The tenor saxophonist Mark Turner is now in the fourth decade of his career, an airy and still somehow tenuous fixture on the jazz scene from the release of Yam Yam in 1995, his debut as a leader whose quintet spotlighted a group of fellow up-and-comers including the pianist Brad Mehldau, the guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, the bassist Larry Grenadier and the percussionist Jorge Rossy. After a series of well-received albums on Warner Bros. for a while Turner was content to take more of a back seat, as he became a fixture of Rosenwinkel’s band and forged relationships with Jakob Bro and Billy Hart, continuing to release some of his own music on ECM as part of the Fly trio with the drummer Jeff Ballard and Grenadier before 2014 marked his full-blown return to the leader’s chair after more than a decade.
Renowned for his crispness and clarity of tone, both there and not there, with a range that can stretch almost imperceptibly from the haunting depths to a seamless incorporation of the altissimo register, his influences include John Coltrane and Joe Henderson and more particularly Warne Marsh and his onetime teacher George Garzone, but the deft harmoniser and cool and conscientious improviser really does have a sound all of his own, an aspect and temperament which makes him unique. That album Lathe of Heaven in 2014 – its title drawn from one of his favourite authors, an Ursula K. Le Guin novel – introduced a new cast of collaborators with Turner’s tenor weaving together with Avishai Cohen’s trumpet while Joe Martin played bass and Marcus Gilmore the drums. Widely acclaimed while cementing his status as an ECM artist, it was followed by Temporary Kings a duo with Ethan Iverson and an all-new quartet for the StanisÅaw Lem-inspired Return from the Stars.
Turner has been kept busy over the past couple of years as Return from the Stars was followed swiftly by Nocturnes with the Mikkel Ploug Group and Misterioso where he teamed up with the drummer Jeff ‘Tain’ Watts and bassist Orlando le Fleming. A live album with his Return from the Stars quartet dropped in the fall of 2023 while 2024 brought Solid Jackson by a reconvened M.T.B. now comprising Mehldau, Turner, Peter Bernstein, Grenadier and Bill Stewart, as his tenor also featured on projects by Linda May Han Oh, Jakob Bro, Nasheet Waits and Tom Harrell.
Yet for all of that Turner’s new album We Raise Them To Lift Their Heads marks his solo debut. Its release completes a jam-packed start to the year for the typically cool customer, as in January his singular tenor starred alongside Mathias Eick, Linda May Han Oh and Matthieu Chazarenc on the pianist Benjamin Lackner’s plangent new album Spindrift while the release of We Raise Them To Lift Their Heads coincides precisely with his guest appearance on a hard-swinging live album by the Steve Lehman Trio, who interpret the seventies stylings of one of contemporary music’s keenest composers on The Music of Anthony Braxton, plus Just the latest effort by the longstanding Billy Hart Quartet which finds the veteran drummer reuniting with Iverson and Turner plus the double bassist Ben Street.
The session which begat We Raise Them To Lift Their Heads owes to the time Turner spent towards the tail end of 2019 touring with Jakob Bro. The guitarist was both filming and putting together the score for Andreas Koefoed and JĆørgen Leth’s documentary feature Music for Black Pigeons, which explores the lives and processes of some of our most renowned jazz musicians and would premiere out of competition at the Venice International Film Festival in 2022. Encouraged by Bro his longtime collaborative partner, an impromptu shift at The Village Recording in Copenhagen turned the camera on Turner and resulted in his first ever solo album, which features a couple of his original compositions in ‘Slow’ and ‘Fast’, two pieces penned by Bro in the form of ‘Red Hook’ and ‘Bella Vista’ plus a take on Thelonious Monk’s enigmatic ‘Misterioso’ which he would soon return to with Fleming and Watts.
Bro and Turner worked together on three albums in the mid-to-late aughties and the trenchant Danish guitarist produced this record. Both framing and describing the essence of We Raise Them To Lift Their Heads he says:
In the early 2000s, I lived in Red Hook, Brooklyn with the bassist Ben Street. Mark Turner lived in Puerto Rico, but when he was in New York to play concerts, he also stayed with Ben. It was a railroad apartment where all the rooms were connected in a row. It wasn’t possible to isolate yourself. Mark was constantly practicing when he was home. All the time. For hours on end. His saxophone and his work on sound, harmonies, melodies, rhythm etc. became a kind of soundtrack to my life at the time. It’s common to use quiet music, electronic music or ambient music as a backdrop to the things you do at home in everyday life – music that sets a mood, brings calm. Mark’s solo saxophone took on that role for me. Of course, you could dive into the things he was playing (sometimes, I secretly recorded his practice sessions on my MiniDisc from my room and tried to analyse and learn what he was working on). Other times, it was just background music, like when I listened to Bonnie Prince Billy, Brian Eno’s ambient music, etc. The horn has so much warmth and life, and then there’s a harmonic world that is entirely Mark’s own. My wish with the solo album is to recreate the mood I experienced when I lived with Mark. He’s sitting in the next room, searching for new paths in the music. Always.
