SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2017
VOLUME FOUR NUMBER ONE
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2017
VOLUME FOUR NUMBER ONE
JILL SCOTT
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
DAVID MURRAY
(February 25--March 3)
OLIVER LAKE
(March 4–10)
GERALD WILSON
(March 11-17)
DON BYRON
(March 18-24)
LIGHTNIN’ HOPKINS
(March 25-31)
COLEMAN HAWKINS
(April 1-7)
ELMORE JAMES
(April 8-14)
WES MONTGOMERY
(April 15-21)
FELA KUTI
(April 22-28)
OLIVER NELSON
(April 29-May 5)
SON HOUSE
(May 6-12)
JOHN LEE HOOKER
(May 13-19)
http://www.allmusic.com/artist/david-murray-mn0000182855/biography
David Murray
(b. February 19, 1955)
Artist Biography by Thom Jurek
Initially an inheritor of an abstract/expressionist improvising style that originated in the '60s by such saxophonists as Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp, David Murray eventually evolved into something of a mainstream tenor, playing standards with conventional rhythm sections. However, Murray's readings of the old chestnuts are vastly different from interpretations by bebop saxophonists of his generation. Murray's sound is deep, dark, and furry with a wide vibrato -- reminiscent of such swing-era tenors as Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins. And his approach to chord changes is unique. Although it's apparent that he's well-versed in harmony, Murray
seldom adheres faithfully to the structure of a tune. He's adapted the
expressive techniques of his former free jazz self (slurred glissandi,
indefinite pitches, ambiguous rhythms, and altissimo flights) to his
straight-ahead playing, with good results. He'll plow right through a
composition like "'Round Midnight," hitting just enough roots, thirds,
fifths, and sevenths to define the given harmonies, then filling every
other available space with non-chord tones that may or may not resolve
properly. In other words, he plays the wrong notes, in the same way that
Eric Dolphy played the wrong notes. Like Dolphy, Murray
makes it work by dint of an unwavering conviction. The sheer audacity
of his concept, the passionate fury of his attack, and the spontaneity
of his lines -- in other words, the manifest success of his aesthetic --
make questions of right and wrong irrelevant.
Murray's parents were musical; his mother played piano and his father guitar. In his youth, Murray
played music in church with his parents and two brothers. He was
introduced to jazz while a student in the Berkeley school system,
playing alto sax in a school band. When he was 13, he played in a local
group called the Notations of Soul. Hearing Sonny Rollins inspired Murray to switch from alto to tenor. He attended Pomona College, where he studied with a former Ornette Coleman sideman, trumpeter Bobby Bradford. Around this time, he was influenced by the writer Stanley Crouch, whom he met at Pomona. Murray
moved to New York at the age of 20, during the city's loft jazz era -- a
time when free jazz found a home in deserted industrial spaces and
other undervalued bits of urban real estate below 14th Street. Murray and Crouch opened their own loft space, which they called Studio Infinity. Crouch occasionally played drums in Murray's trio with bassist Mark Dresser. In a relatively short time, Murray (with help from his unofficial publicity agent, Crouch) acquired a reputation as a potential great. Murray's early work was exceedingly raw, based as it was on the example of Ayler,
who had a penchant for multiphonics, distorted timbres, extremes of
volume, and forays into the horn's uppermost reaches and beyond. He made
his first albums in 1976, Flowers for Albert (India Navigation) and Low Class Conspiracy (Adelphi), with a rhythm section of bassist Fred Hopkins and drummer Phillip Wilson. Also in 1976, Murray became -- with Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, and Hamiet Bluiett -- a founding member of the World Saxophone Quartet. Around this time, Murray was commissioned by theatrical impresario Joseph Papp
to assemble a big band, which enjoyed a degree of critical success. Out
of the big band came the formation of an octet, which provided him a
platform for his increasingly ambitious compositions.
In the '80s, Murray performed with the WSQ,
his octet, and various small bands, recording mostly for the Italian
Black Saint label. His octet records of the time -- though very roughly
executed -- showed him to be a talented (if unformed) composer. Murray's
recording activity reached nearly absurd levels in the '80s and '90s;
probably no contemporary jazz musician has led more dates on more
labels. It was in the '80s that Murray
began relying more on the standard jazz repertoire, especially in his
small ensemble work. As he got older, the wilder elements of that style
were toned down or refined. Murray
incorporated free jazz gestures into a more fully rounded voice that
also drew on the mainstream of the jazz improvising tradition.
In the 1990s, the influence of his swing- and
bop-playing elders became stronger, even as the passionate abandon and
spontaneity that marked his early work were replaced by his attention to
the craft of playing the horn. Murray
recorded just as often as he had with Black Saint. DIW signed a
distribution deal with Columbia in the early '90s. He recorded a number
of important albums during that decade, including Special Quartet with McCoy Tyner, Fred Hopkins, and Elvin Jones and Shakill's Warrior with Don Pullen on Hammond B-3, drummer Andrew Cyrille, and guitarist Stanley Franks -- the latter stretched the B-3 soul-jazz genre into entirely new terrain. He cut a one-off album for Red Baron entitled Jazzosaurus Rex, and fronted Pierre Dørge's New Jungle Orchestra for the Jazzpar Prize album. During this period, Murray's Black Saint albums began to appear as reissues on CD, so record store shelves were bursting with his titles. In 1995 Murray released one of the most compelling and little-known albums in his career on France's Bleuregard imprint. Flowers Around Cleveland was recorded with pianist Bobby Few, drummer John Betsch, and bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel -- the rhythm section from the Steve Lacy Quartet. It was a risky match that paid off gloriously; it offered proof that in spite of his towering presence as a soloist, Murray was also a sensitive stylist and team player.
In fact, Murray became an inimitable stylist, which was underscored by DIW's release of Ballads for Bass Clarinet that same year. He threw jazz fans a true and deeply satisfying curve ball in releasing Dark Star: The Music of the Grateful Dead on Astor Place, with a large group that included Hopkins, Craig Harris, and even the Dead's own Bob Weir. Murray
also began a long and fruitful relationship with Justin Time, a
Canadian label distributed through Enja. He recorded what was -- at the
time -- the most revolutionary and controversial recording of his career
in Fo Deuk Revue,
which featured a large group of African and American musicians, with
layers of drums and chanted vocals along with poetry and recitations by Amiri Baraka. It wove together funk, jazz, and various African folk styles that began to draw Murray
in. They would emerge full-blown in the 21st century. In 1998 he issued
four albums of new material. First was another variation on the B-3
soul tip with Jug-A-Lug on DIW, his tribute to the music of Gene Ammons with organist Robert Irving, electric bassist Darryl Jones, and guitarists Bobby Broom and Darryl Thompson, with Olu Dara guesting on trumpet. This was followed on the same label by the moving The Long Goodbye: A Tribute to Don Pullen and the stellar The Tip. Murray also recorded his second album for Justin Time in 1998 with Creole, a large-group album that offered a meld of jazz as influenced by numerous Latin and Brazilian styles. Murray also continued to record and tour with the World Saxophone Quartet.
In the 21st century, Murray
began the decade prolifically. In 2000 he released three albums and in
2001 four. Of these, the most satisfying was the 2000 release Octet Plays Trane on Justin Time. In 2002 Murray made the stellar Yonn-Dé for the label, his first David Murray & the Gwo-Ka Masters offering; the others would be 2004's Gwotet (with Pharoah Sanders) and 2009's The Devil Tried to Kill Me. Murray issued a dizzying array of recordings in that first decade, including Now Is Another Time with his Latin Big Band, Waltz Again in 2005 featuring his quartet in a setting backed by strings, and Silence in 2008, as well as five more with the WSQ. In 2010, Murray's
complete Black Saint and Soul Note recordings were given the box set
treatment. His first recording of new material in the century's second
decade found the saxophonist on Emarcy with a new band called the David Murray Cuban Ensemble. Their debut for the label was Plays Nat King Cole en Español,
released in October of 2011, which interpreted, song for song, two
albums the singer and pianist recorded in Spanish and Portuguese -- in
1958 and 1962 -- respectively. Murray's
fiery persona as a vanguard improviser still reveals itself in his
performances and on select recordings. That said, manifested more
frequently now are his abilities as an artful composer, arranger, and
bandleader who also happens to be a master technician on the tenor
saxophone and bass clarinet. Murray debuted his new Infinity Quartet on his 2013 recording Be My Monster Love with pianist Marc Cary, bassist Jaribu Shahid and drummer Nasheet Waits. The album also featured cameo appearances from vocalists Macy Gray and Gregory Porter, as well as trumpeter Bobby Bradford, the saxophonist's former teacher. In 2017 Murray issued Cherry/Sakura, a collaboration with Japanese pianist and composer Aki Takase.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/david-murray-a-jazz-innovator-leads-from-the-center-to-the-edge/2015/02/26/68bbda78-b6fa-11e4-9423-f3d0a1ec335c_story.html?utm_term=.01e32df0bea7
Music
David Murray: A jazz innovator leads from the center to the edge
by Giovanni Russonello
February 27, 2015
The Washington Post
David Murray was invited to perform at New York’s Winter Jazzfest this January in an early celebration of his 60th birthday. He did three sets over two nights, each with a different ensemble, all playing the city for the first time. No surprise there — the saxophonist has recorded nearly 100 albums as a leader, with dozens of bands. He lives ahead of expectations.
A 20-year-old Murray took jazz by surprise in 1975, when New York was still reeling from the death of John Coltrane. The penetrating certainty and harmonic sparseness of Coltrane’s late work left people awed. Murray made his mark by reengaging with the older, more lyrical styles of Don Byas and Ben Webster, and he built new room in the avant-garde for blues humor and playful ironies.“He wasn’t really bothered by what Coltrane did, or what he was trying to do. He didn’t hear it like that,” says Stanley Crouch, a jazz writer and cultural critic who taught Murray at Pomona College and lived with him in New York.
“David also came to recognize what most musicians don’t: That once you understand the idea that gave rise to the notes, you don’t have to play the notes themselves that way,” Crouch adds.
On Winter Jazzfest’s first night, he led a Clarinet Summit at the Minetta Lane Theatre, with four clarinetists plus a bassist and a drummer. The front line set up oblique harmonies, and Murray — who celebrated his 60th birthday Feb. 19 — knifed through them with downward skewers on the bass clarinet, studded with meaty, gutbucket flavor.
After a set break, he switched to tenor saxophone and introduced a brand-new trio, featuring pianist Geri Allen, who made warm and humming vamps, and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, whose kit wafted a spiked haze upward through the room. The next day, nearby at Le Poisson Rouge, Murray’s Infinity Quartet blended straight-ahead free jazz and open-mike funk as poet Saul Williams delivered brooding, invective ribbons of verse.
It’s not typical for an innovator to lead from a position near the center, especially in jazz. But across four decades, Murray has always held onto multiple forces at once while finding an expressive balance. He likes to create an illusion of precariousness or overextension while projecting confidence. Sometimes it’s as if he is stridently arguing a point — his horn ejecting thick, charred notes and staccato cries — but not indicating which side of the argument he’s on. It’s payoff and suspense, all at once from a player who has often been unfairly footnoted as the ambassador of a thwarted movement.
Murray splits his time between homes in Portugal and Paris, visiting New York just a few times a year. By the time he first moved to the city from California, musicians could more easily get a gig playing jazz in Europe than at a legitimate club in New York. The venues that remained were loath to book experimental acts.
Young players started turning their Lower Manhattan apartments and studios into pseudo-commercial spaces, giving rise to the much-documented “loft jazz” scene. Murray and Crouch lived in an apartment on the Bowery, above the Tin Palace jazz club, and they hosted poetry readings and salons and concerts. Murray became a lodestar for the underground, earning the Village Voice’s “Musician of the Decade” accolade in 1980 while developing an array of ensembles: duets, quartets, an octet, a big band. The last was a rarity in the avant-garde world.
“It was just a way to expand my idea of compositions,” he says. “That’s essentially what Ellington did — he took songs he wrote and said, ‘Let’s see what everybody else can do with this song.’ I don’t know if people hear it in my music or not, but the history of our music is so deep.”
Murray’s big-band arrangements were only intermittently successful, sometimes too heavily weighted with unbending unison lines. But his arranging was perfectly suited to the World Saxophone Quartet, an all-saxes group featuring three fellow downtown stars: Oliver Lake and Julius Hemphill on alto and Hamiet Bluiett on baritone. On such albums as “Steppin’ With the World Saxophone Quartet,” “W.S.Q.” and “The World Saxophone Quartet Plays Duke Ellington,” he composed marbled harmonies that embraced and gave way like waves. The tunes ranged from shadowy harmonic movement to sputtering free improvisations.
There was an eagerness to bridge artistic and personal and ideological gaps, sometimes all at once. When Crouch, his roommate, declared verbal war on the poet and critic Amiri Baraka, objecting to the Black Arts leader’s insistence that revolutionary politics stay central to the music’s identity, Murray somehow maintained a working friendship with both.
“He’s inspired by words, their meanings, and something that speaks to a unified outlook. He’s a listener,” says poet/singer/musician/actor Saul Williams of Murray. (Guadalupe Ruiz/Guadalupe Ruiz)
Murray performs at the Hague Jazz Festival in the Netherlands in 2011. He moved to Europe in 1996 and splits his time between homes in Portugal and Paris. (Peter Van Breukelen/Redferns)
“I used to give parties in my loft, and that was one of the times [Crouch] and Baraka might have fallen out. I’d have Baraka in one corner, I’d have Albert Murray in the other corner, I’d have Ishmael Reed in the other corner. I’d have all these writers, and I had to keep them separated,” Murray says. “Writers are vicious, man. But my thing was, I was working with all of them. I was a writer’s musician. I always did music to their poetry and they used to like me to take their poems.”
Even on instrumental albums — such as the elegiac “Flowers for Albert” (1976) or the tender “Ballads” (1988) — you can hear Murray’s affection for words. It’s in the way he places notes: boldly, with interrogative inflections and an arc toward ecstatic revelation. Maybe that’s part of what helped him avoid the rabbit hole of babbling perspectives and relativism that so irritated people like Crouch. He was a free musician with an interest in form, syntax and recognition.
“He’s inspired by words, their meanings, and something that speaks to a unified outlook. He’s a listener,” says Saul Williams, the poet/singer/musician/actor whom Murray contacted last year after hearing him read a poem at Baraka’s funeral. “ He’s been around those people, like Amiri Baraka and Ishmael Reed, and it bleeds through.”
Since Murray moved to Europe in 1996, his boundary-crossing politics have engaged especially with global black identity. In the 1990s and 2000s, he recorded a series of albums in Senegal — joyful, mutinous funk with sabar drummers and other local musicians and poets. A few years later, he began to record with musicians in Cuba. In the process, he has developed relationships with young artists and helped some travel to the United States and Europe.
His output has been slow of late, and the typically prolific Murray hasn’t recorded an album since 2012. But he still has his characteristic certainty, and his sights are set in multiple directions.
“American black people, we’re from all different tribes, but we’ve become a tribe, too. My idea is to share those experiences with all of our brothers that are in Africa,” he says of his continuing work in West Africa. “I always thought that traveling and playing music, I’m teaching at the same time. In the big-band situation with Ellington, he used to always have older cats in the same band as the young ones. The philosophy was each one teach one.”
Giovanni Russonello is a freelance writer.
http://www.jazzweekly.com/2016/08/david-murray-perfection/
Jazz Weekly
Creative Music and other forms of Avant Garde art
DAVID MURRAY: PERFECTION
by George W. Harris
August 1, 2016
BACK IN THE 80S, DAVID MURRAY WAS THE POSTER CHILD FOR THE NEW FORCE OF LEFT OF CENTER ARTISTS THAT WERE CONSIDERED THE FUTURE OF JAZZ. ALONG WITH ARTHUR BLYTHE, CHICO FREEMAN, LESTER BOWIE AND HENRY THREADGILL, MURRAY WAS ON THE VANGUARD OF WHAT WAS NEW AND EXCITING.
TOGETHER WITH HAMIET BLUIETT, OLIVER LAKE AND JULIUS HEMPHILL, MURRAY FORMED THE LEGENDARY WORLD SAXOPHONE QUARTET WHICH SET THE WORLD ABLAZE WITH IT’S EXPLORATIVE ALBUMS OF BOTH ORIGINAL MUSIC AND INTERPRETATIONS OF SOUNDS RANGING FROM R&B TO ELLINGTON.
ON HIS OWN, HE RECORDED ALBUMS RANGING FROM EXPLOSIVE BIG BANDS TO QUARTETS AND RICHLY TEXTURED OCTETS, WITH “MING” BEING THE POSSIBLE HIGH WATER MARK.
AT THE HEIGHT OF HIS POPULARITY IN THE STATES, HAVING RECORDED WITH BANDS INCLUDING THE GRATEFUL DEAD, MURRAY LEFT THE US TO RE-LOCATE TO FRANCE. SINCE THEN, THE STATE OF THE AMERICAN TENOR SAX HAS NOT BEEN THE SAME, WITH HIS VACUUM STILL NOT YET BEING FILLED.
THE CHANGE IN HIS IDENTITY DIDN’T PHASE THE ARTIST, AS HE EXPLAINS TO US IN THIS RECENT INTERVIEW. HE’S STILL ACTIVE, WITH HIS LATEST COLLABORATION (“PERFECTION”) WITH GERI ALLEN AND TERRI LYNE CARRINGTON BEING ONE OF HIS BEST.
YOU DID A MAJOR CAREER CHANGE WHEN YOU MOVED TO FRANCE A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO. WHAT WAS THE IMPETUS OF THAT?
I had already accomplished many things, and was at the height of my career; I just continued my career from there. I’ve always travelled all over the world. When I went to Paris it was a wonderful time. I recorded in Africa, in Cuba, and in many parts of the world. It gave me the ability to explore many options like the Gwo Ka Masters from Guadaloupe. We did several albums, one with Pharoah Sanders.
I’ve also been able to write two operas; one for Alexander Pushkin with strings and for actors. Avery Brooks did the role of Pushkin. I did projects for Red Bull and the Masked Poets. We made a big show out of that and packed many places. In Paris we had lines around the corner. It was sold out.
We did Women’s Songs of Africa. It was a great show. With my big band we did a tribute to Ellington; the obscure works by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. I collaborated with James Newton on it.
Plus, I went to France and raised two beautiful children! I went to France, fell in love and followed my heart.
I live in Harlem, I live in Paris, and I live in Portugal now.
YOU’RE LATEST PROJECT WITH TERRI LYNE CARRINGTON AND GERI ALLEN (PERFECTION) IS A WELCOME REUNION WITH SOME OLD COMPATRIOTS. HOW DID YOU GET THIS ONE TOGETHER?
Back in the Winterjazz Festival a couple of years ago, we did a couple of projects. One was with (poet) Saul Williams and my quartet which had Nasheet Waits. I also did a revival of the Clarinet Summit. That had Don Byron, David Krakauer and Hamiet Bluiett and myself. Originally it had John Carter, Alvin Batiste, they contacted me for bass clarinet and then we got Jimmy Hamilton. We did some albums like that. We wanted to do an extension of that idea, but everyone in the group had passed on. I had an opportunity to make that group again.
At the same time during that Winterfest I got the idea to bring Terri Lyne Carrington and Geri Allen to play with me. I had played with Geri Allen and Richard Davis once at the Vanguard and enjoyed playing together with her then and different situations afterwards. I had worked at Town Hall with Carrington, so we decided to put this together and make a co-op group out of it.
