Angelika Niescier with Tomeka Reid and Eliza Salem, October 30, 2025, JazzFest Berlin. Photo (c) Berliner Festspiele / Camille Blake
(The third of three subscriber posts on Subtackon this year’s Jazz Fest Berlin. The first two are longer essays on particular sets by Wadada Leo Smith and Vijay Iyer and by Pat Thomas, the third a more general overview of the festival.)
Angelika Niescier—Marta Sánchez—Tim Berne—David Murray—Elder Ones—London Jazz Composers Orchestra—Amalie Dahl—Fire! Orchestra—Mary Halvorson—Marc Ribot—Mopcut and MC Dälek—Sakinda Abdou—The Handover—Moabit Imaginarium—James Brandon Lewis—Cadences—Where we’re going.
Something like a festival, shapeed as it is by the organisational demands of a one-off occasion, by acts that it’s felt will draw an audience, by the circuit of prizes and names, and names, offers a cross-section of whatever is felt to be happening at a particular moment on time. It’s partly through festivals, which tend to be recorded and documented far more and far more officially than regular gigs, that we construct our history. (The archive of Jazzfest Berlin / the Berlin Jazztage is a particularly rich resource, as the documentation made available at last year’s festival revealed.) But what really happens is what happens on the ground, day to day: that which continues, in New York or Chicago or London or Berlin and beyond. What’s beyond the headline, what continues after the applause has ended. What we heard in Leo Smith or Pat Thomas, in the massed voices of larger and smaller groups around them, also sounds out round the margins of the big events, events that, in the current environment, are themselves no doubt in the margins, under threat of some kind. The sound must come from every angle.
As a subscriber post on Substack, this piece on a track from Adegoke Steve Colson’s and Iqua Colson’s album Triumph!, along with thoughts on survival, the outcast and, once more, the work of John Wieners.
Often, the poems that give consolation to others don’t always give consolation to the poet themselves, or the time of release is different. The renewal they offer wavers in its power. It saves some and not others, and sometimes it seems like it can save no one or do precisely nothing, but what matters is that it’s still there, if nothing else as testimony and record, as the poems of the martyrs in Gaza, as the poems of the shining martyrs Wieners saw in the queer poets of Boston, as in all the poems being written now, all the poems that have been written and that will be written, triumph of the outcasts, coming!
I come home to find out that Louis Moholo-Moholo died, this Friday 13th, listen to recordings of what I guess was his last band, with Alex Hawkins on piano, John Edwards on bass, the twin saxophones of Jason Yarde and Shabaka Hutchings, on a European tour in 2019.* Free jazz, yes, and music never more free, but freedom, entirely within melody, with the way melody is treated, as, for the first six minutes they do nothing but play the melody, over and over; however many variations are spread around it, how many patches of atonal fights and flurries, at any one point during that time, one person will be playing the melody. And this music above all the music that survives of the twentieth century, perhaps, because of the extremity of its conditions in which it emerged, because of the unshakeable faith and unceasing struggle of the movement with which it was already, whether at home or in exile, in solidarity, this has music has something about it of the quality I can't help name as anything other than truth: where hope is not just an alibi--the fear of facile hope as betrayal--but a present and necessary reality, a utopia and a reality all at once.
Moholo-Moholo's is music that knows life because it knows death, and isn't afraid to face up to that, but that finds a way, in itself, in the spirit it is, not in a spirit external to the music, but within the music, and from that, the music can move out into the world, into the (freedom) movement that made it and the movement it maintains. It was like that when I saw Abdullah Ibrahim last year, however old he was and however slowly he played. Each touch of each note weighted with grace. (And in the video we see Alex Hawkins lead the already 80 year old Moholo offstage, up from the drumkit, by the hand, as Ibrahim, too, was guided by the hand, to and from the stage.) So often, as we see in the music of those in their last years, the late performances of Cecil Taylor, say, or, Hal Singer, or whoever you care to name, music strains beyond the limits of a body that would slow down beyond its speed, spirit pushes at the limits where it would usually part from the body. For isn't that what sound and music is, or what we make of it, as it takes on a life of its own and survives its makers? And so often the most moving music played by Ibrahim, Moholo, the Blues Notes--Feza, Dyani, McGregor et al--was a record of loss: most movingly of all, the Blue Notes' records for Mongezi Feza, then later for Johnny Dyani, where the studio becomes a place for a gathering, a wake, a way to put to rest and release the spirit of the individual, collectivized, collectively held in the memory of song.
