1/30/2018 The Best Jazz Reissues and Rediscoveries of 2017 | The New Yorker

2017 In R i

The Best Jazz Reissues and Rediscoveries of 2017

By Richard Brody December 14, 2017

ike the history of cinema, the history of jazz depends largely on availability, which is why roundups of
L historical reissues and discoveries is more than a matter of new delights—it’s a question of setting the
record straight. When Ornette Coleman died, at the age of eighty- ve, in 2015, his status as a venerable
master and a crucial innovator—as opposed to the charlatan he was often called early in his career—was
already secure, but some of his best work was virtually inaccessible in the post-LP era. One of his best
albums, “Crisis,” recorded in concert at N.Y.U. in 1969 and released in 1972, is also one of his rarest,
having never been reissued on CD—until now, from Real Gone Music, under license from its original
label, Impulse!, which provided access to the master tapes. (The release is in CD only, not for download or
streaming; the album never sounded this good.) It’s the prime jazz reissue of the year.

It isn’t just the monitory title and the cover image of the Bill of Rights going up in ames, or even tunes
with such titles as “Song for Che” and “Trouble in the East,” that make the recording feel like an
exemplary sound capsule of the time (notable for Richard Nixon’s attacks on the press, his Enemies List,
domestic surveillance, police brutality, chicanery, corruption, and, above all, reckless warfare). The concert
—featuring Coleman, on alto sax, with his longtime associates Don Cherry, on trumpet, and Charlie
Haden, on bass, plus his lifelong friend Dewey Redman, playing tenor sax, and his thirteen-year-old son,
Ornette Denardo Coleman, on drums—is a sort of friends-and-family reunion, and the result is passionate
and energized, offering de ant frenzies and exultations around a core of proud serenity. Here, Coleman
ful lls some longtime projects; the collective improvisation that he championed in the structures of the
1960 recording “Free Jazz” here arises with an organic spontaneity from the start, with the three horns’
gures interweaving until solos break out—and Coleman’s own solos break out with an electric urgency.

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Ornette Coleman with his son Denardo, 1969. Photograph by Elliott Landy / Redferns / Getty

The entire group seemed wildly energized, and Coleman foremost; his performances are stark, melodic,
and explosive, blues-drenched and jaggedly dissonant yet joyously singable throughout their ve-minute-
plus expanses. Over the course of the decade, Coleman had been pushing rhythms toward variability; here,
with Denardo’s propulsive but freewheeling drumming, he reached full uidity, never losing the beat and
never sticking to it, either. The concert is more than a cry of righteous outrage; it’s an ideal vision of
collective purpose, progress, and love. (The disk also features the 1968 concert recording “Ornette at 12,”
featuring the same group minus Cherry; it’s a ne performance, but it also proves how far the group, and
Denardo, travelled in less than a year.) (It isn’t available to stream; sound samples are available here.)

Short Subject
Harold Land
0:00

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The currents of the sixties, in musical form and in political substance, hit different artists in different ways.
One of the most fruitfully in uenced is the tenor saxophonist Harold Land, a distinctive late-bop stylist of
the nineteen- fties in the Clifford Brown-Max Roach group and as a leader of some memorable albums
(notably “The Fox,” with the complex and original pianist Elmo Hope, and “West Coast Blues!,” featuring
the guitarist Wes Montgomery). But in the late sixties, Land reëmerged with a new sound and a new
mood, a starker and more urgent tone and a taste for distant harmonies, as well as a new quintet co-led by
the young and advanced vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson. That group’s major studio outing, for the
Mainstream label, from 1971, and long unavailable in any format, has been reissued, on CD and digitally,
by WeWantSounds. (The project is overseen by the brother-and-sister team of Judd and Mia Apatow,
grandchildren of the visionary producer BobBob Shad
Shad, the founder of Mainstream and other vital labels.)
Land’s own musical imagination has entered wider and wilder realms, in conjunction with his and
Hutcherson’s band concept, based on a polyrhythmic foundation with heavy, roiling undertones (provided
by the pianist Bill Henderson, the bassist Buster Williams, and the drummer Billy Hart, along with the
percussionist James Mtume on some cuts) that gives Land a looser yet more urgent framework within
which to improvise. (For that matter, Land, with a tune such as “Ode for Angela,” dedicated to Angela
Davis, makes clear that his musical moods are in synch with the times.) Hutcherson, too, stretches out in
the open eld, and Henderson, whose career was out of the spotlight, nearly steals several tracks with his
impulsive, exuberant, yet rigorously constructed solos. The sound of the reissue is a little thin—the master
tapes couldn’t be found—but the musical delight is undiminished.