It was great, because the last co-op group I was in lasted for 40 years, The World Saxophone Quartet. This would have been our 40th year, we no longer exist but everything has to come to an end. So, this is my “new” co-op group
I’ve also started a new group called David Murray and Class Struggle, with my son Mingus on guitar. It’s interesting to have some young people in the band. You’ll hear about this band soon; we’ll be playing at the Vanguard in April.
ANY WEST COAST GIGS COMING UP?
My quartet is trying to come around in early 2017, and the trio looks strong enough to be able to come around soon.
YOU PLAY IN ALL TYPES OF GROUPS. DO YOU SEE YOURSELF AS A “MUSICIAN” MORE THAN A “JAZZ MUSICIAN” OR “TENOR SAX PLAYER”?
Music is something that you shouldn’t pigeonhole. If you have the skills, or develop the skills for a big band, you should follow that. Then, the more forms and compositions that you fulfill, the better you get. I’ve been doing big bands since 1978; I’m pretty adept at writing for big bands. I’ve also done octets and shifted it around. We did Nat King Cole in Espanol; it wasn’t quite an octet, but it ended up being eight people and the music was different.
Sometimes it’s just the arranging skills and the orchestration skills. Improvisation is the beginning of my story with the tenor sax, but there are also other things, like that I write for theatre. I’m coming back to New York because I’d like to pursue that career as well. Music is music, so I try not to limit myself.
ONE TIME YOU TOLD ME THAT MUSIC IS LIKE CHURCH, IN THAT IT BRINGS DIVERSE PEOPLE TOGETHER.
Music is like that, and jazz in particular is one of the most ecumenical types of music on the planet because we let everybody into our church!
IN RETROSPECT, HOW DO YOU THINK THE WORLD SAXOPHONE QUARTET IMPACTED MUSIC?
I think we revolutionized things. Having four members that were quite different in the way that they played. Julius Hemphill was a large factor in the WSQ: we had to go into a different direction when we lost him. We tried many people who also made the group sound different like James Spaulding, Arthur Blythe and James Carter. We had a lot of other people.
Hamiet Bluiett is one of the world’s greatest baritone saxophone players, if not THE premier player. He is a master of his instrument and a wonderful composer. Who knows if someone had the notion to make some institution of the WSQ we could go out again. But, at this juncture, I think that we may have hit a point where we go into different directions. Everyone is doing fine on their own. At certain times we need each other, but right now we’re doing fine, things are positive and everyone’s healthy.
ANOTHER IDENTITY OF YOURS WAS THE LABEL YOU WERE WITH FOR MANY YEARS, BLACK SAINT.
Certain companies have been important in my career. That’s because they give you opportunities to develop. When you take different groups on the road for 3-4 weeks, like my octet, you come back into a club, play the club and then go into the studio and make a recording. That to me has always been the formula to making a good record.
To get a band that actually knows the music, plays together and change it every night, the music becomes a growing organism. Then, to have an opportunity to record; Black Saint and DIW, the Japanese label I did 30 albums with…all of these companies were very important in the development of my career. And other people’s careers!1342
Sometimes a label might choose a particular face to be the poster child of their company, and I was that several times. That can be a beautiful thing, because that way you can invite your friends and people you like to play with to come in as leaders and do their own records too. It’s not just about me; it’s about the whole jazz community.
YOU, CHICO FREEMAN, HENRY THREADGILL AND ARTHUR BLYTHE ALL CAME UP AROUND THE SAME TIME AND WERE SEEN AS A SINGLE IDENTITY.
Well, that’s important and it’s a great thing. What that means is that those of us who survived were able to go on into a positive way a whole world for ourselves. Each one of those people, and you have to put Ornette Coleman in there, created a whole community of people that knew what they were doing.
Sometimes you have to spread out to spread the music over the world. Fortunately I was able to spread my music all over Europe and Africa. That’s a real important thing for me to have done that in my life; to be able to go to different countries like Senegal and South Africa that normally wouldn’t have jazz. It’s really something to go into Mali and help develop projects.
I’ve been working with 3D Family, which is an organization that the mother of my children, Valier Malot, is the head of. She handles great acts from Mali like Salif Keita, Amadou and Mariam. People like that.
My family is in the business of music; we’re all working together to make something happen.
DO YOU THINK YOUR CHURCH BACKGROUND HAS INFLUENCED YOU TO BE “SPREADING THE WORD” LIKE AN EVANGELIST?
I grew up in The Church of God in Christ. My mother was very important in my development; she played piano and my father played guitar. In the music of the church, my brother Donald is the musical director for several churches in Fresno, California. He’s carrying on the tradition of my mother. Music is very important in our family and it helped me to develop; you can hear it in my playing.
HOW DID IT AFFECT YOU AS A MAN?
My brother Reuben and I always used to ask my father “How come we have to come to church all the time?” He said, “First, the band is the band and the church isn’t going to start without the band. Second, I want you to go in order to know the difference between right and wrong.”
WHAT WAS THE NAT COLE PROJECT ABOUT?
That took several trips to Cuba. At the time, you couldn’t go to Cuba from New York. I was able to go via Air France straight to Cuba from Paris. Our government hadn’t gotten around to opening up until now, but with things getting better we’ll get an opportunity to see what great musicians are down there and they’ll be able to have the opportunity to spread their wings.
There are several people from Cuba that I helped come to New York. I’ve had my hands in a number of things including young Cuban musicians’ careers and lives.
WHAT’S THE BIGGEST THING YOU TRY TO TEACH YOUNGER MUSICIANS?
Individuality. The people we spoke about before, each of them developed their own path. They made their own world of music.
Being able to copy people is not really that difficult. Trying to be original; that’s what is difficult. But at the same time, once you become an individual thinker or person you are a better person. You’ve created your own identity.
I have a friend, Craig Harris, who is a very creative musician. A great trombone player, and he’s got a song that I really like, called “Step Into My World.” When you hear that song, he makes you feel like he’s created his own world.
I think all of us that get a chance to survive these life issues and can put it into our music, we can expand our world to truth. Like Alice Coltrane, she put a whole universe of sound around John Coltrane. Anyone who can orchestrate like that, or like Benny Carter or Jimmy Heath. To get to a level of writing or arranging takes years, but that’s the best.
I was just at the Kennedy Center for the Jazz Masters and was allowed to be with Jimmy Heath, Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders. We all went to a concert together of the music of Benny Carter played by the Smithsonian Institute Masterworks Orchestra. It was quite an event to hear all of his music at one time. They also did music by Dave Baker who recently passed away. He was instrumental in helping me advance. I’ve had people who’ve helped me to become who I am, and if I can pass that on to others, it’s something good to do. I teach in my flat. I teach them that there’s more than replicating the notes. They need to open up their sound, as that is what makes you an individual. That is your stamp. The notes will come.
WHAT GOT YOU INTO DOING OPERA?
It was an opportunity to create a hero for people, black people in particular, because most people don’t know that Alexander Pushkin was part black. He was a voice of poetry in a certain period in Russian history. He was quite a dapper guy, and people listened to him. My idea was to expose African Americans to another hero that they can celebrate who was one of their own who accomplished something in another country.
Pushkin himself was searching for his blackness; he couldn’t understand why his great grandfather who came over as a slave (from Cameroon) and where this blackness in him came from. He expressed it in his poetry, so we did an opera. We did it in several languages; in French, in Russian, English and Bantu.
I discovered how to write with lyrics and how to write straight from Russian. A lot of projects I did in Europe I tried to get here. I tried hard to bring it to The Lincoln Center and a couple other places by sending out a lot of media and videos. But, you know, America, when it comes to music coming into America that is jazz based, is a very closed society. It exports, but it doesn’t bring things in that could be quite interesting, other than classical music.
As a person who has developed these kind of things I think we open up a little bit. I also did an opera called The Sisyphus Syndrome with Amiri Baraka. He had revolutionary prose and poetry set to music and a gospel choir. That was interesting too, it was something we recorded and did several concerts. In the middle of remixing the album the whole record industry went belly up. That material hasn’t had a chance to come out, but at some point I’m sure it will. But, the current restructuring of the record industry has put a stop to it.
IS THAT WHAT BROUGHT YOU BACK TO LIVE, AT LEAST PART TIME, IN THE STATES?
I’m back here in America because people thought I was just twiddling my thumbs for the last 20 years, but, no, I’ve been moving; I’ve been as active as I always had. I’ve been doing music. I was born into it; it’s what I do.
IT’S YOUR IDENTITY
I’m still breathing, and it’s what I do.
ALL OF MURRAY’S PROJECTS, BE THEY THE WORLD SAXOPHONE QUARTET, OPERA, HIS OWN SMALL AND BIG BANDS, LATIN MUSIC OR HIS LATEST TRIO ALBUM WITH ALL STARS ALLEN AND CARRINGTON, ARE PART OF HIS IDENTITY. HE’S NOT A ‘JAZZ MUSICIAN’ AS MUCH AS A ‘MUSICIAN’, ALWAYS LOOKING FOR NEW VENUES OF STIMULATION. NOW CONSIDERED ONE OF THE ‘ELDER STATESMEN’ OF JAZZ, MURRAY IS ONE OF THE FEW THAT KEEPS HIS EARS AND MIND OPEN, ALWAYS SEARCHING FOR A NEW PROJECT AND COLLECTION OF IDEAS. THE SAXOPHONE IS HIS INSTRUMENT, NOT HIS IDENTITY.
https://jazztimes.com/features/david-murray-three-days-in-the-life/
JazzTimes
David Murray: Three Days in the Life
Published 06/01/2000
By Bill Milkowski
Like Wynton Marsalis, David Murray can talk. It may be all they have in common, but the two certainly do share a gift for gab. And they are equally out-spoken. Get Murray going and he will talk about anything. But time is tight this morning and just running down his current activities and rash of recent releases will take up most of it.
For the record, there are his new and typically intense recordings Octet Plays Trane and Requiem for Julius with the World Saxophone Quartet, recent duet gigs in Italy and Ireland with Andrew Hill, as well as his ongoing projects focused around such recent releases as the Senegalese-inspired Fo Deuk Revue, the Haitian-flavored Creole and the gospel-drenched Speaking in Tongues (all for the Montreal-based Justin Time label).
As he sits there fielding questions and expounding between bites of grits and croquettes, I am flooded by vivid memories of past Murray gigs. The chronology has become blurred over time but the images remain powerful: An explosive duet with drummer Milford Graves at the (now-defunct) New Music Cafe; a 1984 Clarinet Summit performance at the Public Theatre with Alvin Batiste, John Carter and Jimmy Hamilton; a JATP-styled cutting context at a mid-’90s JVC Festival that pitted him against fellow tenor saxophonists George Coleman and Don Braden; an early ’80s appearance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with the World Saxophone Quartet; a moving performance at an early ’90s JVC Jazz Festival of Bobby Bradford’s suite “Have You Seen Sideman?” in honor of the late John Carter; a free, outdoor Central Park Summerstage bash two years ago with Fo Deuk Revue that had both Murray fans and the uninitiated dancing side by side.
Equally memorable are his riveting re-creation of Paul Gonsalves’ masterful improvisation on “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” from the classic 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, backed by a potent American Jazz Orchestra at Cooper Union Hall, and last year’s sublime interpretation of Ellingtonia with big band and strings at Aaron Davis Hall in Harlem. One gig that jumps out in this wash of Murray nostalgia is the night his Shakill’s Warrior band, featuring the late Don Pullen on Hammond B-3 organ, rocked the hallowed Village Vanguard like a roadhouse rib joint with their greasy brand of avant-funk. And that’s just a random sampling of New York gigs. Murray’s prolific output, and his natural tendency toward collaboration, extends to other cities all over the world, from the Baltic Sea to Africa, from Japan to Guadalupe to Washington, D.C. So many gigs, so little time.
Wednesday
With his saxophone case slung over one broad shoulder, bass clarinet and travel bag over the other, Murray hustles to the airport near Paris, where he lives. He’s flying back to New York, his home for years. He lands at Kennedy airport at 9 p.m. and jumps on the “A” train. It’s an excruciatingly long subway ride from the deepest part of Brooklyn-way down by John Gotti’s former turf in nearby Howard Beach-all the way up to Harlem, where he’ll be staying for the next few days. But Murray’s cool and, for once, he’s got plenty of time to kill. And besides, a buck-and-a-half subway ride beats a $50 cab ride any day.
He grabs all four New York dailies off the newsstand to get himself up to speed with the city he left behind and reads each one cover to cover before arriving at his appointed stop uptown. It’s nearly 11 p.m. by the time he strolls into the M&G soul food restaurant on 125th Street, just next door to Showman’s Lounge and down the strip from the historic Apollo Theater. Marvin Gaye is singing “What’s Goin’ On” on the jukebox as Murray places a take-out order of greens and fried chicken and brings it all back to his friend’s place a few blocks away. The Knicks and Hornets are on TV. The greens taste good, the fried chicken is the real deal, the Knicks are up by four in the fourth quarter with three minutes remaining. It’s good to be back in the Big Apple.
Thursday
Murray meets me at the same soul food restaurant from the night before. It’s 9:30 a.m. and jet lag has already set in. His eyes are bloodshot and he’s concerned about a photo shoot scheduled for later in the day. “But you know, my eyes are always red,” he offers. “Anyone who knows me knows that. In fact, they used to call me ‘Blood’ when I was a kid. I just wasn’t blessed with that white-eye look. I don’t know, you can’t have everything.”
He sips a lemonade and slowly shakes off the cobwebs. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he apologizes. “Sometimes it takes a minute to get rolling in the morning with the interview stuff. I’m not perfect.” His plan is to eat a hearty breakfast, chat with me for an hour or so, attend an afternoon rehearsal of “Soul Deep”-a collaboration with his Octet and the Urban Bush Women dance company scheduled for a New York premiere the following evening-then grab a quick nap and freshen up before the photo shoot. They aren’t serving any greens or fried chicken this early at the M&G so he orders salmon croquettes and grits with eggs. He adds a generous dose of hot sauce to the grits before settling in to some flowing, no-holds barred conversation and breakfast, Harlem-style.
JazzTimes: Both Speaking in Tongues and “Soul Deep” represent a kind of coming full circle for you.
Murray: Yeah, it’s nice to get back into the gospel thing. Going out and leaving the church and doing my jazz career, there’s always a little part of me that’s really still in the church. And when I get to express it, it really makes me feel good. Gospel is happening, man. In fact, I just did another gospel project down in Washington, D.C., with some friends of mine from college. We’re putting together a spiritual jazz label and we just did a recording of gospel music called I Want Jesus to Walk With Me. The theme is gospel and jazz, bringing spiritual jazz into the church. You know, people in the church have always called jazz the devil’s music so jazz musicians have been outcasts. But now people are starting to get hip that jazz can be very spiritual, as ‘Trane and Albert Ayler have shown. And so we’re bringing that into the church, using jazz as a tool to, for one, upgrade the music in church and also just to hip people to something that’s new around them-something that they should be digging anyway.
JazzTimes: What was it like growing up in the Church of God in Christ and also being interested in jazz?
Murray: It was very strict. When I grew up I could only play the music I played in church or concert band music I played in school. I couldn’t play jazz in the church. I couldn’t even play jazz growing up in my house. So now we’re trying to change this. We’re trying to make our own jazz standards to put into the hymnals so that people can understand that this is music that rejoices God as well. I don’t know how most people are but most people in my family, no matter how far they may have wavered from spirituality and religion, they always tend to get back to it at a certain point in their life. So this is where I’m at with myself and this music is how I’m trying to express it.
JazzTimes: How do you see yourself fitting into the jazz community at this point in your career?
Murray: I feel like the missing link sometimes in this whole jazz thing. Because I knew a lot of the older cats that none of these younger cats today would ever have been able to meet. It’s weird. Like when I’m talking around younger guys, they look at me like I’m an old relic just because I even know some of these guys.
JazzTimes: Like Ben Webster and Paul Gonsalves?
Murray: Yeah. Or even Dexter Gordon. People that they didn’t get to see, somebody like Junior Cook, who they only heard about. It just reminds me that I’m just older than some guys, that’s all.
JazzTimes: How has the musical climate changed from when you first came to town?
Murray: When I came to New York, people were really trying to make the music move. We really made an effort to do that. But the people that came after us, they weren’t so interested in moving the music along. They were more interested in just being part of the status quo.
JazzTimes: I know that you and Stanley Crouch were friends and colleagues when you both came to town in 1975 from the Bay Area. Have you been in touch with him over the years?
Murray: No, I usually don’t talk to him so much. I see him every once in a while. He came down to the Iridium for a little while and then left. I don’t know. I don’t see him too much. I guess he’s doing all right. It’s just that our ideas of what’s good are so different. I think maybe we’ll just stay away.
JazzTimes: It sounds like you’ve gone in different directions at some point, certainly since you played together on the Wildflowers sessions from Studio Rivbea.
Murray: Yeah. Stanley was into the loft music scene at that point. But people go their different ways in life. He went his way in life, probably more opposite than I did in terms of where he started out in this music. But he’ll pretty much do what he needs to do to get over in the city. He’s proven that. He’s a good artist. I just wish he had realized what his true art was. I think he’s a guy who never really showed the world what he really could do. It’s a shame. Because I always thought that he could’ve been one of the greatest playwrights or directors around. I guess he kind of got more involved with being a music critic or something, which seemed to be a lower calling. I mean, I keep up with what he’s doing. I know what he’s doing. I know exactly what he’s doing. But I’m just saying, he had a potential to be a really wonderful playwright and director because he has a vision in that area that he didn’t pursue. Perhaps it’s something that he’ll pursue later in his life. But as far as I know, he got more interested in talking about the scene and being a social advocate than being a true artist that he probably is deep down inside. Other than that, he’s still my friend.
JazzTimes: He certainly is highly opinionated and…
Murray: Cantankerous? That’s what happens to people when they waste their lives being a reactionary instead of an artist. When you’re really an artist and you become a reactionary to make money, it doesn’t jibe right with the creator of the universe. And I think that’s the kind of problem that he has to face.
JazzTimes: I noticed that a lot of young musicians that I’ve seen are beginning to integrate a lot of Middle Eastern scales and tonalities. They’re bringing world music influences into jazz.
Murray: That’s good. But the fact is, after you studied all of the world music you can what you find out is that most of that information is already in jazz. When you peep through some of the things that Wayne Shorter was doing, some of the things ‘Trane and Dolphy and Yusef Lateef were doing. Those kinds of things have been checked out before. Ellington with the Far East Suite. So I think, the concentration of study really is jazz. I’m not the kind of guy that’s going to be running away from jazz because jazz is certainly the teacher. And other musics are something that we like to study where we can bring it in and incorporate it into our music but we as jazz musicians, we really have to remain focused on strictly jazz and really conquering what that is. You find this kind of a concept that I’ve been talking about in dealing with what Sun Ra did all his life. I only played with his band once, but I watched him hundreds of times. I remember as a kid in Berkeley before I came to New York, I think I spoke to Sun Ra for about six hours one time. He went on and on and on and everything just made so much sense. Even to this day I’ve never heard anybody expound on himself, what his relationship is to the universe and music and why are doing this, why are we expressing ourselves in this way, what difference does it make-it makes a difference to the universe. He makes it seem like if you don’t do that you would be some kind of a threat, some kind of a convict to the universe, if you didn’t express what you have to express. We need those kinds of guys. And just from talking with Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, McCoy Tyner and Andrew Hill-I mean, these are the people, man, that really inspire me to do what I do. They have such a firm stance on the ground. Their footing is so solid.