So, too, this music from 2019 is lament and celebration at once: it is never not both, the one that cannot exist without the other, their constant dialectic, their co-existence, that struggle of being alive. On Pule Phuto's piece 'Zanele', a Xhosa name meaning "they are enough", they are sufficient, the band hold their instruments and sing Zanele, Zanele, over the piano's gently rocking chords and the crisp crackle and splash of Moholo's snare and cymbals, his whole playing contained, wound-up tight and sharp, propelling the music's hugeness of heart and soaring song precisely through its containment. Music that always exists in and emerges into the condition of singing, the act of singing: to repeat the melody over and over, whether in instrument or to open our mouth and sing it, means we're still alive, we're still alive, we're still alive, and they are enough; and when the band emerge into 'You ain't gonna know me cos you think you know me' and play the melody over and over like a hymn, a benediction, all those words for which the usual designation of 'ballad' is entirely insufficient, for the second time watching the video I burst into tears. What is the point of anything without hope.
(*This is the 'Five Blokes' band that recorded Uplift the People(Ogun, 2018), but to really witness the band's joyous, flowing dynamic, you have to see the videos. Another full-length concert from a few days before the Bimhuis performance above took place at Church of Sound, with Shabaka Hutchings replaced by Byron Wallen and Steve Williamson is here: Part 1, Part 2)
Trumpeter Paul Shearsmith passed away a few days ago in Stuttgart, aged 78. One of those many presences on the UK free improvisation scene known to—and as—one of the faithful—his German Wikipedia page is extensive, his English Wikipedia page non-existent. So is cultural memory.
Shearsmith grew up in Tadcaster, Yorkshire, where his father was the local blacksmith. Influenced, in his words, by the BBC Sound Effects library, on leaving the Leeds School of Architecture and moving to London, he attended jazz gigs by Stan Tracey. Here, as he tells it, he would stage a weekly heckle. On the basis of this, he was invited by drummer John Stevens to attend his workshops, playing a battered pocket trumpet he’d bought second hand with Stevens and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble and with the London Musicians Collective at the Little Theatre Club in the West End and at the ICA back in the 1970s.
In the early ’80s, he travelled to Indonesia, where he came back with a ‘trompet’, a children’s instrument made from film canisters, a plastic tube, and a reed made from a balloon. Adapting this with a garden hose pipe as the ‘baliphone’, he met instrument-builder David Sawyer and through him joined the collaborative group Echo City with Guy Evans, Giles Leaman, Julia Farrington, Rob Mills, and Giles Perring. Starting in 1983 with a playground in Weaver’s Field in the East End, dubbed by the NME an ‘urban gamelan’, the group built what they called ‘sonic playgrounds,’ inventing tuned percussion instruments, made from old piping and other industrial and storage implements, including ‘batphones’, ‘fibrephones’ and ‘barrel drums’, and running workshops across the UK, Europe, East Asia and North America, including a collaboration with members of the Sun Ra Arkestra on the beach in the Isle of Jura, off the coast of Scotland. In Echo City’s work, music becomes sculpture, part of a public place and a participatory aesthetic. This is not about gigs or records, though they are a part of it, but about a more ongoing and more genuinely collective process. As Shearsmith put it: “I believe music belongs to everybody and can be made by anyone. Don’t let technique get in the way”.
Album art from Echo City’s second album, The Sound of Music (Some Bizarre, 1992)
These kind of public projects have always been a key part of UK improv, and, whether in Echo City or elsewhere, it was the spirit of collective playing that informed Shearsmith’s work, from his early work with Stevens to Maggie Nicols’s The Gathering, playing in the groups the Funking Poets and APE with the likes of saxophonist Big Mike Walter and poet Grassy Noel (for the latter, Shearsmith added fire extinguishers to his instrumental arsenal), or in the duo The Fujii with Japanese singer-guitarist, Koichi ‘Fuji’ Fujishima, who he met while the latter was busing in York, and latterly, with Ben Watson’s freewheeling AMM all stars.
Over the years, Shearsmith worked in an architecture firm, practiced photography, turned his car into a work of sculpture, played trombone, tubing, “tuned gas main”, and the baliphone in addition to his trusty pocket trumpet. Back in the day, I played in private a few times with Paul and the other members of KMAT, his trio with guitarist Keisuke Matsui and bassist Graham Makeachan, indefatigable host at the Hundred Years Gallery in Hoxton, where Shearsmith was a regular. It was soon after the election that saw Boris Johnson elected mayor of London: Shearsmith, he reported, had been playing in Ken Livingstone’s “battle bus”, blasting out socialist classics like ‘The Red Flag’. Around that time I remember anti-austerity protests, the student movement, the carnivalesque energies around the Hundred Years and its constellations, a warehouse near King’s Cross with a variant on Henry Threadgill’s Hubkaphone made out of old storage canisters for reels of film, a parade with bells through the streets of Hoxton organized by Mary Lemley in memory of Gabriel Hardisty-Miller, running into Grassy Noel going the other way up the street on a protest where, suddenly, everyone was going joyfully in every direction at once, and the street briefly reconfigured itself, as on protests it does, lines of poems, lines of music that refused to line up or be counted, out of time. And Paul Shearsmith’s pocket trumpet, piquant and strong in the wake of Don Cherry, blowing out little blasts of light.