More than yearning, the opening piece ‘Slow’ on We Raise Them To Lift Their Heads carries a brisk and searching tone, as though Turner was at the same time saluting the dawning of a new day and playing simple exercises as he runs up and down his horn, with the result blending a consequential warmth with traces of the workaday and scholastic. ‘Red Hook’ maintains the same pacing and character but sounds more urbane, calling to mind the railroad apartment he shared with Street and Bro in early-aughties New York but stepping outside of those walls to wander amid the brackish air and laidback atmosphere. And on ‘Misterioso’ the tenor saxophonist ascends the upper registers of his instrument, as though climbing an eternal ladder without ever slipping or succumbing to the vertiginous height, showcasing his altissimo and taking the odd gulp before goes again as he offers a softly spellbinding take on Monk’s bluesy original.
Elaborating once more his penchant for science fiction, the title We Raise Them To Lift Their Heads draws from Octavia E. Butler and her Patternist series. At the heart of the record ‘Bella Vista’ offers a change of pace, as foghorn blasts serve to both echo and punctuate a lilting melody, with Turner blazing through the middle section of the composition which sounds like two saxophones riffing off one another. ‘Fast’ as its name suggests features sprightly runs and arpeggios before name suggests features spritely runs and arpeggios before the record draws to a close with a signal ‘Red Hook’ variation.
We Raise Them To Lift Their Heads is one of two new releases out now on Jakob Bro’s own label Loveland Music. The other culls seven songs from a residency at the Village Vanguard in the spring of 2023, with the guitarist Bro and the saxophonist Joe Lovano heading up the same stellar ensemble which had freshly appeared on their ECM record Once Around The Room – A Tribute to Paul Motian. Bro had teamed up with Motian late in the drummer’s career, holding down the right channel on the wistful yet agile Garden of Eden before inviting him to join his band for Pearl River and Balladeering, while Lovano was part of Motian’s celebrated trio alongside Bill Frisell, and for their tribute they pulled out all the stops by incorporating two drummers in Joey Baron and Jorge Rossy and a whopping three bassists with Larry Grenadier and Thomas Morgan joined by Anders Christensen on the bass guitar.
The twenty-one-minute opener from Live at the Village Vanguard is a medley which starts with ‘Sound Creation’, the second song from Once Around The Room which served as a group improvisation coiled around the stem of an idea from Lovano. As on the record the saxophonist briefly swaps out his trusty tenor for the tĆ”rogatĆ³, the single reed Hungarian folk instrument, as the ensemble shift through iterations of ‘Dug’ and ‘Pause’ by Bro either side of Motian’s oft-played ‘Abacus’, which featured on his 1979 album Le voyage before reappearing as the second track on Misterioso, his own Monk homage which arrived in 1987 with Lovano a part of the quintet.
On this opening track Bro is content to play spectral strums and piquant, space-age harmonics amid the winding and growling of Lovano’s tenor, with the saxophonist driving the rhythm and largely carrying the melody. The bassists bang out the margins of the composition like a kind of morse code, and there is a bit of noodling between the more scraping and sputtering, arid and dusty passages of ‘Dug’ and beyond before the medley reaches a languishing conclusion. ‘Colors’ a Bro composition features more moody noodling and the subtle shifting of pigment or sediment, while his ‘Song To An Old Friend’ – the centrepiece of Once Around The Room – proves much warmer, a tune so sentimental and nocturnal that it sometimes sounds like a tenderhearted romance, with Lovano’s saxophone so felted that it approaches the charming urbanity and keen nostalgia of a bandoneon or accordion.
‘Once Around The Park’ – another Motian original which was part of his acclaimed full-length Misterioso after landing a year earlier on Fragments by Paul Bley – features a slouching bassline and bluesy airs. After a fine solo by Lovano the piece meanders until the bassists pick up the pace, at which point we get to stretch our legs and stride past the bandstand, brassy and even a bit clangorous with an echo of martial percussion before the ensemble led by Lovano come in again. ‘Once Around The Room’ offers a riff on themes from the album, breathy and ambling, shuffling and moseying towards the spectral as a spare kick drum initiates a general screwing around until the filigree close.
And then ‘As It Should Be’ abounds in tumbling percussion and more apparitional shapes on the guitar but stands out more than anything for its pealing and glimmering choruses, before a brisk take on Motian’s nineties live staple ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ delivers a more rousing close to the record, emphasised by the fullness of Lovano’s horn and Bro’s overdriven guitar.