JazzTimes: There are signs of a new vibrancy; different bands, different players coming up.
Murray: I hope so. It would have to be because it’s such a dynamic city. And that kind of energy will always attract real artists. A real artist, to me, is someone who is a barometer or chronicler of his times. He’s the guy that looks at the street scene and plays it through his horn. He’s the kind of guy who listens to the radio and what’s going on with everybody-something happening over here in Brooklyn, something happening in Southeast Asia-and then he just blows it out through his horn or paints a picture of it. To me, that’s an artist. All this other stuff, anybody else can learn how to do. It’s like a poet. If you don’t have no song in your language, you ain’t gonna really be a good poet. You might get it together and copy some styles, but to be really listened to and to have a voice of your own, you gotta know what’s going on with the world. It has to make sense. In jazz there’s always somebody who comes along who is just the perfect guy for that generation, and everybody’s gotta dig him. You know, the guy who you just can’t deny once you look at him. I’ve heard people say that Albert Ayler was like that. He was the perfect cat for his time. For what was happening, he just said it in a nutshell. Probably when Ornette Coleman came to New York, he was the perfect guy for that moment in time. I guess it’s kind of like somebody being president or something like that. Clinton came at a time when the people really needed Bill Clinton. Maybe they don’t need him now but they sure needed him then. But there has to be a cat for this time. It’s kind of like a prophet, like someone who comes and chronicles his time but not with a lot of fanfare-not to try to make it like a Jesus type of prophet or Mohammed, but more like a musical type of prophet. It’s important for his voice to be heard, even though it might be trying to be squelched. In this town, you may say something and the reaction to it drowns out the actual concept itself. The reaction to it is so angry that you would miss the point, because the reaction has so much media power that you could never even hear it if you didn’t hear it at first, if you weren’t the first to be there to hear it, the reaction would wipe it out. New York is like that. So you have to watch for that.
JazzTimes: In terms of playing with that kind of urgency and energy today, I’m thinking of people like David S. Ware, Matthew Shipp, Charles Gayle, Daniel Carter, Roy Campbell.
Murray: Yeah, those guys have always been chroniclers of their time. I would include them in what I’m saying. They were also here when I was here, too. We all developed in the ’70s. They may not have been as popular as myself or as out there in the media, but they were here and they were playing good then, in the ’70s. I’m talking about somebody even younger than them. And no disrespect to those guys because they’re all my friends. But I’m looking to some of the younger guys that are not in our generation to come on with it now. I’m looking for them to see through the smokescreen of what has transpired in New York and I want them to come along and see what they can do in terms of integrating what they heard over the last, say, 25 years and coming up with their own voice.
JazzTimes: Have you heard any twentysomething-year-old musician doing that?
Murray: I heard some guys who are capable of pushing the buttons but I’m not sure if they’re as capable at maintaining a concept. That’s kind of what I see. I want to see more of somebody’s concept developing into something using all of the tools that have been developed over the years.
JazzTimes: Graham Haynes?
Murray: Oh yeah, Graham always did have a concept. He got some great seasoning playing with Ed Blackwell and he just built from there. But Graham is older. Still, we’re talking about guys mostly from my generation. I’m talking about guys that are in their early 20s right now. These guys need to make their statements now, not 10 years from now. Now! I’m just saying that your energy is different when you’re younger than when you get older, your enthusiasm is different. So I would like to hear that young enthusiasm inside of this music. And I know that some of these young guys today want to be out here but they don’t quite know what to play in order for their real soul to come out. So they’re playing all these other people’s tunes instead of writing their own tunes. They should be writing their own tunes and playing them out so people can react to them. It’s time for these young guys to come on out. But what I see is, cats are scared. They’re a little paranoid to come out in a certain way because they may be chastised because they don’t follow this little mode that’s been made. So they come out in this little mode with their little suits on…
JazzTimes: It’s like joining a country club.
Murray: Yeah, and they’re too young to be in that country club. It’s strange. I’m talking about it because I want to see it happen for them. I mean, let’s see what’s going on next.
JazzTimes: You seem so caught up in the process of creating that you don’t worry too much about criticism.
Murray: It’s ridiculous to worry about stuff like that. I mean, when it’s all over and it’s all said and done, we’re all on our death beds and stuff, then we can go back and say, “Oh, I shoulda did that, I shoulda did this.” But right now, I could care less what anybody thinks about me. I mean, I’m happy when I hear accolades. And when I hear something negative, I’m happy they spelled my name right. But other than that, man, I’m just kind of doing my thing, man. And if somebody wants to step into my world and see what I’m doing, that’s great. But if they don’t, man, I’ll still be doing it.
JazzTimes: What do you see on the horizon for you?
Murray: Aside from getting more involved in gospel music or spiritual jazz, I’m also interested in spreading myself around to different kids and young adults around the world. I go to Africa and there’s all these cats running around behind me, excited to learn about jazz. In general, man, when I see people from different countries, I get a thrill out of showing them what jazz is. I go to Senegal or Guadeloupe or Martinique and do some big band workshops over there. Those cats, man, they were just so happy that someone would take some time out and show them something about jazz. They’re hungry to learn. So I’m ready for the next John Coltranes to come from somewhere else. They might not be coming from North Carolina or New Orleans. Maybe they’ll come from Dakar or Nigeria or Guadeloupe or Martinique. Maybe they’ll come from Scandinavia, I don’t know. All I know is, I see these people, they’re eager all over the world for jazz. What I don’t see is that same kind of enthusiasm in the United States. For instance, I don’t see a lot of jazz in the black community here like it should be. But I’ll go to Dakar and I’ll start playing and people are interested. I start playing in the black community here, man, people be like, “You gotta stop now, we’re gonna put on some boom box stuff.” I mean, something is happening that’s brainwashing people, that makes them think that. Like, I heard a rapper on TV a couple of months ago and he said, “You know, we don’t even have to learn how to play instruments no more.” And I thought that was the epitome of ignorance. I always thought it was to someone’s advantage to be taught something that they could use the rest of their life. But people don’t think that way these days. Even some of the kids in my community in Paris, they don’t see it that way. They want to be like the American rappers. They see the guys with the cars and the cell phones, they wanna be like these guys. So they’re just rapping in French. You get that kind of MTV brainwashing all over. Believe me, it’s not just America. It’s happening in Africa, too. But young people just gotta know that there should be a bigger picture out here. So in all these places you gotta reach in and find the points where people are really digging in and expressing themselves more honestly. You gotta look hard and sometimes it’s difficult to find. But you’ll find it eventually.
As the interview winds down, Murray takes out his wallet and produces pictures of his family. There’s his son Mingus, a basketball star in Sacramento on the nation’s number one team, according to USA Today. There’s an older son, Kahil, who performed and recorded with Murray’s big band in the early ’90s and now leads his own band, Ixhire. There’s a gorgeous two-year-old niece, Olga Kiavue, whom Murray is convinced should be the poster child for Guadeloupe’s tourist board. Last, but not least, there’s little baby Ruben with his mommy, Valerie, back home in Paris. “Gotta keep my kids close,” Murray smiles as he stuffs the bulging wallet back into his coat pocket, “just in case.”
He slings the sax bag around his shoulder, hoists the bass clarinet and his travel bag up over the other one, and he’s off. There’s a rehearsal to get to, followed by a photo shoot, then the gig. Scanning his itinerary for the days ahead, there’s a whole other string of upcoming appointments that will keep him running: rehearsals and gigs, workshops and clinics, sessions and collaborations, photo shoots and interviews. It’s the never-ending saga of David Murray, the hardest working man in the avant garde.
Friday
Aaron Davis Hall is an impressive facility near the campus of City College on 135th Street & Convent Road. It’s Harlem’s principal center for the performing arts, the Uptown equivalent of Merkin Hall at Lincoln Center or the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and this night the place is packed with a colorful mix of jazz fans, dance aficionados and residents of the community. Murray’s Octet and Urban Bush Women have been touring “Soul Deep” around the States, including one memorable stop in Texas where Murray’s sisters and stepmother were thoroughly engrossed in the exhilarating energy and uplifting spiritual undercurrent of the performance. “It was very nice to see them dig it because they’re from the Church of God in Christ, where I come from,” he says. “They don’t like anything, pretty much, outside of the church. Of course, the first part-the big party scene-kind of went by them. They didn’t grasp it at all. But the second part, which deals with the material I did with Speaking in Tongues, was right in there for them. Before the show started I told them, ‘Now you sit tight because there’s gonna be something that you like in a minute.’ And they really dug it. I was happy for that.”
As the curtain opens in the Marian Anderson Theater-named for Harlem’s great gospel singer-the Octet is lined up against the back wall downstage. From left to right there’s Donald Smith on piano and organ, Bob Stewart on tuba (subbing for trombonist Craig Harris), Billy Johnson on bass (subbing for Jaribu Shahid), Murray seated next to him with tenor in hand and bass clarinet in a stand, James Spaulding on alto sax, Ravi Best (subbing for Rasul Siddik) on trumpet, Mark Johnson behind the drums and special guest Michael Wimberly on percussion. Throughout the dynamic opening act, entitled “Saturday Night: The Party,” Murray and the horns get up from their seats and engage with the dancers, shuffling, hopping and rejoicing as they play, coaxing kinetic movement from the beautiful bodies whirling about on stage.
Throughout the first act, Murray blows with typical authority and volcanic high energy, demonstrating the same huge piercing tone, explosive upper register shrieks, swaggering delivery and Herculean circular breathing prowess on both tenor sax and bass clarinet that made him the darling of the avant garde during the ’70s and ’80s.
During the second act-“Sunday Mornin’: From a Whisper to a Shout,” a meditation on the black church experience that includes some inspiring lines from a Langston Hughes poem along with a pulse-quickening rendition of the old Negro spiritual “How I Got Over”-Murray seems particularly inspired. He’s smiling more than usual and at one point is so moved by Smith’s churchy organ playing and sanctified singing that he grabs a mike and joins in the call-and-response with some jubilant shouts of his own. As the final note of that glorious hand-clapping anthem resounds, Murray leap-kicks triumphantly into the air with rock star zeal, putting an exclamation point on this inspired collaboration.
Backstage, he is basking in the glow of congratulations from well-wishers. In-between hugs, Murray spies me in the crowd. “Hey man, you going out to hear some music tonight?” he inquires. “Bluiett’s playing down in Brooklyn and Bill Saxton is up at St. Nick’s Pub.”
Sounds like a long night ahead. He’ll probably sit in somewhere, maybe at both places. Then tomorrow he’ll do a repeat performance in Harlem of “Soul Deep” before heading off to some other destination, saxophone case slung over one broad shoulder, bass clarinet and travel bag over the other. So many gigs, so little time.
Essential Listening
While choosing among his some 300 recordings may seem like an impossible task, Murray has come up with a baker’s dozen of his own favorite albums:
Speaking in Tongues (Justin Time, 1999)
Creole (Justin Time, 1998)
Fo Deuk Revue (Justin Time, 1997)
London Concert (Cadillac Records, 1978)
Octet Plays Trane (Justin Time, 2000)
M’Bizo (Justin Time, 1998)
The Long Goodbye: A Tribute to Don Pullen (DIW, 1998)
Morning Song (Black Saint, 1984)
Jazzosaurus Rex (Red Baron, 1994)
Shakill’s Warrior (DIW/Columbia, 1991)
Flowers For Albert (India Navigation, 1976)
The Tip (DIW, 1995)
Dark Star (Astor Place, 1996)
Gearbox
Murray plays a series 8600 Selmer Mark VI balanced action tenor saxophone with a Berg Larsen 120 mouthpiece and a #4 Rico Royal reed. His bass clarinet is a Leblanc, which he plays with a #3 Rico Royal tenor saxophone reed.
https://wallofsound.wordpress.com/david-murray/
Firstly, there’s the drafts to a fairly lengthy analysis of Murray’s career. This is followed by analyses of his recorded output. I’ve identified getting on for 200 LPs, so it’s going to take time to build up the complete set. After that there’s some posts on rather random aspects of Murray’s career usually written in response to assumptions about Murray’s career that I find unconvincing. As I get round to it you’ll also be able to read some interviews with people who offer interesting insights into Murray’s career.
David Murray: the making of a progressive jazz musician
These are drafts of an article that should be coming into publication soon. They aren’t polished, finished pieces, but the final article needed cutting down, so these drafts often feature lengthier sections on matters that interest me, even if the overall argument is harder to follow.
First here’s a discussion of the idea of progress in jazz discourse using David Murray (and a comparison with Coleman Hawkins) as an example.
Coleman Hawkins and David Murray, and the idea of the progressive musician
The next three links are to a full version of the article, which extends and distills earlier drafts. This is not the final version, which has now been published in the Jazz Research Journal. If you want more detail on some aspects it is worth reading the drafts as well.
Just click on the link to go to the topic.
David Murray: the making of a progressive jazz musician (Part One)
David Murray: the making of a progressive jazz musician (Part Two)
David Murray: the making of a progressive jazz musician (Part Three) Bibliography
The drafts:
David Murray Part One
David Murray Part Two David Murray Part Three
If you want to find out more the bibliography should give you plenty more to read.
David Murray – I am a Jazzman
Information of a French TV documentary about Murray.
David Murray’s recorded output
My ultimate aim here is to produce a detailed survey of Murray’s whole recording career. You’ll find surveys of different decades of his work, and I’m building up a series of posts based upon close analysis and contextual discussion of his recordings. I’m starting with the earlier and hard to find releases.
I’ve also posted the first of a series of guides to Murray’s prodigious output if you want to buy and listen to more. I’ll extend and add to them over time. Here’s what’s available so far:
A listener’s guide to David Murray’s records in the 1990s
I’ve been collecting Murray records for a few decades now, and recently I came to believe that had had all but a few of his recordings as leader or co-leader. This is quite an achievement because there are around 150 of them. You can count down the final additions to my Murray record collection through these posts:
150
151
The records
Ted Daniel: In The Beginning (featuring David Murray) 1975 Live At The Peace Church 1976 Flowers For Albert 1976 Live At The Lower Manhattan Ocean Club Vol.1& 2 1977 Solomon’s Sons 1977 Conceptual Saxophone 1978
track by track: ‘Home’ ‘Come Sunday’ ‘Flowers for Albert’
Organic Saxophone 1978 Sur-Real saxophone 1978 Last of the Hipman 1978 Wilber Morris / David Murray / Dennis Charles: Wilber Force 1983 Clarinet Summit In Concert at the Public Theater Vol. I/II 1984/5 Kahil El’Zabar with David Murray Golden Sea 1989 David Murray & Milford Graves: Real Deal 1992
Popular misconceptions
You can also read about Murray’s comments about Albert Ayler as an influence (he isn’t much of one) in a series of posts
Does Flowers for Albert suggest Murray was influenced by Ayler?
Flowers for Albert (reprised)
Misunderstanding Flowers for Albert
Flowers for Albert (yes again)
Interviews
I have conducted a series of interviews with people involved in Murray’s career. As I write them up you’ll be able to read them here:
Interview with John Jack owner of Cadillac Records in London. Read it here.
David Murray (tenor saxophone and bass clarinet) is a Jazz artist who has recorded over 130 albums, including 2 recorded in 2006 (Gwotet and Pushkin) and a forthcoming album to be released in Summer 2007. He was born in Oakland, California in 1955 and grew up in Berkeley, where he studied with his mother Catherine Murray (organist), Bobby Bradford, Arthur Blythe, Stanley Crouch, Margaret Kohn and many others before he left Ponoma College (Los Angeles) for New York in 1975. In New York he met and played with Cecil Taylor, who along with Dewey Redman, gave the young musician the encouragement he needed. The city would again be a source of new encounters, with people and with music from all horizons : Sunny Murray, Tony Braxton, Oliver Lake, Don Cherry. In Ted Daniel's Energy Band he worked with Hamiet Bluiett, Lester Bowie and Frank Lowe.
David Murray, Jazz.
trackback
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/david-murray-a-jazz-innovator-leads-from-the-center-to-the-edge/2015/02/26/68bbda78-b6fa-11e4-9423-f3d0a1ec335c_story.html?utm_term=.01e32df0bea7
Music
David Murray: A jazz innovator leads from the center to the edge
by Giovanni Russonello
February 27, 2015
The Washington Post
David Murray has made his mark by engaging with
older jazz styles while still being a force in the avant-garde
movement. (Guadalupe Ruiz/Guadalupe Ruiz)
At 60, Murray is still performing and recording
regularly; he has recorded nearly 100 albums as a leader, with dozens
of bands. (Guadalupe Ruiz/Guadalupe Ruiz)
David Murray was invited to perform at New York’s Winter Jazzfest this January in an early celebration of his 60th birthday. He did three sets over two nights, each with a different ensemble, all playing the city for the first time. No surprise there — the saxophonist has recorded nearly 100 albums as a leader, with dozens of bands. He lives ahead of expectations.
A 20-year-old Murray took jazz by surprise in 1975, when New York was still reeling from the death of John Coltrane. The penetrating certainty and harmonic sparseness of Coltrane’s late work left people awed. Murray made his mark by reengaging with the older, more lyrical styles of Don Byas and Ben Webster, and he built new room in the avant-garde for blues humor and playful ironies.“He wasn’t really bothered by what Coltrane did, or what he was trying to do. He didn’t hear it like that,” says Stanley Crouch, a jazz writer and cultural critic who taught Murray at Pomona College and lived with him in New York.
“David also came to recognize what most musicians don’t: That once you understand the idea that gave rise to the notes, you don’t have to play the notes themselves that way,” Crouch adds.
On Winter Jazzfest’s first night, he led a Clarinet Summit at the Minetta Lane Theatre, with four clarinetists plus a bassist and a drummer. The front line set up oblique harmonies, and Murray — who celebrated his 60th birthday Feb. 19 — knifed through them with downward skewers on the bass clarinet, studded with meaty, gutbucket flavor.
After a set break, he switched to tenor saxophone and introduced a brand-new trio, featuring pianist Geri Allen, who made warm and humming vamps, and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, whose kit wafted a spiked haze upward through the room. The next day, nearby at Le Poisson Rouge, Murray’s Infinity Quartet blended straight-ahead free jazz and open-mike funk as poet Saul Williams delivered brooding, invective ribbons of verse.
It’s not typical for an innovator to lead from a position near the center, especially in jazz. But across four decades, Murray has always held onto multiple forces at once while finding an expressive balance. He likes to create an illusion of precariousness or overextension while projecting confidence. Sometimes it’s as if he is stridently arguing a point — his horn ejecting thick, charred notes and staccato cries — but not indicating which side of the argument he’s on. It’s payoff and suspense, all at once from a player who has often been unfairly footnoted as the ambassador of a thwarted movement.
Murray splits his time between homes in Portugal and Paris, visiting New York just a few times a year. By the time he first moved to the city from California, musicians could more easily get a gig playing jazz in Europe than at a legitimate club in New York. The venues that remained were loath to book experimental acts.
Young players started turning their Lower Manhattan apartments and studios into pseudo-commercial spaces, giving rise to the much-documented “loft jazz” scene. Murray and Crouch lived in an apartment on the Bowery, above the Tin Palace jazz club, and they hosted poetry readings and salons and concerts. Murray became a lodestar for the underground, earning the Village Voice’s “Musician of the Decade” accolade in 1980 while developing an array of ensembles: duets, quartets, an octet, a big band. The last was a rarity in the avant-garde world.
“It was just a way to expand my idea of compositions,” he says. “That’s essentially what Ellington did — he took songs he wrote and said, ‘Let’s see what everybody else can do with this song.’ I don’t know if people hear it in my music or not, but the history of our music is so deep.”
