Kahil El’Zabar & David Murray – Spirit Groove: Golden Sea Duo in Shenzhen

Over the past few decades what was farmland then a hodgepodge of factories and warehouses has turned into Overseas Chinese Town, one of the most modern and scenic not to mention affluent parts of the megacity of Shenzhen. Between theme parks like the Splendid China Folk Village, Window of the World and Happy Valley and the water-themed retail complex OCT Harbour with its aquarium, fountains and lakes lies what has been described as the crown jewel of Overseas Chinese Town in OCT-LOFT, a former warehouse complex which has been converted into a thriving and multifaceted arts scene.

For more than a decade OCT-LOFT has hosted an annual jazz festival, which has typically taken place over the course of a few weeks while starring a truly international cast of performers. Featuring everything from Berber music and the desert blues to West African and Latin American rhythm making to traditional Chinese winds and strings or the swirling muqam of the Uyghurs, among the marquee names to have played at the festival the Peter Brötzmann Trio with Sabu Toyozumi and Jason Adasiewicz shared a lineup with the guitarist Tetuzi Akiyami and pianist Giovanni Di Domenico during its fifth iteration in 2015; the following year brought such diverse pairings as the Giovanni Guidi Trio with Thomas Morgan and João Lobo, the fledgling Canadian indie band Men I Trust and from Scandinavia the long-running Mats Gustafsson, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten and Paal Nilssen-Love project The Thing; while the 2018 and 2019 festivals attracted William Parker, Marilyn Mazur, Peter Evans, Isao Suzuki, a Hamid Drake and Pat Thomas duet, Jozef van Wissem and Eli Keszler before the coronavirus pandemic entailed a four-year hiatus.

When the OCT-LOFT Jazz Festival returned in 2023 with a slimmed-down lineup, the stars of the show were the Golden Sea Duo of Kahil El’Zabar and David Murray. Their performance in Shenzhen is released this week by the record label Old Heaven Books, which as the name suggests is first and foremost a book and record store and sometime performance space within the OCT-LOFT cultural complex.

Just last month the label issued a recording of the Peter Brötzmann Trio’s performance from 2015 as a form of tribute to the saxophonist and clarinetist who died at the age of 82 in the summer of 2023, while Old Heaven Books is also the primary outlet of the Shenzhen transplant and musical visionary Mamer, who might busy himself with revitalising folk forms from Kazakhstan, deconstruct Han Chinese scales or find the blistering middle ground between American strains of alternative rock and Japanese noise rock whether wailing on his electric guitar or cutting the first album for solo sherter.

David Murray of course is no stranger to the loft scene having emerged at a pivotal time for jazz in the middle of the 1970s. As cultural shifts, a sense of urban decay and the decline of old industries made for vacant buildings and low rents, a group of aspiring artists converged on New York City from other hotbeds of jazz like Chicago, California and St. Louis drawing their inspiration less from the mainstream than from the first thrusts of free jazz as heard in the music of John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra and Albert Ayler. They set up performance spaces in lofts and apartments, downtown storefronts, art galleries and abandoned warehouses with a young Murray himself getting in on the act as he shared a loft with his Black Music Infinity co-founder Stanley Crouch above an East Village club called the Tin Palace.

Kahil El’Zabar was more loosely connected to the scene as he shared a connection with some of the Chicago outflux tied to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. The two artists have collaborated frequently since El’Zabar headed up the duo album Golden Sea in 1989, a format which was repeated upon the release of One World Family in 2000 and Spirit Groove in 2020 while Murray and the double bassist Fred Hopkins played on the acclaimed Kahil El’Zabar Trio album Love Outside of Dreams in 2002 and 2004 brought We Is, a live album from the pair as a more conventional duo. In the meantime El’Zabar featured on Murray’s nineties records A Sanctuary Within, The Tip and Jug-A-Lug. Together they seem to share an innate chemistry, with El’Zabar somewhat tempering Murray’s wide tone and once fiery register as they remain capable of a certain thematic richness and continue to paint in bold strokes while their sense of swing feels easy and unconquerable.