Free improvisation in the UK and elsewhere developed as a social music and in this often unheralded way it continues, in venues like Hundred Years, the late lamented Iklectik, or the slightly more publicly-visible scene around Cafe Oto. It’s a music that's often politically connected to the traditions of left wing politics that have for decades been under steady attack from both the Right and the Labour party in its Blairite or Starmerite configurations: as well as the Livingstone Battle Bus, Shearsmith recorded an Iraq war protest song, and the Hundred Years Gallery has recently been raising money for the people of Gaza. Heard by small audiences, the music is not ‘popular’ by record industry terms—or the kinds of ‘focus groups’ by which Starmerite lurches to the right are justified—but it is more fundamentally than that a people’s music, one that, because it does not make money and is barely tied to market demands, aims at exploring only itself and its world, that draws, in spirit and sometimes in letter, on the traditions of protest in folk musics of various kinds, in free jazz, in experimental theatre or film and in the various experimental incarnations grouped under the headings of prog-rock or (post-)punk (Guy Evans of Van der Graaf Generator and Susie Honeyman of the Mekons both played in Echo City). The music stages a counter-history and a different way of being to all the various lies and erasures of memory surrounding it.
That was the world Paul Shearsmith believed in. That was the music that Paul Shearsmith made.
An essay I began a few years ago on N.H. Pritchard, II, is out now in African American Review, with thanks to Aileen Keenan and Nathan L. Grant. Here’s the abstract:
In 1967, Wilmer Lucas wrote that N. H. Pritchard’s poems “decompose the reader by sight and sound.” This essay follows Lucas’s prompt in several ways. It examines Pritchard’s early poetry in the context of the New York art scene and the Umbra Poets Workshop, outlining his development of the concept of “transrealism” and the subsequent visual reorganization of his work, before focusing on the sonic dimensions of his poetry, and suggesting that his approach ultimately led him toward silence. The conclusion emphasizes Pritchard’s legacy in the work of new generations of experimental musicians and poets and its continuing relevance today.
And, since I drafted the essay, Pritchard’s previously-unpublished “exploded haiku” The Mundus, versions of which I discuss in a section of the essay, has come out as a book from Primary Information, edited by Paul Stephens. Here’s my blurb.
Rumours of N.H. Pritchard’s long-lost poem, The Mundus began to surface a few years ago, summoning us to imagine the mystic, Black radical work to transform society. Pritchard’s was always a music of language, a chanting on the page, a sonic visualisation that troubles the edges of both poetry and music alike. He broke apart form at every level—word, letter, sentence, phrase—sounding out mutable mutating beauties and metamorphosing phonic propositions that resound into our present. It is a remarkable work by the standards of any time.
Meanwhile, over on the Jacket 2 website, Charles Bernstein has helpfully posted a funding letter Pritchard wrote in 1967, summarising the project, which expands, corrects and (hopefully) extends some of my guesses in the essay.
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Elsewhere...
A sequence published in the winter issue of Almost Island, with thanks to Mantra Mukim.
Reviews of the Donaueschinger Musiktage in the latest issues of The Wire (you can find also find a long versions in an earlier post on this blog) and the new Beam Splitter/Phil Minton album, along with a contribution to the magazine’s year-end reflections and charts.
And stay tuned for reprints of out-of-print titles from Materials, which should be here in the next couple of weeks (hopefully before the year is out)...
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And finally…
A few days ago, astonishing new footage of Albert Ayler was uploaded by Jay Korber to his Youtube channel: one ten-minute piece from Munich and one full set from Berlin, both filmed on a 1966 European tour featuring the three-front line of the Ayler brothers and violinist Michael Samson. What’s perhaps most striking about these, given Ayler’s reputation, is the amount of time spent playing melodies. There are relatively few sections of the ‘free’ improvisations for which Ayler was infamous: instead, medley, melody, the ‘folk’ element of the music are more pronounced, not in the somewhat constrained pop forms into which Ayler’s music attempted to fit on New Grass, but as a continuous stream of cadential, decorated, ornamented, amplified, reiterated, singing declaration.
As Peter Niklaus Wilson notes in the recently-translated biography Spirits Rejoice: Albert Ayler and his Message, the Ayler band had been touring Europe as part of a package tour organised by impresario George Wein, what bassist Bill Folwell called the “B tour” to the star turns of Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, Max Roach and Dave Brubeck. It was on this tour that what was for a time thought to be the only footage of Ayler was recorded at the London School of Economics for the BBC’s Jazz 625, tapes subsequently destroyed in a cull of old recordings (so does Britain value art). Samson recalls ecstatic response to the group’s music on some of the gigs from the tour, comparing their reception in the Netherlands and France to the Beatles, though this doesn’t seem to have applied to the West German gigs: the audience in the footage, respectable and be-suited, appear indifferent, if not hostile. Yet the music Ayler was making had been designed precisely to reach out, to create a collective experience whose call the audience seem on this occasion to have been unable to hear.