Murray’s big-band arrangements were only intermittently successful, sometimes too heavily weighted with unbending unison lines. But his arranging was perfectly suited to the World Saxophone Quartet, an all-saxes group featuring three fellow downtown stars: Oliver Lake and Julius Hemphill on alto and Hamiet Bluiett on baritone. On such albums as “Steppin’ With the World Saxophone Quartet,” “W.S.Q.” and “The World Saxophone Quartet Plays Duke Ellington,” he composed marbled harmonies that embraced and gave way like waves. The tunes ranged from shadowy harmonic movement to sputtering free improvisations.
There was an eagerness to bridge artistic and personal and ideological gaps, sometimes all at once. When Crouch, his roommate, declared verbal war on the poet and critic Amiri Baraka, objecting to the Black Arts leader’s insistence that revolutionary politics stay central to the music’s identity, Murray somehow maintained a working friendship with both.
Murray performs at the Hague Jazz Festival in the Netherlands in 2011. He moved to Europe in 1996 and splits his time between homes in Portugal and Paris. (Peter Van Breukelen/Redferns)
“I used to give parties in my loft, and that was one of the times [Crouch] and Baraka might have fallen out. I’d have Baraka in one corner, I’d have Albert Murray in the other corner, I’d have Ishmael Reed in the other corner. I’d have all these writers, and I had to keep them separated,” Murray says. “Writers are vicious, man. But my thing was, I was working with all of them. I was a writer’s musician. I always did music to their poetry and they used to like me to take their poems.”
Even on instrumental albums — such as the elegiac “Flowers for Albert” (1976) or the tender “Ballads” (1988) — you can hear Murray’s affection for words. It’s in the way he places notes: boldly, with interrogative inflections and an arc toward ecstatic revelation. Maybe that’s part of what helped him avoid the rabbit hole of babbling perspectives and relativism that so irritated people like Crouch. He was a free musician with an interest in form, syntax and recognition.
“He’s inspired by words, their meanings, and something that speaks to a unified outlook. He’s a listener,” says Saul Williams, the poet/singer/musician/actor whom Murray contacted last year after hearing him read a poem at Baraka’s funeral. “ He’s been around those people, like Amiri Baraka and Ishmael Reed, and it bleeds through.”
Since Murray moved to Europe in 1996, his boundary-crossing politics have engaged especially with global black identity. In the 1990s and 2000s, he recorded a series of albums in Senegal — joyful, mutinous funk with sabar drummers and other local musicians and poets. A few years later, he began to record with musicians in Cuba. In the process, he has developed relationships with young artists and helped some travel to the United States and Europe.
His output has been slow of late, and the typically prolific Murray hasn’t recorded an album since 2012. But he still has his characteristic certainty, and his sights are set in multiple directions.
“American black people, we’re from all different tribes, but we’ve become a tribe, too. My idea is to share those experiences with all of our brothers that are in Africa,” he says of his continuing work in West Africa. “I always thought that traveling and playing music, I’m teaching at the same time. In the big-band situation with Ellington, he used to always have older cats in the same band as the young ones. The philosophy was each one teach one.”
Giovanni Russonello is a freelance writer.
http://www.jazzweekly.com/2016/08/david-murray-perfection/
Jazz Weekly
Creative Music and other forms of Avant Garde art
DAVID MURRAY: PERFECTION
by George W. Harris
August 1, 2016
DAVID MURRAY
BACK IN THE 80S, DAVID MURRAY WAS THE POSTER CHILD FOR THE NEW FORCE OF LEFT OF CENTER ARTISTS THAT WERE CONSIDERED THE FUTURE OF JAZZ. ALONG WITH ARTHUR BLYTHE, CHICO FREEMAN, LESTER BOWIE AND HENRY THREADGILL, MURRAY WAS ON THE VANGUARD OF WHAT WAS NEW AND EXCITING.
TOGETHER WITH HAMIET BLUIETT, OLIVER LAKE AND JULIUS HEMPHILL, MURRAY FORMED THE LEGENDARY WORLD SAXOPHONE QUARTET WHICH SET THE WORLD ABLAZE WITH IT’S EXPLORATIVE ALBUMS OF BOTH ORIGINAL MUSIC AND INTERPRETATIONS OF SOUNDS RANGING FROM R&B TO ELLINGTON.
ON HIS OWN, HE RECORDED ALBUMS RANGING FROM EXPLOSIVE BIG BANDS TO QUARTETS AND RICHLY TEXTURED OCTETS, WITH “MING” BEING THE POSSIBLE HIGH WATER MARK.
AT THE HEIGHT OF HIS POPULARITY IN THE STATES, HAVING RECORDED WITH BANDS INCLUDING THE GRATEFUL DEAD, MURRAY LEFT THE US TO RE-LOCATE TO FRANCE. SINCE THEN, THE STATE OF THE AMERICAN TENOR SAX HAS NOT BEEN THE SAME, WITH HIS VACUUM STILL NOT YET BEING FILLED.
THE CHANGE IN HIS IDENTITY DIDN’T PHASE THE ARTIST, AS HE EXPLAINS TO US IN THIS RECENT INTERVIEW. HE’S STILL ACTIVE, WITH HIS LATEST COLLABORATION (“PERFECTION”) WITH GERI ALLEN AND TERRI LYNE CARRINGTON BEING ONE OF HIS BEST.
YOU DID A MAJOR CAREER CHANGE WHEN YOU MOVED TO FRANCE A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO. WHAT WAS THE IMPETUS OF THAT?
I had already accomplished many things, and was at the height of my career; I just continued my career from there. I’ve always travelled all over the world. When I went to Paris it was a wonderful time. I recorded in Africa, in Cuba, and in many parts of the world. It gave me the ability to explore many options like the Gwo Ka Masters from Guadaloupe. We did several albums, one with Pharoah Sanders.
I’ve also been able to write two operas; one for Alexander Pushkin with strings and for actors. Avery Brooks did the role of Pushkin. I did projects for Red Bull and the Masked Poets. We made a big show out of that and packed many places. In Paris we had lines around the corner. It was sold out.
We did Women’s Songs of Africa. It was a great show. With my big band we did a tribute to Ellington; the obscure works by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. I collaborated with James Newton on it.
Plus, I went to France and raised two beautiful children! I went to France, fell in love and followed my heart.
I live in Harlem, I live in Paris, and I live in Portugal now.
YOU’RE LATEST PROJECT WITH TERRI LYNE CARRINGTON AND GERI ALLEN (PERFECTION) IS A WELCOME REUNION WITH SOME OLD COMPATRIOTS. HOW DID YOU GET THIS ONE TOGETHER?
Back in the Winterjazz Festival a couple of years ago, we did a couple of projects. One was with (poet) Saul Williams and my quartet which had Nasheet Waits. I also did a revival of the Clarinet Summit. That had Don Byron, David Krakauer and Hamiet Bluiett and myself. Originally it had John Carter, Alvin Batiste, they contacted me for bass clarinet and then we got Jimmy Hamilton. We did some albums like that. We wanted to do an extension of that idea, but everyone in the group had passed on. I had an opportunity to make that group again.
At the same time during that Winterfest I got the idea to bring Terri Lyne Carrington and Geri Allen to play with me. I had played with Geri Allen and Richard Davis once at the Vanguard and enjoyed playing together with her then and different situations afterwards. I had worked at Town Hall with Carrington, so we decided to put this together and make a co-op group out of it.
It was great, because the last co-op group I was in lasted for 40 years, The World Saxophone Quartet. This would have been our 40th year, we no longer exist but everything has to come to an end. So, this is my “new” co-op group
I’ve also started a new group called David Murray and Class Struggle, with my son Mingus on guitar. It’s interesting to have some young people in the band. You’ll hear about this band soon; we’ll be playing at the Vanguard in April.
ANY WEST COAST GIGS COMING UP?
My quartet is trying to come around in early 2017, and the trio looks strong enough to be able to come around soon.
YOU PLAY IN ALL TYPES OF GROUPS. DO YOU SEE YOURSELF AS A “MUSICIAN” MORE THAN A “JAZZ MUSICIAN” OR “TENOR SAX PLAYER”?
Music is something that you shouldn’t pigeonhole. If you have the skills, or develop the skills for a big band, you should follow that. Then, the more forms and compositions that you fulfill, the better you get. I’ve been doing big bands since 1978; I’m pretty adept at writing for big bands. I’ve also done octets and shifted it around. We did Nat King Cole in Espanol; it wasn’t quite an octet, but it ended up being eight people and the music was different.
Sometimes it’s just the arranging skills and the orchestration skills. Improvisation is the beginning of my story with the tenor sax, but there are also other things, like that I write for theatre. I’m coming back to New York because I’d like to pursue that career as well. Music is music, so I try not to limit myself.
ONE TIME YOU TOLD ME THAT MUSIC IS LIKE CHURCH, IN THAT IT BRINGS DIVERSE PEOPLE TOGETHER.
Music is like that, and jazz in particular is one of the most ecumenical types of music on the planet because we let everybody into our church!
IN RETROSPECT, HOW DO YOU THINK THE WORLD SAXOPHONE QUARTET IMPACTED MUSIC?
I think we revolutionized things. Having four members that were quite different in the way that they played. Julius Hemphill was a large factor in the WSQ: we had to go into a different direction when we lost him. We tried many people who also made the group sound different like James Spaulding, Arthur Blythe and James Carter. We had a lot of other people.
Hamiet Bluiett is one of the world’s greatest baritone saxophone players, if not THE premier player. He is a master of his instrument and a wonderful composer. Who knows if someone had the notion to make some institution of the WSQ we could go out again. But, at this juncture, I think that we may have hit a point where we go into different directions. Everyone is doing fine on their own. At certain times we need each other, but right now we’re doing fine, things are positive and everyone’s healthy.
ANOTHER IDENTITY OF YOURS WAS THE LABEL YOU WERE WITH FOR MANY YEARS, BLACK SAINT.
Certain companies have been important in my career. That’s because they give you opportunities to develop. When you take different groups on the road for 3-4 weeks, like my octet, you come back into a club, play the club and then go into the studio and make a recording. That to me has always been the formula to making a good record.
To get a band that actually knows the music, plays together and change it every night, the music becomes a growing organism. Then, to have an opportunity to record; Black Saint and DIW, the Japanese label I did 30 albums with…all of these companies were very important in the development of my career. And other people’s careers!1342
Sometimes a label might choose a particular face to be the poster child of their company, and I was that several times. That can be a beautiful thing, because that way you can invite your friends and people you like to play with to come in as leaders and do their own records too. It’s not just about me; it’s about the whole jazz community.
YOU, CHICO FREEMAN, HENRY THREADGILL AND ARTHUR BLYTHE ALL CAME UP AROUND THE SAME TIME AND WERE SEEN AS A SINGLE IDENTITY.
Well, that’s important and it’s a great thing. What that means is that those of us who survived were able to go on into a positive way a whole world for ourselves. Each one of those people, and you have to put Ornette Coleman in there, created a whole community of people that knew what they were doing.
Sometimes you have to spread out to spread the music over the world. Fortunately I was able to spread my music all over Europe and Africa. That’s a real important thing for me to have done that in my life; to be able to go to different countries like Senegal and South Africa that normally wouldn’t have jazz. It’s really something to go into Mali and help develop projects.
I’ve been working with 3D Family, which is an organization that the mother of my children, Valier Malot, is the head of. She handles great acts from Mali like Salif Keita, Amadou and Mariam. People like that.
My family is in the business of music; we’re all working together to make something happen.
DO YOU THINK YOUR CHURCH BACKGROUND HAS INFLUENCED YOU TO BE “SPREADING THE WORD” LIKE AN EVANGELIST?
I grew up in The Church of God in Christ. My mother was very important in my development; she played piano and my father played guitar. In the music of the church, my brother Donald is the musical director for several churches in Fresno, California. He’s carrying on the tradition of my mother. Music is very important in our family and it helped me to develop; you can hear it in my playing.
HOW DID IT AFFECT YOU AS A MAN?
My brother Reuben and I always used to ask my father “How come we have to come to church all the time?” He said, “First, the band is the band and the church isn’t going to start without the band. Second, I want you to go in order to know the difference between right and wrong.”
WHAT WAS THE NAT COLE PROJECT ABOUT?
That took several trips to Cuba. At the time, you couldn’t go to Cuba from New York. I was able to go via Air France straight to Cuba from Paris. Our government hadn’t gotten around to opening up until now, but with things getting better we’ll get an opportunity to see what great musicians are down there and they’ll be able to have the opportunity to spread their wings.
There are several people from Cuba that I helped come to New York. I’ve had my hands in a number of things including young Cuban musicians’ careers and lives.
WHAT’S THE BIGGEST THING YOU TRY TO TEACH YOUNGER MUSICIANS?
Individuality. The people we spoke about before, each of them developed their own path. They made their own world of music.
Being able to copy people is not really that difficult. Trying to be original; that’s what is difficult. But at the same time, once you become an individual thinker or person you are a better person. You’ve created your own identity.
I have a friend, Craig Harris, who is a very creative musician. A great trombone player, and he’s got a song that I really like, called “Step Into My World.” When you hear that song, he makes you feel like he’s created his own world.
I think all of us that get a chance to survive these life issues and can put it into our music, we can expand our world to truth. Like Alice Coltrane, she put a whole universe of sound around John Coltrane. Anyone who can orchestrate like that, or like Benny Carter or Jimmy Heath. To get to a level of writing or arranging takes years, but that’s the best.
I was just at the Kennedy Center for the Jazz Masters and was allowed to be with Jimmy Heath, Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders. We all went to a concert together of the music of Benny Carter played by the Smithsonian Institute Masterworks Orchestra. It was quite an event to hear all of his music at one time. They also did music by Dave Baker who recently passed away. He was instrumental in helping me advance. I’ve had people who’ve helped me to become who I am, and if I can pass that on to others, it’s something good to do. I teach in my flat. I teach them that there’s more than replicating the notes. They need to open up their sound, as that is what makes you an individual. That is your stamp. The notes will come.
WHAT GOT YOU INTO DOING OPERA?
It was an opportunity to create a hero for people, black people in particular, because most people don’t know that Alexander Pushkin was part black. He was a voice of poetry in a certain period in Russian history. He was quite a dapper guy, and people listened to him. My idea was to expose African Americans to another hero that they can celebrate who was one of their own who accomplished something in another country.
Pushkin himself was searching for his blackness; he couldn’t understand why his great grandfather who came over as a slave (from Cameroon) and where this blackness in him came from. He expressed it in his poetry, so we did an opera. We did it in several languages; in French, in Russian, English and Bantu.
I discovered how to write with lyrics and how to write straight from Russian. A lot of projects I did in Europe I tried to get here. I tried hard to bring it to The Lincoln Center and a couple other places by sending out a lot of media and videos. But, you know, America, when it comes to music coming into America that is jazz based, is a very closed society. It exports, but it doesn’t bring things in that could be quite interesting, other than classical music.
As a person who has developed these kind of things I think we open up a little bit. I also did an opera called The Sisyphus Syndrome with Amiri Baraka. He had revolutionary prose and poetry set to music and a gospel choir. That was interesting too, it was something we recorded and did several concerts. In the middle of remixing the album the whole record industry went belly up. That material hasn’t had a chance to come out, but at some point I’m sure it will. But, the current restructuring of the record industry has put a stop to it.
IS THAT WHAT BROUGHT YOU BACK TO LIVE, AT LEAST PART TIME, IN THE STATES?
I’m back here in America because people thought I was just twiddling my thumbs for the last 20 years, but, no, I’ve been moving; I’ve been as active as I always had. I’ve been doing music. I was born into it; it’s what I do.
IT’S YOUR IDENTITY
I’m still breathing, and it’s what I do.
ALL OF MURRAY’S PROJECTS, BE THEY THE WORLD SAXOPHONE QUARTET, OPERA, HIS OWN SMALL AND BIG BANDS, LATIN MUSIC OR HIS LATEST TRIO ALBUM WITH ALL STARS ALLEN AND CARRINGTON, ARE PART OF HIS IDENTITY. HE’S NOT A ‘JAZZ MUSICIAN’ AS MUCH AS A ‘MUSICIAN’, ALWAYS LOOKING FOR NEW VENUES OF STIMULATION. NOW CONSIDERED ONE OF THE ‘ELDER STATESMEN’ OF JAZZ, MURRAY IS ONE OF THE FEW THAT KEEPS HIS EARS AND MIND OPEN, ALWAYS SEARCHING FOR A NEW PROJECT AND COLLECTION OF IDEAS. THE SAXOPHONE IS HIS INSTRUMENT, NOT HIS IDENTITY.
https://jazztimes.com/features/david-murray-three-days-in-the-life/
JazzTimes
David Murray: Three Days in the Life
Published 06/01/2000
By Bill Milkowski
Like Wynton Marsalis, David Murray can talk. It may be all they have in common, but the two certainly do share a gift for gab. And they are equally out-spoken. Get Murray going and he will talk about anything. But time is tight this morning and just running down his current activities and rash of recent releases will take up most of it.
For the record, there are his new and typically intense recordings Octet Plays Trane and Requiem for Julius with the World Saxophone Quartet, recent duet gigs in Italy and Ireland with Andrew Hill, as well as his ongoing projects focused around such recent releases as the Senegalese-inspired Fo Deuk Revue, the Haitian-flavored Creole and the gospel-drenched Speaking in Tongues (all for the Montreal-based Justin Time label).
As he sits there fielding questions and expounding between bites of grits and croquettes, I am flooded by vivid memories of past Murray gigs. The chronology has become blurred over time but the images remain powerful: An explosive duet with drummer Milford Graves at the (now-defunct) New Music Cafe; a 1984 Clarinet Summit performance at the Public Theatre with Alvin Batiste, John Carter and Jimmy Hamilton; a JATP-styled cutting context at a mid-’90s JVC Festival that pitted him against fellow tenor saxophonists George Coleman and Don Braden; an early ’80s appearance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with the World Saxophone Quartet; a moving performance at an early ’90s JVC Jazz Festival of Bobby Bradford’s suite “Have You Seen Sideman?” in honor of the late John Carter; a free, outdoor Central Park Summerstage bash two years ago with Fo Deuk Revue that had both Murray fans and the uninitiated dancing side by side.
Equally memorable are his riveting re-creation of Paul Gonsalves’ masterful improvisation on “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” from the classic 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, backed by a potent American Jazz Orchestra at Cooper Union Hall, and last year’s sublime interpretation of Ellingtonia with big band and strings at Aaron Davis Hall in Harlem. One gig that jumps out in this wash of Murray nostalgia is the night his Shakill’s Warrior band, featuring the late Don Pullen on Hammond B-3 organ, rocked the hallowed Village Vanguard like a roadhouse rib joint with their greasy brand of avant-funk. And that’s just a random sampling of New York gigs. Murray’s prolific output, and his natural tendency toward collaboration, extends to other cities all over the world, from the Baltic Sea to Africa, from Japan to Guadalupe to Washington, D.C. So many gigs, so little time.
Wednesday
With his saxophone case slung over one broad shoulder, bass clarinet and travel bag over the other, Murray hustles to the airport near Paris, where he lives. He’s flying back to New York, his home for years. He lands at Kennedy airport at 9 p.m. and jumps on the “A” train. It’s an excruciatingly long subway ride from the deepest part of Brooklyn-way down by John Gotti’s former turf in nearby Howard Beach-all the way up to Harlem, where he’ll be staying for the next few days. But Murray’s cool and, for once, he’s got plenty of time to kill. And besides, a buck-and-a-half subway ride beats a $50 cab ride any day.