United
Woody Shaw
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A live recording by the trumpeter Woody Shaw, “At Onkel Pö’s Carnegie Hall/Hamburg ’82” ( Jazzline),
catches him at a critical moment (albeit a short-lived phase) in his career. Most of Shaw’s work in the
nineteen-sixties was as a sideman. In the nineteen-seventies, his regular working groups were, in tone and
format, something of a borrowing from the drummer Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and more or less every
potent hard-bop group of the era. It wasn’t until 1980, when he formed his new quintet with the
trombonist Steve Turre, the pianist Mulgrew Miller, the bassist Stafford James, and the drummer Tony
Reedus, that he formed not just a group but a group concept of his own. (The band broke up in 1983.)
Miller was twenty- ve; Reedus was twenty; and what Shaw developed with the group was a sense of
musical space entirely his own. His earlier bands were, and this is meant as praise, tight; its succession of
musical events was closely packed, and the rapid- re agility of Shaw’s solos re ected the band’s intensity.
With this new group, Shaw loosened the springs; the music isn’t slack, but it’s more spacious, thanks in

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good measure to the multidirectional energy of Reedus’s drumming, and the added space gives Shaw room
to emphasize his melodic gifts and to cultivate a sculptural sense of phrasing. In “Katrina Ballerina,”
Shaw’s extravagant blasts alternate with witty call-and-response passages with Miller; there are hair-raising
passages in “Joshua C.” where Shaw leaps out of tempo and back into it, lets y with mercurial
multifaceted torrents of notes punctuated by lyrical fanfares. The other soloists don’t quite reach the
exalted heights of Shaw’s improvisations, but they sustain the energy and spirit; the album marks not a
radical shift but a major new stage in the maturation of an original, unfailingly inspired and questing artist.
here
(In the U.S., the album is only on CD, not streaming; here
here are some sound samples, and here’s a taste of
the band’s studio album “United.”)

Vibrations - Live
Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Ga…
0:00

Speaking of the central importance of drummers, Sunny Murray died last week, in Paris, at the age of
eighty-two. He was one of the crucial artists of jazz, one of the essential innovators of so-called free jazz,
working rst with Cecil Taylor in the early nineteen-sixties, then with Albert Ayler in the mid-sixties, to
undo the template of foot-tapping beats and render rhythm shifting, undulating, torrential. Ayler was, after
Taylor, the great liberator, unspringing improvisation from harmonic underpinnings and, for that matter,
from the very notion of musical pitch into the range of pure sound. He did it with a deep reach into church
music of the African-American tradition, melodies of simple spiritual mystery that he then wrenched into
the realm of musical metaphysics. “Copenhagen Live 1964” (Hatology), an extraordinary performance by
Ayler’s 1964 quartet featuring Murray, the bassist Gary Peacock (who’s happily still recording), and the
trumpeter Don Cherry (formerly of Ornette Coleman’s and Sonny Rollins’s quartets) suggests the epochal
power of the revolution that they wrought—and that posed something like the endpoint of jazz; more or
less all jazz created in its wake is post-apocalyptic, or, as Sun Ra’s band had it a few years later, “after the
end of the world.”

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Watusi, Egyptian March

Sun Ra & His Intergalactic R…
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“It’s After the End of the World” is one of Sun Ra’s greatest albums, one of my favorites, recorded live in
Donaueschingen and Berlin, in 1970; it has also long been unavailable, and now it’s back in the news: it’s
one of the three-hundred-plus jazz or jazz-adjacent albums from the German label MPS that are about to
drop digitally, to download and to stream, on December 29th. This set of performances, too, is a matter of
space—outer space as well as musical space. The raucous, threshold-shredding improvisations for one, two,
and many musicians seem surrounded by a vast, awesome silence, pierced by cosmic electro-
transmogri cations from Sun Ra’s luminous cockpit of keyboards, plus the clarion declamations of June
Tyson. The band of eighteen includes its perennial heroes of the saxophone, John Gilmore, Pat Patrick (the
father of former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick), and Marshall Allen (who, at ninety-three, runs
the band now), plus another inspired saxophonist, Danny Davis, the mercurial trumpeters Kwame Hadi
and Akh Tal Ebah, along with a host of percussionists, as well as dancers and a light show which, though
they can’t be heard, seemingly make their presence felt through the ecstatic energy of the proceedings.
(The clip below is from a previous digital release.)

My year’s top ten is lled out by ve reissues-slash-rediscoveries that I’ve previously highlighted here: Bud
Powell, “Swingin’
Swingin’ with
with Bud
Bud”; The John Kirby Sextet, “ The
The Savory
Savory Collection,
Collection, Vol.
Vol. 33 ”; Thelonious Monk,
“ Piano Solo: Paris 1954”; Woody Shaw, “ The Tour: Volume Two ”; and the copious collection of music
from ECM now available to stream and download—foremost, Dave Holland, “ConferenceConference
Conference of of the
of the Birds
Birds.”
the Birds

Explore more
more of our critics’ favorite books, movies, music, and cultural moments of 2017.
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Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in 1999, and has contributed articles about the directors
his
François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Samuel Fuller. He writes about movies in his blog
blog for newyorker.com.
his blog
He is the author of “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard.” Read more »

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