Wilson labels the period 1965 to 1968 as the transition from ‘free jazz’ to ‘universal music’, with melodic material less a “catapult theme” for improvisation than something which “take[s] on an unprecedented weight in the playing process - firstly, through their length (for they are now often relatively extended, multi-joint structures), secondly, through the chorus-like recurrence of thematic passages between the solos, thirdly, through the clear shortening of the improvisations”. Wilson sees this as “a populist quality Ayler consciously worked towards”—what Ayler described to Nat Hentoff in 1966 as “trying to get more form in the free form […] something […] that people can hum. […] I want to play songs like I used to sing when I was really small. Folk melodies that all the people would understand.”
Wilson also quotes Samson, who suggests that those melodies drew from Ayler’s past in the Baptist church, where communal participation through singing had a pride of place. Ayler’s extended songs were an attempt to create participation, ‘spiritual unity’ , to bridge a real or perceived gap with the audience in a collective experience (in the next stage in his music, he’d go further, adding words and singing himself, alongside musical-romantic partner Mary Maria Parks).
This was not an about-face, a betrayal of the abstract freedoms of Ghosts and Ayler’s earlier music—an accusation Ayler would face in response to the more overtly R&B-oriented New Grass—and nor does it invalidate or represent a progressive maturation from that earlier music. Rather, Ayler’s ‘free’ playing represents one dialectical outgrowth of the syncretic traditions of song his melodies reference: marching band music, church songs, the nursery rhymes or folk songs he’d heard as a child. The multiple overlapping lines of counterpoint or call and response concentrated to occur all at once, at the same time, in multiphonics and atonality, not so much tonality’s absence as its saturation, its density, all the keys at once. Likewise, the restatement of those formative elements, with the Ayler brothers playing counterpoint lines while Samson vigorously bows along in rough-toned obbligato, manifests an element that was latent in the free improvisations, just as those improvisations manifest an element that was latent in the kinds of melodies on which Ayler drew. As Wilson notes, Ayler is not improvising less than in the more abstract earlier phase, where those improvisations were clearly separated from brief opening melodies. Rather, his various decorative figures offer a nearly-continuous micro-improvised commentary on the melodic figures that, in more conventional jazz frames, would be understood as the ‘heads’ preceding the main business—the virtuosic improvised solo.
Noise is an extension of melody; melody contains within itself the sound of noise.
In his contemporaneous reception by the French press, Ayler was often positioned as either a kind of racialized musical primitive or a dadaist in the anarchic vein of European avant-gardists: either atavist revenant or European modernist, the actual, dialectic quality of his music was often not fully grasped. (Greg Pierrot gave a good paper on this at the International Surrealism conference in Paris last month.) This was, though, the changing same, the radical tradition: continuity and rupture, old-time religion and present-day revolution (spiritual, musical, or otherwise), the tiger’s leap into the past. So, while I refer to ‘folk’ qualities of this music—a term Ayler himself used—‘folk’ here, I think, stands as much for vernacular traditions outside or to the side of the developing pop vocabularies of the culture industry, enmeshed as those were with Cold War economic developments. It does so, not in the sense of the revivalism of the US folk movement, or indeed the European folk songs on which Ayler drew, for instance, for the melody of ‘Ghosts’, based as it is on the Swedish ‘Torparvisan (Little Farmer’s Song)’ (Gunde Johansson’s version is here), as a kind of musical romantic anti-capitalism. Rather, it’s shaped by the experience of modernity, as opposed to evoking a static, idealised image of a real or imagined past. It stands at once for particularity, for the personal memories of the songs first heard and sung that Ayler evokes in the Hentoff interview, that maternal transmission (recall W.E.B. Du Bois and his great-grandmother’s lullaby, his infant’s initiation into the sorrow songs), and for the collective dimension that—as Du Bois’ account of the sorrow songs reveals—those songs open onto. Like ‘jazz’ itself, it is syncretic, drawing in all the ear can hear: folk music not as backwater, tradition to the side, but as part of a relation to modernity, to the problems of the world, away from those labels that would limit, ‘folk’ as much as ‘jazz’. As Wilson writes: “From baroque to country music to the European avant-garde: in the abundance of these allusions Ayler’s music [of this period] really transcends every jazz idiom, no matter how broadly conceived, and makes one understand why Ayler shied away from the jazz label at the time, preferring to speak of the vision of a ‘universal music’”.
‘Ghosts’, said Don Cherry, “should become mankind’s National Anthem!” Nation within a nation, nation without a nation, internationale, outernationale. Spirits rejoice.
As a supplement to that piece, some of my favourite Sanders radio and video shots below.
--Sanders' feature on 'Naima' from Live at the Village Vanguard Again--or for, that matter, on 'Peace on Earth' from Live in Japan--is one of the great solos in jazz's recorded history, reinventing the idea of what a 'ballad' could be, of what a 'solo' could be, of what music could be. But, to me, this version of Strayhorn's 'Lush Life' from the Seattle residency that yielded Live in Seattle and the recently issued live version of A Love Supreme surpasses even those. During those brief years of collaboration before Coltrane's death, he and Sanders were plumbing the depths to reach the heights, their music a lived reinvention of the social, of the painful and beautiful movement towards the creation of a more just world. It calls to us still.