He grabs all four New York dailies off the newsstand to get himself up to speed with the city he left behind and reads each one cover to cover before arriving at his appointed stop uptown. It’s nearly 11 p.m. by the time he strolls into the M&G soul food restaurant on 125th Street, just next door to Showman’s Lounge and down the strip from the historic Apollo Theater. Marvin Gaye is singing “What’s Goin’ On” on the jukebox as Murray places a take-out order of greens and fried chicken and brings it all back to his friend’s place a few blocks away. The Knicks and Hornets are on TV. The greens taste good, the fried chicken is the real deal, the Knicks are up by four in the fourth quarter with three minutes remaining. It’s good to be back in the Big Apple.
Thursday
Murray meets me at the same soul food restaurant from the night before. It’s 9:30 a.m. and jet lag has already set in. His eyes are bloodshot and he’s concerned about a photo shoot scheduled for later in the day. “But you know, my eyes are always red,” he offers. “Anyone who knows me knows that. In fact, they used to call me ‘Blood’ when I was a kid. I just wasn’t blessed with that white-eye look. I don’t know, you can’t have everything.”
He sips a lemonade and slowly shakes off the cobwebs. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he apologizes. “Sometimes it takes a minute to get rolling in the morning with the interview stuff. I’m not perfect.” His plan is to eat a hearty breakfast, chat with me for an hour or so, attend an afternoon rehearsal of “Soul Deep”-a collaboration with his Octet and the Urban Bush Women dance company scheduled for a New York premiere the following evening-then grab a quick nap and freshen up before the photo shoot. They aren’t serving any greens or fried chicken this early at the M&G so he orders salmon croquettes and grits with eggs. He adds a generous dose of hot sauce to the grits before settling in to some flowing, no-holds barred conversation and breakfast, Harlem-style.
JazzTimes: Both Speaking in Tongues and “Soul Deep” represent a kind of coming full circle for you.
Murray: Yeah, it’s nice to get back into the gospel thing. Going out and leaving the church and doing my jazz career, there’s always a little part of me that’s really still in the church. And when I get to express it, it really makes me feel good. Gospel is happening, man. In fact, I just did another gospel project down in Washington, D.C., with some friends of mine from college. We’re putting together a spiritual jazz label and we just did a recording of gospel music called I Want Jesus to Walk With Me. The theme is gospel and jazz, bringing spiritual jazz into the church. You know, people in the church have always called jazz the devil’s music so jazz musicians have been outcasts. But now people are starting to get hip that jazz can be very spiritual, as ‘Trane and Albert Ayler have shown. And so we’re bringing that into the church, using jazz as a tool to, for one, upgrade the music in church and also just to hip people to something that’s new around them-something that they should be digging anyway.
JazzTimes: What was it like growing up in the Church of God in Christ and also being interested in jazz?
Murray: It was very strict. When I grew up I could only play the music I played in church or concert band music I played in school. I couldn’t play jazz in the church. I couldn’t even play jazz growing up in my house. So now we’re trying to change this. We’re trying to make our own jazz standards to put into the hymnals so that people can understand that this is music that rejoices God as well. I don’t know how most people are but most people in my family, no matter how far they may have wavered from spirituality and religion, they always tend to get back to it at a certain point in their life. So this is where I’m at with myself and this music is how I’m trying to express it.
JazzTimes: How do you see yourself fitting into the jazz community at this point in your career?
Murray: I feel like the missing link sometimes in this whole jazz thing. Because I knew a lot of the older cats that none of these younger cats today would ever have been able to meet. It’s weird. Like when I’m talking around younger guys, they look at me like I’m an old relic just because I even know some of these guys.
JazzTimes: Like Ben Webster and Paul Gonsalves?
Murray: Yeah. Or even Dexter Gordon. People that they didn’t get to see, somebody like Junior Cook, who they only heard about. It just reminds me that I’m just older than some guys, that’s all.
JazzTimes: How has the musical climate changed from when you first came to town?
Murray: When I came to New York, people were really trying to make the music move. We really made an effort to do that. But the people that came after us, they weren’t so interested in moving the music along. They were more interested in just being part of the status quo.
JazzTimes: I know that you and Stanley Crouch were friends and colleagues when you both came to town in 1975 from the Bay Area. Have you been in touch with him over the years?
Murray: No, I usually don’t talk to him so much. I see him every once in a while. He came down to the Iridium for a little while and then left. I don’t know. I don’t see him too much. I guess he’s doing all right. It’s just that our ideas of what’s good are so different. I think maybe we’ll just stay away.
JazzTimes: It sounds like you’ve gone in different directions at some point, certainly since you played together on the Wildflowers sessions from Studio Rivbea.
Murray: Yeah. Stanley was into the loft music scene at that point. But people go their different ways in life. He went his way in life, probably more opposite than I did in terms of where he started out in this music. But he’ll pretty much do what he needs to do to get over in the city. He’s proven that. He’s a good artist. I just wish he had realized what his true art was. I think he’s a guy who never really showed the world what he really could do. It’s a shame. Because I always thought that he could’ve been one of the greatest playwrights or directors around. I guess he kind of got more involved with being a music critic or something, which seemed to be a lower calling. I mean, I keep up with what he’s doing. I know what he’s doing. I know exactly what he’s doing. But I’m just saying, he had a potential to be a really wonderful playwright and director because he has a vision in that area that he didn’t pursue. Perhaps it’s something that he’ll pursue later in his life. But as far as I know, he got more interested in talking about the scene and being a social advocate than being a true artist that he probably is deep down inside. Other than that, he’s still my friend.
JazzTimes: He certainly is highly opinionated and…
Murray: Cantankerous? That’s what happens to people when they waste their lives being a reactionary instead of an artist. When you’re really an artist and you become a reactionary to make money, it doesn’t jibe right with the creator of the universe. And I think that’s the kind of problem that he has to face.
JazzTimes: I noticed that a lot of young musicians that I’ve seen are beginning to integrate a lot of Middle Eastern scales and tonalities. They’re bringing world music influences into jazz.
Murray: That’s good. But the fact is, after you studied all of the world music you can what you find out is that most of that information is already in jazz. When you peep through some of the things that Wayne Shorter was doing, some of the things ‘Trane and Dolphy and Yusef Lateef were doing. Those kinds of things have been checked out before. Ellington with the Far East Suite. So I think, the concentration of study really is jazz. I’m not the kind of guy that’s going to be running away from jazz because jazz is certainly the teacher. And other musics are something that we like to study where we can bring it in and incorporate it into our music but we as jazz musicians, we really have to remain focused on strictly jazz and really conquering what that is. You find this kind of a concept that I’ve been talking about in dealing with what Sun Ra did all his life. I only played with his band once, but I watched him hundreds of times. I remember as a kid in Berkeley before I came to New York, I think I spoke to Sun Ra for about six hours one time. He went on and on and on and everything just made so much sense. Even to this day I’ve never heard anybody expound on himself, what his relationship is to the universe and music and why are doing this, why are we expressing ourselves in this way, what difference does it make-it makes a difference to the universe. He makes it seem like if you don’t do that you would be some kind of a threat, some kind of a convict to the universe, if you didn’t express what you have to express. We need those kinds of guys. And just from talking with Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, McCoy Tyner and Andrew Hill-I mean, these are the people, man, that really inspire me to do what I do. They have such a firm stance on the ground. Their footing is so solid.
JazzTimes: There are signs of a new vibrancy; different bands, different players coming up.
Murray: I hope so. It would have to be because it’s such a dynamic city. And that kind of energy will always attract real artists. A real artist, to me, is someone who is a barometer or chronicler of his times. He’s the guy that looks at the street scene and plays it through his horn. He’s the kind of guy who listens to the radio and what’s going on with everybody-something happening over here in Brooklyn, something happening in Southeast Asia-and then he just blows it out through his horn or paints a picture of it. To me, that’s an artist. All this other stuff, anybody else can learn how to do. It’s like a poet. If you don’t have no song in your language, you ain’t gonna really be a good poet. You might get it together and copy some styles, but to be really listened to and to have a voice of your own, you gotta know what’s going on with the world. It has to make sense. In jazz there’s always somebody who comes along who is just the perfect guy for that generation, and everybody’s gotta dig him. You know, the guy who you just can’t deny once you look at him. I’ve heard people say that Albert Ayler was like that. He was the perfect cat for his time. For what was happening, he just said it in a nutshell. Probably when Ornette Coleman came to New York, he was the perfect guy for that moment in time. I guess it’s kind of like somebody being president or something like that. Clinton came at a time when the people really needed Bill Clinton. Maybe they don’t need him now but they sure needed him then. But there has to be a cat for this time. It’s kind of like a prophet, like someone who comes and chronicles his time but not with a lot of fanfare-not to try to make it like a Jesus type of prophet or Mohammed, but more like a musical type of prophet. It’s important for his voice to be heard, even though it might be trying to be squelched. In this town, you may say something and the reaction to it drowns out the actual concept itself. The reaction to it is so angry that you would miss the point, because the reaction has so much media power that you could never even hear it if you didn’t hear it at first, if you weren’t the first to be there to hear it, the reaction would wipe it out. New York is like that. So you have to watch for that.
JazzTimes: In terms of playing with that kind of urgency and energy today, I’m thinking of people like David S. Ware, Matthew Shipp, Charles Gayle, Daniel Carter, Roy Campbell.
Murray: Yeah, those guys have always been chroniclers of their time. I would include them in what I’m saying. They were also here when I was here, too. We all developed in the ’70s. They may not have been as popular as myself or as out there in the media, but they were here and they were playing good then, in the ’70s. I’m talking about somebody even younger than them. And no disrespect to those guys because they’re all my friends. But I’m looking to some of the younger guys that are not in our generation to come on with it now. I’m looking for them to see through the smokescreen of what has transpired in New York and I want them to come along and see what they can do in terms of integrating what they heard over the last, say, 25 years and coming up with their own voice.
JazzTimes: Have you heard any twentysomething-year-old musician doing that?
Murray: I heard some guys who are capable of pushing the buttons but I’m not sure if they’re as capable at maintaining a concept. That’s kind of what I see. I want to see more of somebody’s concept developing into something using all of the tools that have been developed over the years.
JazzTimes: Graham Haynes?
Murray: Oh yeah, Graham always did have a concept. He got some great seasoning playing with Ed Blackwell and he just built from there. But Graham is older. Still, we’re talking about guys mostly from my generation. I’m talking about guys that are in their early 20s right now. These guys need to make their statements now, not 10 years from now. Now! I’m just saying that your energy is different when you’re younger than when you get older, your enthusiasm is different. So I would like to hear that young enthusiasm inside of this music. And I know that some of these young guys today want to be out here but they don’t quite know what to play in order for their real soul to come out. So they’re playing all these other people’s tunes instead of writing their own tunes. They should be writing their own tunes and playing them out so people can react to them. It’s time for these young guys to come on out. But what I see is, cats are scared. They’re a little paranoid to come out in a certain way because they may be chastised because they don’t follow this little mode that’s been made. So they come out in this little mode with their little suits on…
JazzTimes: It’s like joining a country club.
Murray: Yeah, and they’re too young to be in that country club. It’s strange. I’m talking about it because I want to see it happen for them. I mean, let’s see what’s going on next.
JazzTimes: You seem so caught up in the process of creating that you don’t worry too much about criticism.
Murray: It’s ridiculous to worry about stuff like that. I mean, when it’s all over and it’s all said and done, we’re all on our death beds and stuff, then we can go back and say, “Oh, I shoulda did that, I shoulda did this.” But right now, I could care less what anybody thinks about me. I mean, I’m happy when I hear accolades. And when I hear something negative, I’m happy they spelled my name right. But other than that, man, I’m just kind of doing my thing, man. And if somebody wants to step into my world and see what I’m doing, that’s great. But if they don’t, man, I’ll still be doing it.
JazzTimes: What do you see on the horizon for you?
Murray: Aside from getting more involved in gospel music or spiritual jazz, I’m also interested in spreading myself around to different kids and young adults around the world. I go to Africa and there’s all these cats running around behind me, excited to learn about jazz. In general, man, when I see people from different countries, I get a thrill out of showing them what jazz is. I go to Senegal or Guadeloupe or Martinique and do some big band workshops over there. Those cats, man, they were just so happy that someone would take some time out and show them something about jazz. They’re hungry to learn. So I’m ready for the next John Coltranes to come from somewhere else. They might not be coming from North Carolina or New Orleans. Maybe they’ll come from Dakar or Nigeria or Guadeloupe or Martinique. Maybe they’ll come from Scandinavia, I don’t know. All I know is, I see these people, they’re eager all over the world for jazz. What I don’t see is that same kind of enthusiasm in the United States. For instance, I don’t see a lot of jazz in the black community here like it should be. But I’ll go to Dakar and I’ll start playing and people are interested. I start playing in the black community here, man, people be like, “You gotta stop now, we’re gonna put on some boom box stuff.” I mean, something is happening that’s brainwashing people, that makes them think that. Like, I heard a rapper on TV a couple of months ago and he said, “You know, we don’t even have to learn how to play instruments no more.” And I thought that was the epitome of ignorance. I always thought it was to someone’s advantage to be taught something that they could use the rest of their life. But people don’t think that way these days. Even some of the kids in my community in Paris, they don’t see it that way. They want to be like the American rappers. They see the guys with the cars and the cell phones, they wanna be like these guys. So they’re just rapping in French. You get that kind of MTV brainwashing all over. Believe me, it’s not just America. It’s happening in Africa, too. But young people just gotta know that there should be a bigger picture out here. So in all these places you gotta reach in and find the points where people are really digging in and expressing themselves more honestly. You gotta look hard and sometimes it’s difficult to find. But you’ll find it eventually.
As the interview winds down, Murray takes out his wallet and produces pictures of his family. There’s his son Mingus, a basketball star in Sacramento on the nation’s number one team, according to USA Today. There’s an older son, Kahil, who performed and recorded with Murray’s big band in the early ’90s and now leads his own band, Ixhire. There’s a gorgeous two-year-old niece, Olga Kiavue, whom Murray is convinced should be the poster child for Guadeloupe’s tourist board. Last, but not least, there’s little baby Ruben with his mommy, Valerie, back home in Paris. “Gotta keep my kids close,” Murray smiles as he stuffs the bulging wallet back into his coat pocket, “just in case.”
He slings the sax bag around his shoulder, hoists the bass clarinet and his travel bag up over the other one, and he’s off. There’s a rehearsal to get to, followed by a photo shoot, then the gig. Scanning his itinerary for the days ahead, there’s a whole other string of upcoming appointments that will keep him running: rehearsals and gigs, workshops and clinics, sessions and collaborations, photo shoots and interviews. It’s the never-ending saga of David Murray, the hardest working man in the avant garde.
Friday
Aaron Davis Hall is an impressive facility near the campus of City College on 135th Street & Convent Road. It’s Harlem’s principal center for the performing arts, the Uptown equivalent of Merkin Hall at Lincoln Center or the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and this night the place is packed with a colorful mix of jazz fans, dance aficionados and residents of the community. Murray’s Octet and Urban Bush Women have been touring “Soul Deep” around the States, including one memorable stop in Texas where Murray’s sisters and stepmother were thoroughly engrossed in the exhilarating energy and uplifting spiritual undercurrent of the performance. “It was very nice to see them dig it because they’re from the Church of God in Christ, where I come from,” he says. “They don’t like anything, pretty much, outside of the church. Of course, the first part-the big party scene-kind of went by them. They didn’t grasp it at all. But the second part, which deals with the material I did with Speaking in Tongues, was right in there for them. Before the show started I told them, ‘Now you sit tight because there’s gonna be something that you like in a minute.’ And they really dug it. I was happy for that.”
As the curtain opens in the Marian Anderson Theater-named for Harlem’s great gospel singer-the Octet is lined up against the back wall downstage. From left to right there’s Donald Smith on piano and organ, Bob Stewart on tuba (subbing for trombonist Craig Harris), Billy Johnson on bass (subbing for Jaribu Shahid), Murray seated next to him with tenor in hand and bass clarinet in a stand, James Spaulding on alto sax, Ravi Best (subbing for Rasul Siddik) on trumpet, Mark Johnson behind the drums and special guest Michael Wimberly on percussion. Throughout the dynamic opening act, entitled “Saturday Night: The Party,” Murray and the horns get up from their seats and engage with the dancers, shuffling, hopping and rejoicing as they play, coaxing kinetic movement from the beautiful bodies whirling about on stage.
Throughout the first act, Murray blows with typical authority and volcanic high energy, demonstrating the same huge piercing tone, explosive upper register shrieks, swaggering delivery and Herculean circular breathing prowess on both tenor sax and bass clarinet that made him the darling of the avant garde during the ’70s and ’80s.
During the second act-“Sunday Mornin’: From a Whisper to a Shout,” a meditation on the black church experience that includes some inspiring lines from a Langston Hughes poem along with a pulse-quickening rendition of the old Negro spiritual “How I Got Over”-Murray seems particularly inspired. He’s smiling more than usual and at one point is so moved by Smith’s churchy organ playing and sanctified singing that he grabs a mike and joins in the call-and-response with some jubilant shouts of his own. As the final note of that glorious hand-clapping anthem resounds, Murray leap-kicks triumphantly into the air with rock star zeal, putting an exclamation point on this inspired collaboration.
Backstage, he is basking in the glow of congratulations from well-wishers. In-between hugs, Murray spies me in the crowd. “Hey man, you going out to hear some music tonight?” he inquires. “Bluiett’s playing down in Brooklyn and Bill Saxton is up at St. Nick’s Pub.”
Sounds like a long night ahead. He’ll probably sit in somewhere, maybe at both places. Then tomorrow he’ll do a repeat performance in Harlem of “Soul Deep” before heading off to some other destination, saxophone case slung over one broad shoulder, bass clarinet and travel bag over the other. So many gigs, so little time.
Essential Listening
While choosing among his some 300 recordings may seem like an impossible task, Murray has come up with a baker’s dozen of his own favorite albums:
Speaking in Tongues (Justin Time, 1999)
Creole (Justin Time, 1998)
Fo Deuk Revue (Justin Time, 1997)
London Concert (Cadillac Records, 1978)
Octet Plays Trane (Justin Time, 2000)
M’Bizo (Justin Time, 1998)
The Long Goodbye: A Tribute to Don Pullen (DIW, 1998)
Morning Song (Black Saint, 1984)
Jazzosaurus Rex (Red Baron, 1994)
Shakill’s Warrior (DIW/Columbia, 1991)
Flowers For Albert (India Navigation, 1976)
The Tip (DIW, 1995)
Dark Star (Astor Place, 1996)
Gearbox
Murray plays a series 8600 Selmer Mark VI balanced action tenor saxophone with a Berg Larsen 120 mouthpiece and a #4 Rico Royal reed. His bass clarinet is a Leblanc, which he plays with a #3 Rico Royal tenor saxophone reed.
https://wallofsound.wordpress.com/david-murray/
David Murray
This page features a series of posts on the jazz saxophonist David Murray. It’s part of a long-term project to chronicle and analyse Murray’s work. If you’re a Murray fan I hope you find what I have to say straightforward and interesting, even if some of it is written for academic publication.
