His home from the founding of the label in 1997 and the release of his Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra opus Sunrise in the Tone World, the great free jazz bassist William Parker raises two new albums this week on the Brooklyn bastion AUM Fidelity, which retains its commitment to transcendent jazz and elemental soul.
The first album Heart Trio finds Parker back alongside his ‘rhythm twin’, the versatile drummer Hamid Drake, who he first met as part of Peter Brƶtzmann’s keenly Ayler-inspired Die Like a Dog Quartet some thirty years ago, with the pair teaming up for something in the region of fifty records in all of the years since, plus another routine collaborator in the form of the pianist Cooper-Moore, who is an enduring member of Parker’s other flagship ensemble In Order To Survive. The three artists have played together on numerous occasions, most notably on the 2017 album Meditation/Resurrection which combined Parker’s regular quartet and a reconvened In Order To Survive, then again a couple of years later for Live/Shapeshifter. Yet this new outing marks their debut as a trio.
From the outset there is a tender quality to Heart Trio, as Parker, Cooper-Moore and Drake play with the heft and resonance of spiritual jazz yet the intimacy of a chamber ensemble, the album opener ‘Atman’ already a soothing balm. And on ‘Five Angels by the Stream’ they dip their toes a little deeper, bracing themselves for the moment of total immersion.
Setting aside their signature instruments, William Parker picks up his doson ngoni or hunter’s harp, the traditional West African griot medium, plus a variety of reed instruments and flutes, including the Japanese end-blown shakuhachi, an Armenian bass duduk, a Serbian frula in the key of F-sharp and the ney flute which are constructed by turns in bamboo, cedar and walnut. Cooper-Moore comes in on two of his earliest self-devised instruments, the ashimba which is an eleven-note xylophone made from discarded wood and his horizontal hoe-handle harp, while Hamid Drake plays a frame drum alongside his regular drum kit.
Duduk and mallet percussion perform a ‘Mud Dance’, on ‘Serbia’ the frula and frame drum are played with a propulsive rhythmic force, while the lengthy ‘Kondo’ with its babbling vocal accompaniment highlights the lustre and limpidity of Cooper-Moore’s harp. Named after the fourth member of the Die Like a Dog Quartet, the trumpeter Toshinori Kondo who died in Kawasaki in the autumn of 2020 at the age of 71 years old, the circular tumbles and flowing cascades of the suite stagger through a series of folk motifs for the final section from around the eleven-minute mark, led by the confluence of Drake’s kit and Parker’s doson ngoni.
Another dedication goes out to the bassist and clarinetist Donald Rafael Garrett, a firm friend of John Coltrane’s who played on some of the saxophonist’s later recordings, and also featured on seminal sets of the era by Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Archie Shepp before taking up the bamboo flute and sitting in with some of the stalwarts of the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians like Joseph Jarman and Kahil El’Zabar. From steep reverence and spiritual buoyancy, the album closer veers back towards chamber stylings through plucked harp, a ‘Processional’ styled as a circular and spacious heave, reverberating and a little bit raga-like.
William Parkerās easy capacity for trenchant lyricism has been displayed before, most recently on the Ava Mendoza and Dave Sewelson duo albumĀ Of It But Not Is It where he pried open a cask of turnip wine and imagined a scene of quasi-Freudian transfiguration where āall the girls will turn into trumpets, and all the rifles into trombonesā, fancying an end to all wars before in similarly idealistic fashion describing a layabout who possesses an endless capacity for doing nothing. Yet with Cereal Music, his second new record of the week this time alongside the vocalist and producer Ellen Christi, the veteran jazzman crosses another frontier as he marks his first ever album of spoken word.
Parker and Christi previously collaborated back in 2021, for the third volume of his sprawling ten-disc Migration of Silence Into and Out of The Tone World. Across ten globetrotting suites which also featured the likes of Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez, Eri Yamamoto, Fay Victor and Lisa Sokolov, the third volume subtitled ‘The Majesty of Jah’ was mixed by Christi, who centred the words of James Baldwin over brass hollerings, industrial clangs and Parker’s brusquely plucked bass as the author and poet diagnosed a society of ‘moral monsters’ and reiterated the phrase ‘how are you going to save yourselves?’, erecting the same sort of sonic scaffolding around ‘Freedom’ and adding her own vocals to ‘Sun Song’, a bucolic and burbling performance which strayed ways from any resting place.
Like with Heart Trio, on Cereal Music the bassist pays tribute to inspirations and old friends, the meditative quality of his spoken word poetry sometimes imbuing delineations of character and depictions of place with his own ruminations, which tend towards the vaguely personal and politically pacifistic. Ellen Christi handles the sound design as Parker buttresses his recitations with bass and flutes, with the celestial album opener an ‘Ode to Kidd Jordan’, the saxophonist who partnered frequently with Parker from the early 2000s, most memorably on the haunting yet steadfast Palm of Soul, a 2006 trio album with Hamid Drake which was recorded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Jordan lost his home in those floods and endured an agonising five-day wait for news as to the wellbeing of his son, who had been stranded rooftop and watched the devastation unfold as helicopters buzzed by overhead. For his ode to the saxophonist, who passed away last spring at the age of 87 years old, Parker juxtaposes images of an ‘upper floor over water castle’ with impressions of Jordan’s youth in and around the rice farms of Crawley, Louisiana, galloping horses, ’embroidered memories, imprints of first love’, eventually arriving at one of the leitmotifs of Cereal Music when he states matter-of-factly that ‘life is not fair, only beautiful’ before offering an ‘hallelujah’ to the ‘joy of sound’.