--I only wish there were more recordings of Sanders' work with Dave Burrell and Sonny Sharrock from around the time they made Tauhid. Burrell's pianism, with his ability to vamp for hours, his harmonic inventiveness, his unassuming and relentless energy, was one of the key spurs in Sanders' move from the open-ended frameworks of the late Coltrane groups to something more groove-driven, to one-chord vamps, a kind of free jazz minimalism that, in its emotional impact, is as maximal as anything ever recorded. The aspirations of the music move out--it's there in the track and album titles, but it's there in the music too, its endless open horizon. On Sanders' studio albums, his bands were often supplemented with additional instruments--the unforgettable use of Julius Watkins' french horn on Karma, of Leon Thomas's vocals on Jewels of Thought, of the extra horns and additional percussion on Summun Bukmun Umyun, Thembi, and the rest. Or the ensemble sound of Izipho Zam, criminally underrated, recorded for Strata-East but not released until four years later. In terms of live recordings, move forward a few years and there's Sanders' group with Lonnie Liston Smith, Sirone on bass, and Majeed Shabazz on drums, in bootlegs from the 1968 Antibes Jazz Festival, playing material from Tauhid, which had been recorded two years prior, and The Creator Has a Master Plan, which had yet to be released. Some film footage from the same performances gives some further visual cues into the band's interplay.
--From the Nice festival two years later, with Cecil McBee replacing Sirone and Jimmy Hopps replacing Shabazz and Lawrence Killian on percussion, a quintet version of the Lonnie Liston Smith arrangement of 'Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord' that appeared on Summun Bukmun Umyun, turning the traditional spiritual made famous by the Edwin Hawkins singers into an epic suite of changing moods and colours. Listen to the way Smith's solo, via simple scalar repetition, transforms as he keeps the sustain pedal depressed and the chords become denser and less consonant, moving into the thick intensity of Sanders' multiphonic re-entry, a passage of fearsome power with Sanders' saxophone accompanied by screams and hollers and Smith's piano chords transformed into part of a thicket of percussion, before things settle into McBee's bass solo. I've always found McBee's arco playing here and on the studio album completely astonishing, some of the most moving music I know.
--From the same year, Sanders and Archie Shepp in a dual-horn line-up with Alice Coltrane at a Carnegie Hall benefit concert, channelling the inside/outside feel of Coltrane's Ptah, the El Daoud, where the Shepp role was taken by Joe Henderson. The dual-horn line-up here is not just a reminder of John Coltrane's last band but, as that band itself was, of the "duelling tenors" sound popularized in the fifties, with the sounds of competition, cutting contests, jam sessions, rendered instead contributions to a conversation of collective rapture.
--As Sanders' moved 'inside' during the seventies and eighties, his quartet with John Hicks on piano, Curtis Lundy on bass, and Idris Muhammad on drums perfected a certain vein of post-Coltrane, post-bop playing. Analogies might be drawn to what David Murray was doing around the same time: endless streams of invention over changes, 'outside' passages deployed at moments of climax, a resolute swing, a fulsome romanticism. This long, long performance of 'Doktor Pitt' from--I believe, 1986, at the Fabrik club in Hamburg--exemplifies their particular energy.
--With McCoy Tyner at the Lugano Jazz Festival in 1985 playing 'For Tomorrow': wistful yet full of hope.
--In duo with John Hicks in Frankfurt in 1986, playing material from the quartet album Africa. I've always loved the version of Hicks' 'After the Morning' here. The word that springs to mind so often with Sanders' later career is serenity: this piece exemplifies that.
-- Ask the Ages was one of Sanders' great late-career albums. Sonny Sharrock had been one of his earliest compadres, and the music they made in this reunion, and attendant tour, was a kind of retrospective of all the styles they could play: swinging post-bop, the blue, free playing, ventures into rock. Live, the energy gets dialled up even more--this was, after all, a Sonny Sharrock who'd been playing with Peter Brötzmann in Last Exit for the past few years. But the music is wider, deeper, broader than that of Last Exit: the panorama of Black populist modernism and modernist populism that Sanders had mastered so well.
When Charlie Parker died, Ted Joans went around Greenwich Village writing "Bird Lives" on walls.
As a friend wrote to me on finding out the news of Sanders' passing: "Pharoah Sanders is immortal".