Firstly, there’s the drafts to a fairly lengthy analysis of Murray’s career. This is followed by analyses of his recorded output. I’ve identified getting on for 200 LPs, so it’s going to take time to build up the complete set. After that there’s some posts on rather random aspects of Murray’s career usually written in response to assumptions about Murray’s career that I find unconvincing. As I get round to it you’ll also be able to read some interviews with people who offer interesting insights into Murray’s career.
David Murray: the making of a progressive jazz musician
These are drafts of an article that should be coming into publication soon. They aren’t polished, finished pieces, but the final article needed cutting down, so these drafts often feature lengthier sections on matters that interest me, even if the overall argument is harder to follow.
First here’s a discussion of the idea of progress in jazz discourse using David Murray (and a comparison with Coleman Hawkins) as an example.
Coleman Hawkins and David Murray, and the idea of the progressive musician
The next three links are to a full version of the article, which extends and distills earlier drafts. This is not the final version, which has now been published in the Jazz Research Journal. If you want more detail on some aspects it is worth reading the drafts as well.
Just click on the link to go to the topic.
David Murray: the making of a progressive jazz musician (Part One)
David Murray: the making of a progressive jazz musician (Part Two)
David Murray: the making of a progressive jazz musician (Part Three) Bibliography
The drafts:
David Murray Part One
David Murray Part Two David Murray Part Three
If you want to find out more the bibliography should give you plenty more to read.
David Murray – I am a Jazzman
Information of a French TV documentary about Murray.
David Murray’s recorded output
My ultimate aim here is to produce a detailed survey of Murray’s whole recording career. You’ll find surveys of different decades of his work, and I’m building up a series of posts based upon close analysis and contextual discussion of his recordings. I’m starting with the earlier and hard to find releases.
I’ve also posted the first of a series of guides to Murray’s prodigious output if you want to buy and listen to more. I’ll extend and add to them over time. Here’s what’s available so far:
A listener’s guide to David Murray’s records in the 1990s
I’ve been collecting Murray records for a few decades now, and recently I came to believe that had had all but a few of his recordings as leader or co-leader. This is quite an achievement because there are around 150 of them. You can count down the final additions to my Murray record collection through these posts:
150
151
The records
Ted Daniel: In The Beginning (featuring David Murray) 1975 Live At The Peace Church 1976 Flowers For Albert 1976 Live At The Lower Manhattan Ocean Club Vol.1& 2 1977 Solomon’s Sons 1977 Conceptual Saxophone 1978
track by track: ‘Home’ ‘Come Sunday’ ‘Flowers for Albert’
Organic Saxophone 1978 Sur-Real saxophone 1978 Last of the Hipman 1978 Wilber Morris / David Murray / Dennis Charles: Wilber Force 1983 Clarinet Summit In Concert at the Public Theater Vol. I/II 1984/5 Kahil El’Zabar with David Murray Golden Sea 1989 David Murray & Milford Graves: Real Deal 1992
Popular misconceptions
You can also read about Murray’s comments about Albert Ayler as an influence (he isn’t much of one) in a series of posts
Does Flowers for Albert suggest Murray was influenced by Ayler?
Flowers for Albert (reprised)
Misunderstanding Flowers for Albert
Flowers for Albert (yes again)
Interviews
I have conducted a series of interviews with people involved in Murray’s career. As I write them up you’ll be able to read them here:
Interview with John Jack owner of Cadillac Records in London. Read it here.
https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/davidmurray
David Murray
David Murray (tenor saxophone and bass clarinet) is a Jazz artist who has recorded over 130 albums, including 2 recorded in 2006 (Gwotet and Pushkin) and a forthcoming album to be released in Summer 2007. He was born in Oakland, California in 1955 and grew up in Berkeley, where he studied with his mother Catherine Murray (organist), Bobby Bradford, Arthur Blythe, Stanley Crouch, Margaret Kohn and many others before he left Ponoma College (Los Angeles) for New York in 1975. In New York he met and played with Cecil Taylor, who along with Dewey Redman, gave the young musician the encouragement he needed. The city would again be a source of new encounters, with people and with music from all horizons : Sunny Murray, Tony Braxton, Oliver Lake, Don Cherry. In Ted Daniel's Energy Band he worked with Hamiet Bluiett, Lester Bowie and Frank Lowe.
In 1976, after an European tour, David Murray set up the first of his mythic groups, the World Saxophone Quartet, with Oliver Lake, Hamiet Bluiett and Julius Hemphill. This marked the beginning of an intensely creative time, when one recording led to another, with an endless permutation of formations.
From Jerry Garcia to Max Roach, from Randy Weston to Elvin Jones, David Murray worked as widely as possible until 1978, when he set up his own quartet, then octet and finally his quintet. From this time on his focus is more on his own formations, although he frequently works with other musicians, drawing in a whole range of different sounds, from strings (the 1982 concert at the Public Theatre in New York), to Ka drums from Guadeloupe (Créole in 1998 and Yonn Dé in 2002) and South African dancers and musicians (Mbizo, 1998), just some of the treasures he has discovered on his journey.
David Murray's awards include : a Grammy in 1989 and several nominations; a Guggenheim Fellowship (1989); the Bird Award (1986); the Danish Jazzpar Prize (1991); Village Voice musician of the decade (1980s); Newsday musician of the year (1993); personality of the Guinness Jazz festival (Ireland, 1994); the Ralph J. Simon Rex Award (1995).
Two documentaries have been made about David Murray's life : “Speaking in Tongues” (1982) and “Jazzman”, nominated at the Baltimore Film Festival (1999).
“Murray's music stems from the post-free movement, combining the innovations of free in the 70's and New Orleans jazz. It is characterized by its paroxystic effects, producing a harsh, extreme sound. He draws explicitly on African traditions, and symbolizes a return to a raw sound”. From Le Dictionnaire du jazz, ed. Laffont, 1995
Awards
Grammy Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, Bird Award, Danish Jazz Bar Prize, musician of the 80’s by the Village Voice
https://wallofsound.wordpress.com/2007/04/09/david-murray/
David Murray April 9, 2007
Posted by wallofsound inDavid Murray, Jazz.
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David Murray has been one of the most lauded of saxophonists of the
last thirty-five years. His recorded output and concert appearances are
prolific. He claims he has recorded on over 260 records, and his
touring schedule from current base in Paris criss-crosses the world’s
continents.
He has worked with an impressively wide range of collaborators from within and outside the Jazz tradition. Today he is as likely to play and record with African, or Caribbean musicians, as he is with those who from one of the many US or European Jazz traditions. His playing is often seen as a classic case of ‘out’ improvisation, yet he draws substantially on the full history of Jazz in his recordings of compositions and themes. He has worked with a wide range of cult North American, European and Japanese independent jazz record labels, and is featured on major festival and concert circuit in many parts of the world. At the same time he is little known even inside the Jazz world.
His career raises many interesting questions about the Jazz musician’s relationship to innovation, and to the development of Jazz since the 1960s.
In this paper I want to explore where his musical imperatives derive from, and more importantly to connect Murray’s developing career and his musical explorations to the cultural philosophy and political economy of recording contracts and concert appearances that has sustained him financially. In doing so I seek to understand why Murray wants to explore the language of Jazz and other music, and how he is able to do so.
To do this I have analysed 120 of his key recordings and undertaken a historiography of his career. This is the first of a series of articles on Murray’s career.
Murray as a progressive musician
To achieve this I use Scott DeVeaux’s notion of the ‘Progressive musician’ that he proposes in his study of Coleman Hawkins and his relationship to the Be Bop musicians of the 1940s. I find DeVeaux’s approach to Jazz historiography exemplary. He argues for the study of Jazz history as an examination of its “‘disciplinary matrix’: the sum total of practices, values and commitments that define Jazz as a profession” (44). His analysis of Coleman is a blend of cultural practice and political economy.
Centrally I translate DeVeaux’s key research question from a study of the 1930s to the 1950s, into a study of the 1970s to 2000s.
“What does it mean for a young African-American man to pursue the career of professional Jazz musician in the last decades of the twentieth century? In particular, what did it mean for him to be progressive?” (paraphrasing DeVeaux, 45).
There are some interesting parallels between Hawkins and Murray.
• Hawkins set the standard for the tenor saxophone, and showed how it could be used for virtuoso performance; Murray explored its outer limits playing outside its conventional range.
• They both escaped what they saw as a restricted Jazz scene in New York to live in Paris and Northern Europe, playing with a diverse musicians and absorbing musical ideas from outside Jazz.
• They both played a pivotal role in constituting a new sense of what Jazz improvisation and group interaction was.
Unlike Murray, though, Hawkins achieved both critical and popular success. His recording of ‘Body and Soul’ was a commercial lucrative release, and a mainstay of black jukeboxes and white jazz aficionados’ record collections. It is also one of the most analysed of Jazz recordings.
Murray is very aware of Hawkins’ importance, and of his Body and Soul recording. The song is the most recorded piece by Murray [six times in my sample]. It was the first standard he recorded in 1978 when he produced a solo rendition, and while he played nearly 20 John Coltrane compositions, many tunes associated with other tenor players, and dozens of standards once or twice, he came back to the Body and Soul in 1983, and produced four versions of it in the early 1990s.
February 1978 solo live on Organic Saxophone [1978] Palm 31
September 1983 Quartet on Morning Song [1984] Black Saint
December 1990 Quartet as The Bob Thiele Collective on Sunrise Sunset [1992] Red Barron
May 1990 duo with pianist George Arvanitas on Tea for Two [1991]
April 1991 duo with pianist Aki Takase on Blue Monk [1991]
February 1993 Quartet with vocalist Taana Running on Body and Soul [1994]
In this later period Murray’s output is at its most eclectic, and by the middle of the decade he had moved to Paris, and began recording extensively with African and Caribbean musicians.
DeVeaux locates an idea of progress as central to African American culture of the later 19th century and well into the 20th. It is particularly important in the rhetoric of black self-help philosophy of African American leaders like Booker T Washington, where individual self improvement and communal collaboration were seen as the means through which the race could progress. Craig Werner has suggested that we can identify a Jazz impulse in African American society in which the past is remade into multiple possibilities. He cites Ralph Ellison’s notion of Jazz as a constant process of redefinition on three levels of individuality, community and tradition [Shadow and Act].
These are important ideas to understand Murray’s music and career, and his place in a wider culture and political economy.
To trace the “practices, values and commitments” that DeVeaux highlights I intend to divide Murray’s career broadly into four parts:
1. The 1970s characterised by Murray’s move from the West Coast world of college and Black Arts movements to New York’s loft scene and European festivals.
2. Starting in 1980 and focused on his output for the Italian Black Saint label, and his development of composition, his work with big bands and his engagement with the Jazz tradition to 1987
3. 1988 to 1995 and his output on DIW, Colombia, and Red Baron
4. Finally the last ten years, his recordings for Justin Time, his residence in Paris and his engagement with ethnomusicology
1. Black Arts Movement, Loft Jazz, European Festivals, and Small Independents
The standard Murray biography goes something like this.
Murray’s mother played piano and his father guitar. In his youth, Murray played music in church with his family. He was introduced to jazz while a student in the Berkeley school system, playing alto sax in a school band. When he was 13, he played in a local R&B and Rock groups. Hearing Sonny Rollins inspired Murray to switch from alto to tenor. He attended Pomona College, where he studied with a former trumpeter Bobby Bradford. Around this time, he was influenced by the writer Stanley Crouch. Murray moved to New York at the age of 20, during the city’s Loft Jazz era.
Those musical roots of gospel, R&B, and art Jazz were key to Murray’s whole development. By comparison with Hawkins who started as a journeyman dance musician in the 1920s, came to fame as a featured soloist in Swing bands of the 1930s, and achieved influence through his involvement with the New York Be Bop movement in the 1940s, Murray enjoyed a musical education of considerable freedom and privilege. By the 1970s Liberal Arts colleges like Pomona were playing host to significant black arts movements, with parallel community-based which grew out of the black power movement.
The best known is AACM in Chicago, but an important equivalent was to be found in BAG (Black Arts Group) in St Louis and other major cities. There were common threads to these black arts musicians: a strong emphasis on Afro-centricism in dress, imagery, inter-textuality of names; collaboration with visual and performing artists; a commitment to independent venues and record distribution; and often a stress on social and educational, as well as musical goals.
Often funded by art grants, and playing to progressive multi-cultural audiences, these groups created creative milieu in which experimentation was highly valued. Although initially locally-based in the US, there was a particular European enthusiasm for this collective Avant Guard, expressed through the programming in festivals and concerts and the release of recordings on small independent record labels.
Following in Hawkins’ footprints many of the leading members of these arts groups moved first to Europe, and then to New York where an alternative scene was developing in disused industrial buildings in Manhattan. This loft scene which drew Murray together with other key musicians from the Black Arts collectives from other major cities. Here they mixed with the earlier generation of free players who had followed the innovations of Coltrane, Coleman and Ayler.
Murray’s first recordings are strongly rooted in this Milieu. Almost all recorded live, in New York and Europe for small independent labels on single release contracts.
1976-79
Live
Studio Rivbea New York May 1976
The Ladies’ Fort New York June 1976
St. Marks Church New York 1976
International New Jazz Festival Moers June 1977
Bimhuis Amsterdam August 1977
Lower Manhattan Ocean Club New York December 1977
Unnamed Rouen January 1978
Theatre Mouffetard Paris February 1978
Studio
Blue Rock Studio, NYC June 1976
18 releases; 11 labels
Adelphi
Black Saint
Danola
Cadillac
Circle
hat ART
Hora
India Navigation
Marge
Palm
Red Record
Five releases on five labels as a sideman including first World Saxophone Quartet
Altura
Reality Unit Concepts
Douglas
Moers Music
Black Saint
The music is created out of practices of collective experimentation, a rejection of form in the Be Bop tradition, but with a strong emphasis on exploration of the instrument as a machine that produced sound.
Shout Song Wildflowers: The New York Loft Sessions 1976 Douglas 10
[recorded May 1976 at Studio Rivbea, NYC]
Quartet: David Murray (ts), Olu Dara (tp), Fred Hopkins (b), Stanley Crouch (d) Composed by: David Murray
The group is typical of Murray’s output featuring a piano-less quartet, and distinctly different roles from the usual idea of rhythm section and soloists.
The Wallflower series of CDs were set of recordings made at Sam Rivers’ loft space in Manhattan in 1976. They capture the music being made in these post-industrial spaces, where since the late 1950s musicians or arts collectives hired large, cheap spaces in old warehouses and factories and organised gigs where musicians could play together and experiment. The echoes of the after-hours jam sessions that Hawkins frequented in the 1940s, and where different generations of musicians played together is strong. But the lofts were controlled by musicians, who often worked, lived and slept there, and the cutting-contests of swing and Be Bop were replaced by large ensemble playing and multimedia performances. This was a key component of the infrastructure that brought creative musicians together and sustained their experiments economically.
We should also note the involvement of Stanley Crouch in the band. I pick up Crouch’s relationship between Murray at several points, but I should note here that Crouch had taught Murray at Pomona, and played drums with many times on the West coast. He moved to New York in the mid 1970s to pursue his interest in black cultural politics and journalism, and became a member of his Low Class Conspiracy band, and an advocate for Murray. He played drums on four of Murray’s early live recordings, and contributed compositions to Murray’s repertoire.
1976 Wildflowers Four
1976 Live at Peace Church
1977 Penthouse Jazz
1977 Holy Siege on Intrigue
Crouch tunes recorded by Murray:
Noteworthy Lady on Sur-Real Saxophone
Monica in Monk’s Window on Organic Saxophone
The treads of the black arts movement, New York Loft Jazz and European sustenance, and the commitment to a new aesthetic of music making, though, is best exemplified by the work of the World Saxophone Quartet, co-founded by Murray with sax plays of a generation older: Lake, Bluiett, and Hemphill (all of whom had all been members of BAG). Lake has suggested that the saxophone quartet unit grew out of “a situation in St Louis where we played solos or duos or trios with different combinations of instruments”, and the disbanding of the notion of a rhythm section. But it also clearly had its origins in Hemphill’s involvement in Anthony Braxton’s saxophone-only ensembles. Again, as their first live recording shows, free improvisation is the key strategy and dissonance a major product. However, the unit’s main pre-occupation is the sound of individual instruments – particularly the sounds and intensity of African American music from gospel, through honking R&B, and ‘flattened’ blues – and the relationship between different players, especially an emphasis on contrast, counter point. Although commentators tend to talk about this period in Murray’s career as one of “confrontational free-jazz” improvisation, composition and arrangement are important parts of his approach (Scaruffi).
The second WSQ record, along with Murray’s Interboogiology, also appeared on the Italian Black Saint record label. Murray’s relationship with the label was to define his next seven years of musical exploration. Jazz historian Piero Scaruffi has suggested that this latter record initiates a new period in Murray’s work, with an emphasis on composition. On Interboogiology he is still working in his then preferred format of a piano-less quartet, but the strong written themes and arrangements that had been apparent in many of his recordings become more central. He’d next develop this approach with larger ensembles.
Click here for Part Two
David Murray
Jazz trackback
He has worked with an impressively wide range of collaborators from within and outside the Jazz tradition. Today he is as likely to play and record with African, or Caribbean musicians, as he is with those who from one of the many US or European Jazz traditions. His playing is often seen as a classic case of ‘out’ improvisation, yet he draws substantially on the full history of Jazz in his recordings of compositions and themes. He has worked with a wide range of cult North American, European and Japanese independent jazz record labels, and is featured on major festival and concert circuit in many parts of the world. At the same time he is little known even inside the Jazz world.
His career raises many interesting questions about the Jazz musician’s relationship to innovation, and to the development of Jazz since the 1960s.
In this paper I want to explore where his musical imperatives derive from, and more importantly to connect Murray’s developing career and his musical explorations to the cultural philosophy and political economy of recording contracts and concert appearances that has sustained him financially. In doing so I seek to understand why Murray wants to explore the language of Jazz and other music, and how he is able to do so.
To do this I have analysed 120 of his key recordings and undertaken a historiography of his career. This is the first of a series of articles on Murray’s career.
Murray as a progressive musician
To achieve this I use Scott DeVeaux’s notion of the ‘Progressive musician’ that he proposes in his study of Coleman Hawkins and his relationship to the Be Bop musicians of the 1940s. I find DeVeaux’s approach to Jazz historiography exemplary. He argues for the study of Jazz history as an examination of its “‘disciplinary matrix’: the sum total of practices, values and commitments that define Jazz as a profession” (44). His analysis of Coleman is a blend of cultural practice and political economy.
Centrally I translate DeVeaux’s key research question from a study of the 1930s to the 1950s, into a study of the 1970s to 2000s.
“What does it mean for a young African-American man to pursue the career of professional Jazz musician in the last decades of the twentieth century? In particular, what did it mean for him to be progressive?” (paraphrasing DeVeaux, 45).
There are some interesting parallels between Hawkins and Murray.
• Hawkins set the standard for the tenor saxophone, and showed how it could be used for virtuoso performance; Murray explored its outer limits playing outside its conventional range.
• They both escaped what they saw as a restricted Jazz scene in New York to live in Paris and Northern Europe, playing with a diverse musicians and absorbing musical ideas from outside Jazz.
• They both played a pivotal role in constituting a new sense of what Jazz improvisation and group interaction was.
Unlike Murray, though, Hawkins achieved both critical and popular success. His recording of ‘Body and Soul’ was a commercial lucrative release, and a mainstay of black jukeboxes and white jazz aficionados’ record collections. It is also one of the most analysed of Jazz recordings.