The second track provisionally concerns America’s pastime, as Parker notes through a gentle rustling that ‘the grass begins to speak to the baseball player in the outfield’, before he issues the first of several condemnations of the nation’s presidents who share a liberal penchant for the dropping of bombs. ‘Birth’ mistily recalls the date on 10 January 1952 when his mother, having been put to sleep, awoke to find that her child was born, albeit prematurely as Parker traces the nascent sounds of a shoebox incubator, creaking and wheezing and beleaguered by indistinct shapes, an ambiance which leads through a smoggy logic of opposites into a starry and smoke-filled Siberian deathscape.
Then the album centrepiece ‘Do Dreams Sleep’ incorporates the hooting cacophony of birds as his ‘gentle melody’ grows ever more prismatic and metaphysical. ‘I want to live in between the rainbow’ he begins as a spectral statement of intent, pondering the circadian rhythms of dreams while professing ‘Never thought the air would bleed. Never thought the sky would give me a look’.
Squirrels scurry up trees with a whimper as his philosophical inquiries take on the troubled yet whimsical and somehow utopian air of Rat from the ubiquitous Martin Bell documentary Streetwise, which chronicled the lives of homeless kids on the streets of Seattle, as Parker’s own field recordings from a park in Brooklyn are curtailed by a curious passerby, with the bassist discussing his practice before observing that the birds do indeed appear to be ‘getting down today’.
‘Ellen and Leaves Floating’ features Christi’s voice, as she sings a di-da-do melody over plucked bass, and ‘Plea’ offers pellucid reflections upon the nature of art, the purpose of life, mentors and iconoclasts like Richard Davis and Duke Ellington, Geronimo and Willie Mays over choral vocals which sometimes stretch towards the liturgical ‘Dies irae’. With its rickety bass and leery synths, ‘Into My Heart’ is more tentative, emanating from a halfway house as the vocals evoke a day of reckoning, while ‘Touring’ offers a startling discursion through propulsive drums and an apparitional bass, a fragment of life on the road somewhere between Hamburg and an undisclosed destination, chugging from one gig to another as Parker wonders in the background ‘can you help me find today?’.
‘Rollins’ is all about formative moments, those divine revelations which emerge through burning thickets or the parting of the sky. In this case they come through misty reeds and celestially warbling vocals, then clopping percussion, the queasy triumphalism of smeared horns and what sounds like a didgeridoo, as Parker outlines a vision of the artist as an architect of the future, evoking the titular Sonny Harper, a fellow musician in the Bronx who he has previously recalled in relation to the violinist Billy Bang as they began to forge a career, evading some of the pitfalls and transgressions of other possible youths, then referencing the classic Pharoah Sanders cut ‘The Creator Has a Master Plan’ and returning to a critique of contemporary politics, limned as a ‘time bomb’ which has been set by ‘blind and colourblind’ mules, continuing to summon images both sublime and ecological on this ‘song of everything’ which is lyrically and sonically the densest of Cereal Music.
The balmy organ-led ‘Uninvited Guest’ places the culpability on politicians for a barrage of war and killing. And ‘ah-ya-ya-ya, tati tati, toot toot’ Parker says, an Afro-Cuban scat over rattling percussion as another of the record’s gestures and themes sweeps into view, as with a certain fondness and the trace of a sneer which shows his commitment to the act of resistance, he closes Cereal Music with the suggestion ‘We were better off before we were better off. We were very civilised before we were civilised’.
The digital and compact disc versions of Cereal Music by Parker and Christi contain three bonus tracks, the first discussing the materiality and membranes of the hotchiku, the shakuhachi and other aerophones or end-blown flutes over an ebullient stop-start drum beat. ‘Windshield Wipers’ is a brassy smear, and on ‘Prayer’ the sounds of a synthesised organ rise and fall beneath the euphoric sobs of the duo, who trade blubbering vocal harmonies until Christi breaks through the clouds with a melismatic solo of dizzying uplift.
‘Lord I’ve loved, fill my cup with your light from above’ she sings as the keys soften and dissolve into watery pools, ‘Holy Spirit ascend in me. Heal the world with your sound, heal the world love abound. Holy Spirit ascend in me. Let the sun rise again, let the light shine within’. With a final spoken word interlude, over the sustained organ chords Parker cuts in, seer and surveyor, framer and spirit as he says ‘From above, I can see the entire world. I see little children standing on the edge of clouds, waiting for angels to return, and look into the sky and see their own faces followed by the silhouettes of five musicians carrying string instruments. We are not going over the rainbow, but inside the rainbow’, making ‘Prayer’ a fitting cap to this boundless and bottomless record, plus a fine coda to the birdcalls and liminal inquiries of ‘Do Dreams Sleep’.