Image above: Grachan Moncur at New York's Vision Festival
Trombonist and composer Grachan Moncur, III, has passed away, the latest loss from the New Thing generation who came of age in the sixties, whose music opens up a world, worlds yet to be attained, makes them open and transparent, brilliant and glittering. Moncur’s work exemplifies the compositional—or, to put it more specifically, the structural: it’s ‘free’, in that it dispenses with, or at least treats as optional the logic of chord changes, but it’s not ‘energy music’; it’s focused on writing, on a composition as an atmosphere to be inhabited, rather than mere structure for blowing, but it’s infinitely more flexible than the stiffness of self-conscious ‘Third Stream’ experiments with the compositional. Brooding and filled with space, constructed on suspended drones or simple vamps, Moncur’s pieces are far from the stereotype of free jazz as energy, ecstasy, and volume. This is a music constructed around space, around absence, in which the careful, and often calculatedly askew placement of notes replaced a logic of momentum and virtuosity of bop, the functional drive of soul jazz, or the decorative restraint of Third Stream and cool jazz. Like the playing of Alan Shorter, of Andrew Hill, or of Mal Waldron—their interrupted vamps and riffs, their calculated mistakes and inscrutable equations—like the spaces between Thelonious Monk’s notes or the dissonant bur of his striking adjacent keys on the piano, Moncur’s music above all contains a core that refuses to reveal itself, an absent centre or central absence, a form of inner or hidden knowledge that initiates an inoculates and protects, that enables survival. Listening to Moncur, the ‘inside-outside’ binary has to be reconfigured: this is music that at one moves ‘out’, in terms of harmonic possibility and liberation from fixed changes—while by no means rejecting them per se—and moves ‘inward’, in the sense of a contemplative inwardness. Moncur, as William Parker would later say, looks for the centre of each note, looks for the silence around it, too: plays only what’s necessary, no filigree, no decoration. Destination...Out! proclaimed the title to a Jackie McLean album for which Moncur’s contributions were pivotal. But outness—McLean’s destination, Sun Ra’s outer space, Dolphy’s Out to Lunch—had its corollary in Moncur’s work in inner space—Inner Cry Blues, as the title to a later album had it.
Moncur came from the same thriving music scene in Newark, New Jersey, that produced the Shorter brothers, organist Larry Young, trumpeter Woody Shaw. He grew up in a musical family, of Caribbean heritage: his father, Grachan Moncur, II, played bass with swing ensemble The Savoy Sultans at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom; his mother’s best friend was Sarah Vaughan. Low sounds drew his ear: he began on cello, then switched to trombone. He began playing as a teenager, studied at a private musical school, and moved onto Juilliard before having to drop out due to high tuition fees, subsequently touring as Ray Charles’ music director for three years. Energetic hard bop groups were in vogue thanks to Art Blakey: fellow Newarker Wayne Shorter would join Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and push Blakey further out as he took his first steps towards participating in the reinvention of the music. Moving, like Blakey, Larry Young and other fellow Newarkers, to New York, Moncur’s first post-Ray Charles gig saw him part of a Blakey-like sextet, the Jazztet, co-led by Art Farmer and Benny Golson, Moncur contributing compositions including his trademark ‘Sonny’s Back’, a celebration of Sonny Rollins’ return to playing after his infamous retirement. Within the Jazztet, their music a balance between the sound and fury of Blakey and the more measured, distanced sounds of cool jazz, Moncur can be heard finding his voice: the trombone precise and limber, in the manner of J.J. Johnson, but with a pensive openness to it even at higher tempi.
The Jazztet had offered efficient, pleasing post-bop—a kind of synthesis of existing trends which offered structure and balance. The real breakthrough, however, came when he joined forces with altoist Jackie McLean with whom he’d played as a teenager sitting in with touring groups in Newark. McLean, of an earlier generation, was coming out of bebop into freer-influenced playing and Moncur was there with him. In 1963, they recorded three albums together: One Step Beyond and Destination...Out appeared under McLean’s name, Evolution under Moncur’s own. To this day there is nothing quite like these albums. As well as its more profitable line in soul jazz and boogaloo stylings, Blue Note Records had become the home for what would be known as ‘free-bop’ or ‘inside-outside’ playing: Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch, Andrew Hill’s Black Fire and Point of Departure, the first records of the teenage Tony Williams, the mid-sixties work of Larry Young. This music took an emotional quality found both in cool jazz and hard bop—the melancholic, even mordant sounds of a McLean or a Mal Waldron, in which melodrama and emotional insularity are each other’s mirror reflections, the astringent manoeuvres of a Sonny Rollins—added the spaciousness of Thelonious Monk, and went somewhere else again. But it wasn’t so much a synthesis of trends as an opened fissure in a world of certainty, genre, categorisation—a world suggested even by the coordinates of names and references I’ve just outlined. It’s a music that lends itself to adjectives: brooding, melancholic, mysterious, even minimalist. Such work didn’t oppose bop, didn’t oppose cool jazz, though it went beyond the limitations into which both sets of stylings had arguably by this period moved; likewise, it supplemented and contrasted the more ecstatic stylings of the post-Ayler continuum as a necessary undercurrent, sidestepping down an alternative path, though deriving from the same source.