Murray is very aware of Hawkins’ importance, and of his Body and Soul recording. The song is the most recorded piece by Murray [six times in my sample]. It was the first standard he recorded in 1978 when he produced a solo rendition, and while he played nearly 20 John Coltrane compositions, many tunes associated with other tenor players, and dozens of standards once or twice, he came back to the Body and Soul in 1983, and produced four versions of it in the early 1990s.
February 1978 solo live on Organic Saxophone [1978] Palm 31
September 1983 Quartet on Morning Song [1984] Black Saint
December 1990 Quartet as The Bob Thiele Collective on Sunrise Sunset [1992] Red Barron
May 1990 duo with pianist George Arvanitas on Tea for Two [1991]
April 1991 duo with pianist Aki Takase on Blue Monk [1991]
February 1993 Quartet with vocalist Taana Running on Body and Soul [1994]
In this later period Murray’s output is at its most eclectic, and by the middle of the decade he had moved to Paris, and began recording extensively with African and Caribbean musicians.
DeVeaux locates an idea of progress as central to African American culture of the later 19th century and well into the 20th. It is particularly important in the rhetoric of black self-help philosophy of African American leaders like Booker T Washington, where individual self improvement and communal collaboration were seen as the means through which the race could progress. Craig Werner has suggested that we can identify a Jazz impulse in African American society in which the past is remade into multiple possibilities. He cites Ralph Ellison’s notion of Jazz as a constant process of redefinition on three levels of individuality, community and tradition [Shadow and Act].
These are important ideas to understand Murray’s music and career, and his place in a wider culture and political economy.
To trace the “practices, values and commitments” that DeVeaux highlights I intend to divide Murray’s career broadly into four parts:
1. The 1970s characterised by Murray’s move from the West Coast world of college and Black Arts movements to New York’s loft scene and European festivals.
2. Starting in 1980 and focused on his output for the Italian Black Saint label, and his development of composition, his work with big bands and his engagement with the Jazz tradition to 1987
3. 1988 to 1995 and his output on DIW, Colombia, and Red Baron
4. Finally the last ten years, his recordings for Justin Time, his residence in Paris and his engagement with ethnomusicology
1. Black Arts Movement, Loft Jazz, European Festivals, and Small Independents
The standard Murray biography goes something like this.
Murray’s mother played piano and his father guitar. In his youth, Murray played music in church with his family. He was introduced to jazz while a student in the Berkeley school system, playing alto sax in a school band. When he was 13, he played in a local R&B and Rock groups. Hearing Sonny Rollins inspired Murray to switch from alto to tenor. He attended Pomona College, where he studied with a former trumpeter Bobby Bradford. Around this time, he was influenced by the writer Stanley Crouch. Murray moved to New York at the age of 20, during the city’s Loft Jazz era.
Those musical roots of gospel, R&B, and art Jazz were key to Murray’s whole development. By comparison with Hawkins who started as a journeyman dance musician in the 1920s, came to fame as a featured soloist in Swing bands of the 1930s, and achieved influence through his involvement with the New York Be Bop movement in the 1940s, Murray enjoyed a musical education of considerable freedom and privilege. By the 1970s Liberal Arts colleges like Pomona were playing host to significant black arts movements, with parallel community-based which grew out of the black power movement.
The best known is AACM in Chicago, but an important equivalent was to be found in BAG (Black Arts Group) in St Louis and other major cities. There were common threads to these black arts musicians: a strong emphasis on Afro-centricism in dress, imagery, inter-textuality of names; collaboration with visual and performing artists; a commitment to independent venues and record distribution; and often a stress on social and educational, as well as musical goals.
Often funded by art grants, and playing to progressive multi-cultural audiences, these groups created creative milieu in which experimentation was highly valued. Although initially locally-based in the US, there was a particular European enthusiasm for this collective Avant Guard, expressed through the programming in festivals and concerts and the release of recordings on small independent record labels.
Following in Hawkins’ footprints many of the leading members of these arts groups moved first to Europe, and then to New York where an alternative scene was developing in disused industrial buildings in Manhattan. This loft scene which drew Murray together with other key musicians from the Black Arts collectives from other major cities. Here they mixed with the earlier generation of free players who had followed the innovations of Coltrane, Coleman and Ayler.
Murray’s first recordings are strongly rooted in this Milieu. Almost all recorded live, in New York and Europe for small independent labels on single release contracts.
1976-79
Live
Studio Rivbea New York May 1976
The Ladies’ Fort New York June 1976
St. Marks Church New York 1976
International New Jazz Festival Moers June 1977
Bimhuis Amsterdam August 1977
Lower Manhattan Ocean Club New York December 1977
Unnamed Rouen January 1978
Theatre Mouffetard Paris February 1978
Studio
Blue Rock Studio, NYC June 1976
18 releases; 11 labels
Adelphi
Black Saint
Danola
Cadillac
Circle
hat ART
Hora
India Navigation
Marge
Palm
Red Record
Five releases on five labels as a sideman including first World Saxophone Quartet
Altura
Reality Unit Concepts
Douglas
Moers Music
Black Saint
The music is created out of practices of collective experimentation, a rejection of form in the Be Bop tradition, but with a strong emphasis on exploration of the instrument as a machine that produced sound.
Shout Song Wildflowers: The New York Loft Sessions 1976 Douglas 10
[recorded May 1976 at Studio Rivbea, NYC]
Quartet: David Murray (ts), Olu Dara (tp), Fred Hopkins (b), Stanley Crouch (d) Composed by: David Murray
The group is typical of Murray’s output featuring a piano-less quartet, and distinctly different roles from the usual idea of rhythm section and soloists.
The Wallflower series of CDs were set of recordings made at Sam Rivers’ loft space in Manhattan in 1976. They capture the music being made in these post-industrial spaces, where since the late 1950s musicians or arts collectives hired large, cheap spaces in old warehouses and factories and organised gigs where musicians could play together and experiment. The echoes of the after-hours jam sessions that Hawkins frequented in the 1940s, and where different generations of musicians played together is strong. But the lofts were controlled by musicians, who often worked, lived and slept there, and the cutting-contests of swing and Be Bop were replaced by large ensemble playing and multimedia performances. This was a key component of the infrastructure that brought creative musicians together and sustained their experiments economically.
We should also note the involvement of Stanley Crouch in the band. I pick up Crouch’s relationship between Murray at several points, but I should note here that Crouch had taught Murray at Pomona, and played drums with many times on the West coast. He moved to New York in the mid 1970s to pursue his interest in black cultural politics and journalism, and became a member of his Low Class Conspiracy band, and an advocate for Murray. He played drums on four of Murray’s early live recordings, and contributed compositions to Murray’s repertoire.
1976 Wildflowers Four
1976 Live at Peace Church
1977 Penthouse Jazz
1977 Holy Siege on Intrigue
Crouch tunes recorded by Murray:
Noteworthy Lady on Sur-Real Saxophone
Monica in Monk’s Window on Organic Saxophone
The treads of the black arts movement, New York Loft Jazz and European sustenance, and the commitment to a new aesthetic of music making, though, is best exemplified by the work of the World Saxophone Quartet, co-founded by Murray with sax plays of a generation older: Lake, Bluiett, and Hemphill (all of whom had all been members of BAG). Lake has suggested that the saxophone quartet unit grew out of “a situation in St Louis where we played solos or duos or trios with different combinations of instruments”, and the disbanding of the notion of a rhythm section. But it also clearly had its origins in Hemphill’s involvement in Anthony Braxton’s saxophone-only ensembles. Again, as their first live recording shows, free improvisation is the key strategy and dissonance a major product. However, the unit’s main pre-occupation is the sound of individual instruments – particularly the sounds and intensity of African American music from gospel, through honking R&B, and ‘flattened’ blues – and the relationship between different players, especially an emphasis on contrast, counter point. Although commentators tend to talk about this period in Murray’s career as one of “confrontational free-jazz” improvisation, composition and arrangement are important parts of his approach (Scaruffi).
The second WSQ record, along with Murray’s Interboogiology, also appeared on the Italian Black Saint record label. Murray’s relationship with the label was to define his next seven years of musical exploration. Jazz historian Piero Scaruffi has suggested that this latter record initiates a new period in Murray’s work, with an emphasis on composition. On Interboogiology he is still working in his then preferred format of a piano-less quartet, but the strong written themes and arrangements that had been apparent in many of his recordings become more central. He’d next develop this approach with larger ensembles.
Click here for Part Two
https://wallofsound.wordpress.com/2007/04/11/david-murray-part-two/
David Murray part two April 11, 2007
Posted by wallofsound inDavid Murray
Jazz trackback
2. Black Saint: towards composition, big bands and the tradition 1980 to 1987
While during 1975 to 1979 Murray had recorded in small groups, between 1980 and 87 as leader he recorded in large ensembles.
1975 to 1979 1980 and 87
Leader Leader Other
Solo 3 0 0
Duo 1 0 3
Quartet 5 1 1
Quintet 4 1 0
Septet 0 1 0
Octet 0 4 0
Big Band 0 2 0
Murray premiered the Big Band in July 1978 at New York’s Public Theatre, and the Octet in 1979 at the October festival. Key to this development was Murray’s new manager Kunle Mwanga who organised major musical projects in concert halls and festivals for Murray through to 1989.
Stanley Crouch’s essays in the Village Voice lionised the Manhattan Jazz underground to which Murray belonged. More importantly, though, he continued to provide an intellectual rationale for Murray’s music-making, and a paradigm through which it could be interpreted. He celebrated the way Murray’s associates were “commingling funk, avant-garde, and other Afro-diasporic forms” (Greg Tate 2007
http://www.villagevoice.com/specials/0543,50thetate,69326,31.html).
In sleeve notes he located Murray’s big bands experiments as steeped in the legacy of the Jazz tradition. In particular he notes the use of Parker’s counterpoint, Ellington’s harmonies as melodies, and Mingus’ hybridity, while avoiding being derivative or pretentious (Crouch 1980 sleeve notes to Ming).
Almost all the material on Murray’s recordings as leader during this period were self-compositions, the majority dramatic re-arrangements of pieces recorded before. Each an exploration of a particular musical theme rooted in the music’s past. Notable is his developing interest in variety in the use of rhythm. Waltzes, Latin rhythms, investigations of 3/4 time and of a-temporal suspensions are all prominent.
There’s a big contrast with his work as a sideman. He produced three records of duo work with piano players or percussionists. The former are interesting because much of his earlier work generally eschewed piano, but such duos were to become a key theme of his later recordings. The two key albums here are also notable because they cement Murray’s contact with the Japanese Disk Union record company that was to dominate his recorded output from 1987.
In these recordings the themes are usually far wider in source including compositions by the collaborator and some post-Bop standards.
Epistrophy Thelonious Monk
Naima John Coltrane
God Bless The Child Billy Holiday
The WSQ material moves from compositions dominated by Hemphill and Bluiett, to themed albums programmed around Duke Ellington, and R&B. The dramatic change coincides with WSQ’s signing to major label Electra.
Once can speculate that Disk Union and Electra wanted to extend the Murray’s and WSQ market by producing distinctive records with themes that would be widely recognised. The contrast with the freedom afforded by the Black Saint label is instructive. His new contracts did not become exclusive and Black Saint released six more records from Murray during the late 80s and 1990s.
3. DIW, Red Baron and Colombia 1988 to 1995
From 1988, though his output was substantially different. During this period most of his output as a leader is on the Disk Union DIW label, and Bob Thiele’s Red Baron label. Both were far better distributed in the US than the Black Saint material had been because both signed deals with Columbia records, then the leading US record company.
While noticeably different from the pre-1988 material, the records from the two labels were also very different.
The first four DIW records were recorded at a mammoth Quartet recording session in January 1988 and released in themed packages around romantic Jazz saxophone ballads and gospel music. The albums set two clear templates that – along with investigations of R&B – were to dominate Murray’s output for the next 18 years.
There’s also the first interest in African themes on Deep River, and a second exploration of a John Coltrane number. These would become important themes in 200 and beyond.
The Quartet again become Murray’s most common band format, although he did record further large ensembles.
The marketing of the DIW albums was impressive. They were beautifully designed CD releases featuring strong graphical work and cover photographs from Murray’s wife Ming Smith. Each was guided by a distinctive concept around an musical investigation of a particular genre from within the African American tradition of popular music.
However, these never seemed mannered. Murray has commented on the good working relationship he had with executive producer Kazunori Sugiyama, and Murray was clearly given freedom to record what he wanted. While the concepts of the CDs was clear in marketing terms the music was constantly innovative, deeply rooted in Murray’s own interests and backgrounds, and track names often reveal important personal qualities as they had during the Black Saint period.
The music Murray recorded fro Red Baron was less successful, and Murray has expressed frustration on occasions with Bob Thiele’s production. This is surprising as Thiele is probably best known for his support of John Coltrane at Impulse during his most experimental period, and Thiele has often said that he gave Coltrane complete freedom to record what he wanted when.
The Red Baron releases, however, seem to be led by their concept, rather than the music. The first recording with the label was, @@ enough, on a McCoy Tyner date (which itself followed a Quartet recording with Murray on DIW). His successive CDs had a range of themes, which no more eclectic than those on DIW, seem more determined by Thiele than Murray. Murray seems to have been unhappy with one of the CDs being released as The Bob Thiele Collective, and to have taken the biggest exception to one of the CDs being titled Jazzasorus Rex; issued the same year as the Jurassic Park film.
Nevertheless he seemed to sell well enough for the Columbia Portrait label to sign him for one release. The interest in time signatures continues with a Waltz and Samba tracks, and the investigation of Jazz’s past represented by Remembering Fats.
It was during this time that Murray fell out with Crouch, who began the his role as Wynton Marsalis booster with as much energy as he had once done for Murray. In fact Marsalis and Murray were often placed as polar positions in debates about the future of Jazz in the 1990s.
Marsalis has most often been connected with the idea of a Jazz cannon for repertory bands, prestigious roles in education and the grand bourgeoisie’s late embracing of Jazz as America’s classical music. Famously Marsalis is accused of wiping post-60s development in Jazz from the history books. By contrast, Murray has been seen as an advocate for innovation in Jazz; an embrace with other forms of popular music within a Jazz aesthetic, and with a seemingly unquenchable desire to play in new contexts and record the results.
However, Crouch’s role should reveal that the issues were far more complex. It won’t be a surprise to learn that I tend to find more interest in Murray’s explorations than in Marsalis’ neo-tradition repertory approach. However, in truth the two approaches are not as dissimilar as they are often made out to be. Both are rooted in important grasps of Jazz as performance, and as a tradition. In this they owe a lot intellectually to Albert Murray’s investigation of Jazz as a black musical form, and the ideas can bee seen starkly in the black arts movement from whence the Loft movement and collective improvisation came.
While Marsalis owed a considerable debt to the support of the Lincoln Centre, Murray also relied heavily on Arts foundation funding during these years. For example all Murray’s British tours during these years were part of the UK public arts infrastructure. His 1993 Octet tour was funded by the Arts Council’ Contemporary Music Network, and in the West Midlands all his early 1990s concerts were organised by Birmingham Jazz, taking place in arts venues.
Click here for Part Three
While during 1975 to 1979 Murray had recorded in small groups, between 1980 and 87 as leader he recorded in large ensembles.
1975 to 1979 1980 and 87
Leader Leader Other
Solo 3 0 0
Duo 1 0 3
Quartet 5 1 1
Quintet 4 1 0
Septet 0 1 0
Octet 0 4 0
Big Band 0 2 0
Murray premiered the Big Band in July 1978 at New York’s Public Theatre, and the Octet in 1979 at the October festival. Key to this development was Murray’s new manager Kunle Mwanga who organised major musical projects in concert halls and festivals for Murray through to 1989.
Stanley Crouch’s essays in the Village Voice lionised the Manhattan Jazz underground to which Murray belonged. More importantly, though, he continued to provide an intellectual rationale for Murray’s music-making, and a paradigm through which it could be interpreted. He celebrated the way Murray’s associates were “commingling funk, avant-garde, and other Afro-diasporic forms” (Greg Tate 2007
http://www.villagevoice.com/specials/0543,50thetate,69326,31.html).
In sleeve notes he located Murray’s big bands experiments as steeped in the legacy of the Jazz tradition. In particular he notes the use of Parker’s counterpoint, Ellington’s harmonies as melodies, and Mingus’ hybridity, while avoiding being derivative or pretentious (Crouch 1980 sleeve notes to Ming).
Almost all the material on Murray’s recordings as leader during this period were self-compositions, the majority dramatic re-arrangements of pieces recorded before. Each an exploration of a particular musical theme rooted in the music’s past. Notable is his developing interest in variety in the use of rhythm. Waltzes, Latin rhythms, investigations of 3/4 time and of a-temporal suspensions are all prominent.
There’s a big contrast with his work as a sideman. He produced three records of duo work with piano players or percussionists. The former are interesting because much of his earlier work generally eschewed piano, but such duos were to become a key theme of his later recordings. The two key albums here are also notable because they cement Murray’s contact with the Japanese Disk Union record company that was to dominate his recorded output from 1987.
In these recordings the themes are usually far wider in source including compositions by the collaborator and some post-Bop standards.
Epistrophy Thelonious Monk
Naima John Coltrane
God Bless The Child Billy Holiday
The WSQ material moves from compositions dominated by Hemphill and Bluiett, to themed albums programmed around Duke Ellington, and R&B. The dramatic change coincides with WSQ’s signing to major label Electra.
Once can speculate that Disk Union and Electra wanted to extend the Murray’s and WSQ market by producing distinctive records with themes that would be widely recognised. The contrast with the freedom afforded by the Black Saint label is instructive. His new contracts did not become exclusive and Black Saint released six more records from Murray during the late 80s and 1990s.
3. DIW, Red Baron and Colombia 1988 to 1995
From 1988, though his output was substantially different. During this period most of his output as a leader is on the Disk Union DIW label, and Bob Thiele’s Red Baron label. Both were far better distributed in the US than the Black Saint material had been because both signed deals with Columbia records, then the leading US record company.
While noticeably different from the pre-1988 material, the records from the two labels were also very different.
The first four DIW records were recorded at a mammoth Quartet recording session in January 1988 and released in themed packages around romantic Jazz saxophone ballads and gospel music. The albums set two clear templates that – along with investigations of R&B – were to dominate Murray’s output for the next 18 years.
There’s also the first interest in African themes on Deep River, and a second exploration of a John Coltrane number. These would become important themes in 200 and beyond.
The Quartet again become Murray’s most common band format, although he did record further large ensembles.
The marketing of the DIW albums was impressive. They were beautifully designed CD releases featuring strong graphical work and cover photographs from Murray’s wife Ming Smith. Each was guided by a distinctive concept around an musical investigation of a particular genre from within the African American tradition of popular music.
However, these never seemed mannered. Murray has commented on the good working relationship he had with executive producer Kazunori Sugiyama, and Murray was clearly given freedom to record what he wanted. While the concepts of the CDs was clear in marketing terms the music was constantly innovative, deeply rooted in Murray’s own interests and backgrounds, and track names often reveal important personal qualities as they had during the Black Saint period.
The music Murray recorded fro Red Baron was less successful, and Murray has expressed frustration on occasions with Bob Thiele’s production. This is surprising as Thiele is probably best known for his support of John Coltrane at Impulse during his most experimental period, and Thiele has often said that he gave Coltrane complete freedom to record what he wanted when.
