave-sounding sub-bass drone.Ā The alto saxophone takes on a more gravelly tone, like a hoarse rattle at the back of one’s throat, before in the second half of the piece Jones moves into the upper register through his searing and zig-zagging blows, always supported by eddies of percussion.
By contrast ‘We Outside’ is immediately brighter and plummier, starting out with some deft interplay between the bass and drums. The first held note on the saxophone seems to send them into a sprawl, and for a few moments they have to gather themselves and build back the tempo, as ‘We Outside’ continues in this manner through various tempo shifts which give a tipsy character to the piece.
Soon enough however Jones manages to cut through the woozy clamour, managing to attain on his alto saxophone a great clarity of tone, which is briefly redolent of John Coltrane and his A Love Supreme opener ‘Acknowledgement’, so clear in its purpose and emphasis that it almost strikes a slightly shrill and piercing note. The moment passes and more generally ‘We Outside’ plays like a fine neighbourhood groove, with Jones possibly surveying the ambiance in the manner of Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window or joining Lightcap and Cleaver for a brisk jaunt around town. They take in the odd park and saunter down a few sidewalks until the leader unveils a more furrowing saxophone with around a minute to go, as Jones taps into these bold tremolos at the climax of ‘We Outside’, really blowing the fuzz out of his horn.
As the counterpart to ‘We Outside’, on the penultimate track ‘We Inside Now’ the trio are deliberately more languid, even drowsy and sluggish in an overt kind of way. Compared to a brisk walk, this piece is more like sprawling out on a shag carpet. Not mournful so much as despondent, the drums keep loose time which the bass wearily traipses over, but just before the six-minute mark a rustling on the cymbals conjures a swifter beat, serving up some kind of tonic as Jones begins to finds some of his most melodic lines on Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye), imbuing his saxophone with a plangent tone.
So on Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye) the trio rise to meet more grievous fare less with equanimity than with an unspoken yet companionly resolve, a few bracers, a penchant for storytelling and a resounding sense of soul. While previous records in the Man’ish Boy saga featured stylised cover paintings, as third eyes and other doublings were offset by serpents, foliage and a bulldog, on Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye) it is Jones who gazes out at us in black and white, unadorned yet as though he were seeking some small solace.
Returning to the opening theme from the very first album in his saga, here after the twin chapters of ‘We Outside’ and ‘We Inside Now’ the record closer ‘Motherfuckin Roosevelt’ proves more of a rumble, with Jones happy to drag and drawl through his aerated horn. A few dank plucks give way to another showcase for Chris Lightcap’s double bass over Cleaver’s ductile drums, before Jones settles into a winding motif that draws Legend of e’Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye) to a measured close.