At the turn of the decade, Ornette Coleman had removed the piano, opening up the harmonic possibilities beyond the changes; McLean and Moncur replaced piano with vibraphone, its combination of shimmering sustain and percussive attack, in the hands of Bobby Hutcherson, offering another set of possibilities: a cushioning and probing at once rhythmic as harmonic or melodic, and a timbre at once crisper and more ambiguously floating than that of the piano. One Step Beyond—for which I named a student radio show a decade or so ago—has two compositions apiece by McLean and Moncur. McLean’s ‘Saturday and Sunday’ and ‘Blue Rondo’ suggest one vibe—exploratory, cool, open—Moncur’s ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Ghost Town’ another: the clipped medium temp of ‘Frankenstein’, a kind of swinging march or lope towards the unknown, ‘Ghost Town’ radically slowed, inward, lugubrious, sinister. A simple descending scale, blown in Moncur’s attack-free legato over Hutcherson’s vibratoed vibraphone descends to a bass burr or leaps up an octave in a kind of contained panic. Eddie Khan’s bass carries the rhythmic weight, Tony Williams’ drums are barely there: before the tempo shift for McLean’s oddly jaunty solo, he offers little more than single cymbal strokes, a playing conspicuous by the absences its leaves as the presence it fills.
On Destination....Out, recorded at the year’s end, all but one of the tracks—Mclean’s dedication to Kahlil Gibran, ‘Kahlil the Prophet’—are by Moncur: ‘Love and Hate’ opens the album, followed by ‘Esoteric’, and closing off with ‘Riff Raff’, a piece he’d play onstage in the production of James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie. ‘Love and Hate’ remains to this listener perhaps the group’s greatest ever recording, a lengthy melody played with exquisite slowness over a simple chordal figure in vibraphone, the spacious setting allowing the contrast in styles between the two horns to reveal itself to the full. Moncur plays the melody first, from the core of its inward focus, before McLean’s alto produces a sour blaze of light: inside-outside, shadow-light, chiaroscuro. ‘Esoteric’ is more self-consciously maze-like, something from The Twilight Zone, ‘Riff Raff’ jaunty, defiant, swinging, its march-style dynamics suggesting the lope of ‘Frankenstein’ or Andrew Hill’s ‘Les Noirs Marchant’. The following year, the piece would make its way to the stage as part of Moncur’s contribution to James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie, on which more presently.
Evolution was Moncur’s first record under his own name, adding Lee Morgan to the basic quintet format. It’s an album of two halves: misterioso tone pictures, in the first half, a move somewhat closer to post-bop in the second. The opener, ‘Air Raid’ is not exactly programmatic, despite its title: the vibraphone trills with which it opens suggesting a generalized figure of suspension, waiting, pause, over which Moncur blows inscrutable truths in light-dark, dialectical relation to the B-section’s double-time swing. ‘Evolution’—its title suggesting Mingus’ tone poem ‘Pithecanthropus Erectus’, on which McLean had participated the previous decade—opens with droning, gently dissonant held notes punctuated by more suppressed martial rolls on the snare; the sound of the three horns getting inside the sound, interrogating what ensemble sounds like. McLean comes in over the top, somewhere between preaching and questioning; by the time Moncur’s solo comes round a few minutes later, it’s unclear if what’s offered is consolation, desolation, or some other affect entirely. The other pole comes on the closing track, the joyously sideways march of ‘Monk in Wonderland’: through the looking glass, down the rabbit hole, bop surrealism as cohesion, moving ahead, together.
The feel of Moncur’s music at this time is suggested by the titles to his piece—‘The Intellect’, Gnostic’, ‘Nomadic’, ‘Esoteric’: an intellectual otherness, a pursuit of knowledge by other means, in other directions, Some Other Stuff. This is a music that moves between places without fixed abode, the mind wandering, errant and introspective, moving in to go out. Monk had opened up the spaces in the music with his sparsely placed notes and pungent dissonances; players like Moncur followed further down that route; tempos were often slow, notes placed into the space like stones in a rock garden, in expansively condensed dramas of scale and shade whose contours were, deliberately, closed to the fetishized world of performance and display. This music refused to let out all its secrets; this was the ‘cool’ that had given the name to ‘cool jazz’ but unlike the stereotyped image of tragic glamour associated with the likes of white musicians such as Chet Baker, this was about a kind of strength rather than a performed weakness, a quiet resolve and inward satisfaction; the inwardness, as Moncur suggests in the liner notes to Some Other Stuff, necessary to survive in the city, on the move; but also a space of discovery, of an alternative—perhaps even utopian—to society as it was and is currently constituted. In this time of struggle, musical and political ,people would need all their inner resources as well as their external ones in order to survive. But, despite its introspection, it was also a music about communication. Moncur perhaps worked best with a more exuberant musicians to play off: the telepathic interplay and contrast between Moncur and the sweet-sharp alto of Jackie McLean; or, later, his contrast to Roswell Rudd in Archie Shepp’s band. Moncur’s music of this period was so effective because the musicians he played with were equally interested in opening up the idea of how a jazz group worked, of the lines between ‘frontline’ and ‘rhythm section’, of how you built space, constructed narrative, moved from straight line to ellipsis.