The Red Baron releases, however, seem to be led by their concept, rather than the music. The first recording with the label was, @@ enough, on a McCoy Tyner date (which itself followed a Quartet recording with Murray on DIW). His successive CDs had a range of themes, which no more eclectic than those on DIW, seem more determined by Thiele than Murray. Murray seems to have been unhappy with one of the CDs being released as The Bob Thiele Collective, and to have taken the biggest exception to one of the CDs being titled Jazzasorus Rex; issued the same year as the Jurassic Park film.
Nevertheless he seemed to sell well enough for the Columbia Portrait label to sign him for one release. The interest in time signatures continues with a Waltz and Samba tracks, and the investigation of Jazz’s past represented by Remembering Fats.
It was during this time that Murray fell out with Crouch, who began the his role as Wynton Marsalis booster with as much energy as he had once done for Murray. In fact Marsalis and Murray were often placed as polar positions in debates about the future of Jazz in the 1990s.
Marsalis has most often been connected with the idea of a Jazz cannon for repertory bands, prestigious roles in education and the grand bourgeoisie’s late embracing of Jazz as America’s classical music. Famously Marsalis is accused of wiping post-60s development in Jazz from the history books. By contrast, Murray has been seen as an advocate for innovation in Jazz; an embrace with other forms of popular music within a Jazz aesthetic, and with a seemingly unquenchable desire to play in new contexts and record the results.
However, Crouch’s role should reveal that the issues were far more complex. It won’t be a surprise to learn that I tend to find more interest in Murray’s explorations than in Marsalis’ neo-tradition repertory approach. However, in truth the two approaches are not as dissimilar as they are often made out to be. Both are rooted in important grasps of Jazz as performance, and as a tradition. In this they owe a lot intellectually to Albert Murray’s investigation of Jazz as a black musical form, and the ideas can bee seen starkly in the black arts movement from whence the Loft movement and collective improvisation came.
While Marsalis owed a considerable debt to the support of the Lincoln Centre, Murray also relied heavily on Arts foundation funding during these years. For example all Murray’s British tours during these years were part of the UK public arts infrastructure. His 1993 Octet tour was funded by the Arts Council’ Contemporary Music Network, and in the West Midlands all his early 1990s concerts were organised by Birmingham Jazz, taking place in arts venues.
Click here for Part Three
https://wallofsound.wordpress.com/2007/04/17/david-murray-part-three/
David Murray part three April 17, 2007
Posted by wallofsound inJustin Time, Paris and Ethnomusicology 1996 to 2006
By 1996, though quite major changes had taken place in Murray’s professional and personal life. He changed record labels, moved to Paris and started a substantial musical journey in musical forms outside the jazz tradition.
His new label was the French Canadian Jazz independent Justin Time. His first contact here seems to have come through his work with Canadian pianist DD Jackson who joined his Big Band in the mid-1990s, and with whom Murray recorded a Justin Time CD in 1995. Both the WSQ and Murray as a leader signed with the label in 1996. The initial releases show Murray’s increasing interest in other musics of the African diaspora.
This interest is apparent much earlier in Murray’s career. Of course the Afro-centricism of the black arts movement had a profound influence, and long time collaborator, Kahil El’Zabar, used African percussion in many Murray records from the late 1980s. The influence of his African tours during the 1980s can be seen in the art work for his DIW CDs and some track names. He also seems to have been profoundly influenced by South African native and erstwhile Blue Note, Johnny Dyani, with whom he recorded many times.
However, the first major evidence for this interest is to be found in the WSQ 1990 recording with African drums played by American Chief Bey, who had first worked with Bluiett nine years earlier. In a 1995 release the WSQ played with three drummers, and recorded Murray’s Dakar Darkness reflecting on his trip to the slave coast of Senegal.
He had by now remarried for a third time, to Valerie Malot, French ethnomusicologists and concert promoter. They jointly formed 3D family which looks after all Murray’s tours and recording activities, as well as those of a range of Paris-based African and Caribbean musicians. Through a long series of CDs Murray has pursued his interests in different aspects of Afro-diasporic music. In interviews he seems to have never been happier. Extending his approach to collaborative work with a wider range of musicians, supported by a management company which places his work at the heart of a world music.
As earlier in his career, though, his Justin time contract isn’t exclusive. In the last ten years he has recorded over 15 CDs with other labels, covering a wide range of ensemble configurations and musical styles. His Justin Time records also cover an eclectic range. And in 2007 and he is revisiting his Black Saint recordings with a revitalised quartet.
Conclusions
Reading through interviews with Murray one is always struck by how interested he is to talk about the business of Jazz. Often more so than the music of Jazz.
He seems as acutely aware of the economics of the Jazz tradition as he is the music.
Re-reading the history of Coleman Hawkins, he always seemed somewhat at the mercy of recording companies and promoters, and seemed happier in the Jam sessions that professional musicians created as a creative space than in the commercial context that produced his living.
By contrast Murray seems determined to try and create a commercial context in which he can explore his musical muse.
His work seems to move in and out of a set of musical practices that we broadly call Jazz. Interestingly, though, he seems to have mainly by-passed the mainstream of major record labels, showing strong attachments to independent labels who offer his a high degree of musical freedom. At the same time he works with professional promoters and with public arts agencies, offering different personal interests up to different audiences.
The values he works with, though, seem to remain deeply rooted in the values of the black arts movement where he first established himself.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/14/arts/music/review-an-all-star-jazz-trio-explores-form-and-freedom.html?_r=0
Music
Review: An All-Star Jazz Trio Explores Form and Freedom
by NATE CHINEN
APRIL 13, 2016
New York Times
Murray, Allen & Carrington Power Trio
“Perfection”
(Motéma)
The longest track on “Perfection,” the debut album by a jazz trio with David Murray on tenor saxophone and bass clarinet, Geri Allen on piano and Terri Lyne Carrington on drums, clocks in at just over eight minutes, covering so much ground that it feels almost like an epic. Composed by Mr. Murray, it’s a swinging tune with a pensive yet intrepid melody, and a midsection of bristling abstraction. The title is playfully apt: “The David, Geri & Terri Show.”
Dynamic combustion is the core characteristic of this all-star trio, which first convened at the 2015 NYC Winter Jazzfest. Mr. Murray, 61, is an improviser of great, garrulous bluster, while Ms. Allen and Ms. Carrington, both in their 50s, have forged prominent careers more in line with the postbop mainstream.
For its official premiere, the track has reinforcements: Along with the trio, it features the bassist Charnett Moffett (a Coleman alumnus), the trombonist Craig Harris (a Murray confrere) and the trumpeter Wallace Roney Jr. (Ms. Allen’s son). Across the board, the performances are thrilling and taut, more celebration than elegy.
The same is true of the album’s other nods of tribute: a flowing elaboration on “Barbara Allen,” the traditional folk song, linked to the memory of the bassist Charlie Haden; “The Nurturer,” a soul ballad dedicated to the trumpeter and mentor Marcus Belgrave; and “For Fr. Peter O’Brien,” a springy invention inspired by the Jesuit priest who managed the pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams. Ms. Allen composed or arranged each of these, and the trio gives them a vital lift.
Elsewhere — on “Geri-Rigged,” by Ms. Carrington, for instance — the trio works with a firmly articulated rhythmic premise that gradually gives way to an expressionistic scrawl. The tension between form and freedom is obvious but never overstated, and the rapport within the trio is exceptionally strong. Mr. Murray, Ms. Allen and Ms. Carrington have cause, anyway, to consider a collective future beyond their current tour, which will bring them to Birdland from May 17 to 21.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/arts/music/david-murray-on-his-new-nat-king-cole-album.html
Music
Paying Tribute to a Jazz Legend, in Spanish This Time
by LARRY ROHTER
November 16, 2011
New York Times
In his musical career the jazz saxophonist David Murray has always been omnivorous, which helps explain why, after playing on more than 150 albums, he has finally turned his sights to the Nat King Cole repertory. But Mr. Murray’s taste can also be quirky, which is why his latest project focuses on a relatively obscure phase of Cole’s career: two albums that the singer and pianist recorded in Spanish in 1958 and 1962.
A result is “David Murray Cuban Ensemble Plays Nat King Cole en Español,” a new CD in which Mr. Murray, 56, has assembled a group of young Cuban musicians to play his reworked versions of old chestnuts like “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás” and “Cachito.” On Thursday Mr. Murray and a nine-piece band will perform selections from the album at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University.
In an interview after a recent rehearsal, Mr. Murray, who is black, said his reasons for undertaking the project were a mixture of the personal and the musical. Seeing a picture of Nat King Cole on the wall of Egrem Studios while in Havana several years ago, and talking about him with the Cuban singers Omara Portuondo and Isaac Delgado, jogged his memories of seeing Cole on television as a child.
“My parents were very religious people who didn’t particularly like anything that was jazz,” he said. “But they liked Nat King Cole because he was a positive image for black people, and that was what they wanted us to see. And to me he looked very cool and debonair in that tuxedo, with that trio of his. He was not only one of the first African-American guys on TV, he was also one of the first serious crossover artists with talent.”On the more personal side, Mr. Murray, who was born and reared in Oakland, Calif., but now divides his time between France and Portugal, said he also wanted to help his wife, Valerie Malot, and children explore their own heritage and pay them homage. Ms. Malot, who is also Mr. Murray’s manager and co-producer, is of mixed French and Spanish-Cuban descent, and the CD is dedicated to her mother, Maria Olga Duque Torres.
“We’ve done a lot of things where I go to try and find my roots in Africa,” Mr. Murray said, referring to albums like “Fo Deuk Revue” (1997) and “Gwotet” (2004), recorded with Senegalese ensembles. “But we have two kids together, and maybe she’s looking for her roots a little too. So that was her reason, and it became part of mine.”
The saxophonist and clarinetist Hamiet Bluiett, like Mr. Murray a founding member of the World Saxophone Quartet and with credentials in the jazz avant-garde, said he was not surprised to see his colleague take this direction. He accompanied Mr. Murray on a trip to Cuba a decade ago, where he said both men were inspired by the musical culture.
Nat King Cole “was not only one of the first African-American guys on TV, he was also one of the first serious crossover artists with talent,” said the jazz saxophonist David Murray. Credit Eric Michael Johnson for The New York Times
“Any musician who lives in New York for any length of time already has a Cuban or Latin influence on how he thinks or feels, but the level of musicianship once you get there is so high, the bands are so killing, that it’s ridiculous,” Mr. Bluiett said of the trip to Cuba. “David is someone who is prolific, always very, very busy, who would do five recording sessions a day if he could. So naturally we both got turned on to the process there and said to each other, ‘Wow, this is great.’ From then on it just grew and grew.”
On an early trip to Cuba Mr. Murray met the alto-saxophonist Román Filiu O’Reilly, now 39, who quickly concluded that “we were both drinking from the same well.” So when Mr. Murray decided to tackle the Nat King Cole project, Mr. Filiu, in addition to being offered the alto chair, was asked to assemble a group of young players who could keep up with Mr. Murray’s demanding arrangements.
“David’s way of playing is loose and free and always surprising, but he doesn’t lose the essence of Cuban music, and even if it may seem dissonant at times, it has its beauty,” Mr. Filiu said in a telephone interview. “His arrangement of a bolero or a cha-cha-cha can be daring and fresh, but the voicing of the instruments, the lines he writes for us to play, however challenging they may be, are perfectly in the tradition.”The Cuban ensemble has toured with Mr. Murray throughout Europe and in Latin America, both before and after recording the “Nat King Cole en Español” CD in Buenos Aires last year, with strings overdubbed in Portugal. But with some restrictions on the ability of Cuban musicians to travel still in place in the United States and Cuba, Mr. Murray will be performing at the Skirball Center with a New York-based group that includes several Cuban musicians.
The two Cole albums on which the project is based were recorded in Havana and then, after Fidel Castro took power in 1959, Los Angeles and Mexico City, drawing on a repertory that is largely Cuban and Mexican. Listening to the records, Mr. Murray, called “the most formidable tenor soloist of his generation” by the comprehensive Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings, was struck by how dated the original arrangements seemed.
“A lot of it sounded like the soundtrack for a bad B-movie, very Hollywood, so the first thing I had to figure out was what not to do,” he said. “The strings are too syrupy, the trumpets are too loud and the clave is not even there. So I had to go and reharmonize a lot of the songs and bring them into our century before I even did the arrangements.”
Mr. Murray, who early in his career played in R&B bands around San Francisco, also has a pop side that surfaces occasionally. In the early 1990s he sometimes played with the Grateful Dead, which led to his making a CD called “Dark Star” after Jerry Garcia’s death, and most recently he has been working with the neo-soul singer Macy Gray, whom he met this summer while both were involved in an Afro-pop project organized by Ahmir Thompson, known as Questlove, drummer for the Roots.
“He’s just a very accomplished musician who knows everything there is to know about orchestrating, plus he’s one of those people who seems to live and breathe music,” Ms. Gray said of Mr. Murray. “On the Afro-pop project I loved his arrangements: a specific blend of horns that he put together with a sound that I’d never heard before. So I wanted that on my new album,” devoted to covers of rock and hip-hop songs, “and whenever I do horns now, I’m going to send them his way.”
A version of this article appears in print on November 17, 2011, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Paying Tribute to a Jazz Legend, in Spanish This Time. Order Reprints| Today's Paper
Live Jazz at the Village Vangaurd w/David Murray:
Here the David Murray Quartet stretches the dynamic with John Hicks (piano), Fred Hopkins (bass) and Ed Blackwell (drums) at the Village Vangaurd circa 1987
David Murray Quartet Live at The Village Vanguard 1986:
Complete performance
David Murray - Tenor sax
Ed Blackwell- Drums
Fred Hopkins- bass
John Hicks - Piano
Tracklist:
1 Off Season
2 Lovers
3 Morning Song
4 Ming
5 Murray's Steps
6 Duet
David Murray -- 'Flowers for Albert' - 1976 [full album]:
3d Family · David Murray (Tenor saxophone) · Johnny Mbizo Dyani (Bass) · Andrew Cyrille (Drums):
David Murray Trio
Anthony Davis · David Murray (tenor saxophone) · George Lewis (Trombone)· Henry Threadgill (Alto saxophone) · Lawrence Butch Morris (cornet) · Olu Dara (trumpet) · Steve McCall (Drums) Wilber Morris (Bass)
David Murray--"The Fast Life"--David Murray Octet
from the 1980 album 'Ming' (Black Saint records); composition and arrangement by David Murray:
David Murray--"Dewey's Circle"--David Murray Octet
From the 1980 album 'Ming' (Black Saint Records):
Composition and arrangement by David Murray
Personnel:
- David Murray – tenor saxophone, bass clarinet
- Henry Threadgill – alto saxophone
- Olu Dara – trumpet
- Lawrence "Butch" Morris – cornet
- George Lewis – trombone
- Anthony Davis – piano
- Wilber Morris – bass
- Steve McCall – drums
David Murray - Black Saint Quartet (Chiasso 14 02 2009) 2:
David Murray Quartet--Live in Italy
Chiasso Jazz '09
Spazio Officina Chiasso 14 febbraio 2009
David Murray tenor bass-clarinet
Lafayette Gilchrist piano
Jaribu Shahid bass
Steven McCraven drums
David Murray & Black Saint Quartet - "Murray's Steps"--Live in concert in Germany, 2007:
David Murray, tenor saxophone
Lafayette Gilchrist, piano
Hamid Drake, drums
Jaribu Shahid, bass
Berlin 2007
DAVID MURRAY Cuban Ensemble plays "Nat King Cole en Espanol" feat. Omara Portuondo
With the Royal Flemish Orchestra at Salle Pleyel, Paris, December 21st 2010, Tres Palabras:
David Murray plays Nat King Cole en Español - "Quizas Quizas Quizas":
David Murray Cuban 10tet & The Royal Flemish Orchestra - Live @ Middelheim Jazz 2009
David Murray Infinity Quartet - Suite for Mehmet Uluğ I Babylon Performance:
Legend of neo- jazz, David Murray was the guest of Babylon with his band Infinity Quartet on March 25-26. David Murray played the suite that he composed in memory of Mehmet Uluğ for the first time in Babylon!
THIS SUITE FEATURES DAVID ON BASS CLARINET
David Murray Documentary '' I am a Jazz Man ''--2011
David Murray Documentary '' I am a Jazz Man '' Part 2:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Murray_(saxophonist)
David Murray (saxophonist)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| David Murray | |
|---|---|
David Murray at Cully Jazz festival 2011
|
|
| Background information | |
| Born | February 19, 1955 |
| Origin | Oakland, California, United States |
| Genres | |
| Instruments | |
| Years active | 1970s–present |
| Associated acts | World Saxophone Quartet |
David Murray (born February 19, 1955) is an American jazz musician who plays tenor saxophone and bass clarinet mainly. He has recorded prolifically for many record labels since the mid-1970s.[1]
Contents
Biography
Murray was born in Oakland, California, USA. He was initially influenced by free jazz musicians such as Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp. He gradually evolved a more diverse style in his playing and compositions. Murray set himself apart from most tenor players of his generation by not taking John Coltrane as his model, choosing instead to incorporate elements of mainstream players Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster and Paul Gonsalves into his mature style.[2] Despite this, he recorded a tribute to Coltrane, Octet Plays Trane, in 1999. He played a set with the Grateful Dead at a show on September 22, 1993, at Madison Square Garden in New York City. His 1996 tribute to the Grateful Dead, Dark Star, was also critically well received.[3]Murray was a founding member of the World Saxophone Quartet with Oliver Lake, Julius Hemphill and Hamiet Bluiett.[4] He has recorded or performed with musicians such as Henry Threadgill, James Blood Ulmer, Olu Dara, Tani Tabbal, Butch Morris, Donal Fox, McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, Sunny Murray (no relation), Ed Blackwell, Johnny Dyani, Fred Hopkins, and Steve McCall. David Murray's use of the circular breathing technique has enabled him to play astonishingly long phrases.[5]
He is currently living in Sines, Portugal, and participates yearly in its FMM Music festival.[citation needed]
Awards
- In 1980 David Murray was named Village Voice Musician of the Decade.
- Murray was honoured with the Bird Award[6] in 1986.
- He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989.[7]
- David Murray and his band earned a Grammy Award in 1989 in the Best Jazz Instrumental Group Performance category for Blues for Coltrane: A Tribute to John Coltrane.[8]
- In 1991 he was honoured with the Danish Jazzpar Prize.[9]
- Newsday named him Musician of the Year in 1993.[10]
Discography
Main article: David Murray discography
References
- Staff Writer. "Best of the best, David Murray, presents workshop, concerts in Bozeman". Bozeman Daily Chronicle, June 29, 2006. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
- Robert Palmer (October 27, 1982). "The Pop Life; David Murray Comes Into His Own". New York Times. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
- John Metzger. "Dark Star: The Music of the Grateful Dead". The Music Box Online. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
- Chris Kelsey, Allmusic. "World Saxophone Quartet". Answers.com. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
- Staff Writer. "Jazz Profiles - David Murray". BBC Radio 3 Jazz Profiles. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
- "Bird Awards winners 1985-2005". North Sea Jazz. Archived from the original on 2006-05-19. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
- Bettie Gabrielli. "JAZZ ARTISTS JON JANG & DAVID MURRAY IN CONCERT FEBRUARY 8 AT OBERLIN COLLEGE". Oberlin Online. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
- Jon Pareles - The New York Times. "David Murray Creole Project". Europe Jazz Network. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
- "The Jazzpar Prize". The Jazzpar Prize Official Website. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
- Staff Writer. "David Murray". Walker Art Center. Retrieved 2006-06-29.
External links
 | Wikimedia Commons has media related to David Murray (jazz). |