On the introduction to Spirit Groove: Golden Sea Duo in Shenzhen, whose title posits the record as at once composite and summation, Kahil El’Zabar plays a repeating kalimba pattern which is pellucid and trance-like as Murray moves from watery sounds to harsher wails through his thick tenor. There are a few vocalisations from El’Zabar, who introduces Murray by name just beyond the halfway mark of the composition then goes it alone, managing to get a great depth of tone from the metal tines of his instrument as he accompanies his extemporisations through some comically fierce growls. Aside from those vocalisations, the effect in two parts has so far been like the Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders album Promises taken to its outer edge and the music box miniature ‘Frosti’ from Björk’s wintry opus Vespertine. Then the saxophonist returns to introduce El’Zabar and squalls until the last, putting the cap on this enthralling and rabble-rousing composition.

All of that and it’s just ‘The Opening’. The deep grooves and full-bodied sound receive clamorous applause from the gathered audience, with El’Zabar praising their youth and beauty while also calling out the talented Bosnian guitarist Miroslav Tadić who had performed at OCT-LOFT earlier that evening.

The second piece ‘Am Gone Get Some’ is more of a hard bop romp with El’Zabar on percussion and Murray finding the pocket of his plosive beats, which gather force through a flurry of drum rolls towards the close of the composition. El’Zabar wields his sticks with a fierce and giddy exuberance. And on another standout in ‘Syriana Promethea’ – a take on the title track from the 2022 album Seriana Promethea by Murray, the bassist Brad Jones and the percussionist Hamid Drake as the Brave New World Trio, where the bandleader vamped on the bass clarinet – El’Zabar falls into a West African groove as though playing the djembe drum with Murray summoning an especially clear tone as his tenor saxophone falls in cascades over the top of the rhythm.

The bass drum becomes more prominent as Murray drops out to provide El’Zabar with the space for a long solo, with his groans and grunts eventually breaking out into a kind of staccato lyric as he repeats ‘tell me that’ and half-pronounces his words in the manner of an old rhythm and blues holler. The flow and tenor of his singing is redolent of Skip James without the wiry falsetto, and the multi-instrumentalist repays the favour as Murray’s solo horn honks away towards the outro.

El’Zabar and Murray are clearly having fun while the crowd in Shenzhen are positively rapturous. Drawing from their debut outing as a duo, ‘Golden Sea’ is more aching and languorous as El’Zabar’s plangent kalimba goes plumbing or deep sea diving beside the furry swathe of Murray’s horn. Tender growls and the tarrying sputters of his tenor cede to a few bird calls, as the lines of the duo which started out in the wide open air become more gilded or bronzed and briefly evoke the soothing balm of a lullaby until El’Zabar starts pulling off these little guitar licks by way of his plucked tines. As the kalimba plays a series of folk motifs, the atmosphere of the piece spurred on too by the horn turns more reedy or swampy.

‘Sweet Meat’ another tune from Golden Sea is more of a genial romp until El’Zabar’s crashing cymbal-led crescendo around the halfway mark, which segues into more scattershot marching band batteries. Murray follows El’Zabar’s lead and briefly touches upon an Ayleresque theme, with El’Zabar’s moans and wails providing a constant background presence.

At the end of ‘Sweet Meat’ the crowd demand an encore, which comes in the form of the Spirit Groove opener ‘In My House’ though the rendition here is less steeped or sniffly and much slinkier and rowdier from the outset than either the original composition or the 10-minute radio edit. ‘You can dance / jump and shout / move the body / all about’ El’Zabar chants and pleads, compelling the crowd while losing his thread for a moment. He continues ‘In my house / you can dance / you can feel the spirit / in your . . .’ but cuts off the word ‘pants’ perhaps to spare some of the audience’s blushes. A writhing piece whose pooling drums are offset by the solitary honks of the horn, which become wafting spirals later on in the composition, in the end the album Spirit Groove: Golden Sea Duo in Shenzhen is a record of how Kahil El’Zabar and David Murray turned the OCT-LOFT into their house for the duration of 63 minutes and 47 seconds.