In April 1964, Moncur III took an acting job in the Broadway production of James Baldwin’s provocative and today neglected play Blues for Mister Charlie. The acting gig in the three-hour production meant that he could use the time between his appearances to go backstage and rehearse the pieces he’d written for an upcoming studio session for Blue Note, the results of which would be released the following year as the album Some Other Stuff. Moncur also played an important role in the play, serving as understudy for minor parts, and playing a townsperson who delivered a solo performance on trombone. An interview feature in Down Beat early the following year fills in the details:
“When I got the call to audition,” he said, “my emotions were mixed—a jazz musician, being confronted with a situation on the Broadway stage. I assumed that I’d have to play something ‘stiff’ for the audition, but to my amazement, they wanted to hear my own music. I played for [director] Burgess Meredith, and he was quite receptive. First I played Frankenstein and laid back a little...He liked it but asked to hear more. When I played Riff Raff, I really opened up, and he was gassed...I had expected a stiff, professional job—nothing more. As it turned out, my judgment couldn’t have been more in error [...] The show really involved me and became my most serious obligation” [...]
Underlying almost all Moncur’s reflections one notices an almost compulsive need to come to grips with the everyday world. For this the tragic insight of Baldwin's play served as fertile ground. The challenge to create music about a deranged social action became more than a mere mechanical exercise; it had a therapeutic effect.
“Blues for Mr. Charlie was a demanding job because I was playing alone,” Moncur said. “If I goofed, there was no rhythm section to pick me up. I had to blend with the mood and pitch of the actors—every nuance—every inflection.
When the theatre was empty, I would go there and practice. I’d try to project my tone to every point in the house—inch by inch. The acoustics were my only support, and I had to know every phase of the reverberation... The mood of the stage was always changing, and if I wasn’t absolutely flexible, the whole performance could be ruined. If you don’t think that’s a responsibility, try it.”
[‘Flexible Grachan Moncur’, Down Beat, Jan 28, 1965: 15]
This aloneness suggests something of Moncur’s music: music as reflective supplement to the social action dramatized on the stage in the next-door theatre, honed and sharpened within the sound-proof space of the rehearsal room, constructing spaces for and around itself. The play itself opens with the sound of mourning from the church, Baldwin writing, in his words, to the accompaniment of “my black ancestors, who evolved the sorrow songs, the blues and jazz, and created an entirely new idiom in an overwhelmingly hostile place”. Songs from Moncur’s former employer Ray Charles and Rufus Thomas played from a jukebox, along with Folkways recordings of work songs; Moncur played onstage as a kind of choric figure, his music swelling underneath the memories of the central, martyred Richard, and his love for the music he plays. The music speaks for what cannot be spoken, the trauma of memory and the possibility of future action. Black music here is memory and defiance; communal repository, the “mighty witness” that enabled Baldwin to find a new language befitting he demands of his first play.
No recordings exist of the 1964 staging, though a playbill notes that he played the pieces ‘Riff Raff’ and the otherwise unrecorded ‘Carissima’. We can, however, hear the record date for which he rehearsed. Though often neglected in comparison to the McLean collaborations, Some Other Stuff may turn out to be Moncur’s greatest work. As Moncur later told Adam Shatz:
“That whole record was inspired by the hard times I was having in New York. I’d just fallen out with the first young lady I’d met in New York, and I’d moved out of my apartment in the Diplomat Hotel opposite Town Hall, which was the biggest mistake I ever made since I had a room there with a private bath and telephone for only $27 a week [...] I was a nomad after losing my room, and I was a gnostic because I had to survive in the streets by my own wits.’”
The Down Beat profile commented on Moncur’s combination of “free acoustical structure”, with “specific harmonic design” as “an intimate extension into a new language”, and Some Other Stuff marked another step beyond even the music of the previous year. Blues for Mister Charlie marked a new departure for Baldwin—a turn to the public environment of the stage, influenced by his personal grief and fury at the murders of Medgar Evers and Emmett Till and by changing political currents. So, too, Moncur would soon participate in a wave of New Music that drew on but extended the music of bebop, often in avowed connection to political militancy. As well as that intellectual otherness I’ve named above, the names of Moncur’s pieces—‘Frankenstein’, ‘Riff Raf,’ ‘Space Spy, ‘New Africa’—suggest the confluence of a working-class identity and a conscious ‘weirdness’ or ‘outness’, or sense of dread, that Amiri Baraka noted as a key propensity in be-bop, and that also characterises the work of fellow Newark Alan Shorter, of Sun Ra, Earl Freeman, and many others. The pieces recorded on Some Other Stuff—‘Nomadic’, named for Moncur’s shifting housing situation, and ‘Gnostic’, the secret knowledge required to survive on the street—suggest at once a personal, introspective language and a common, classed experience. The ensemble might seem more conventional than that on the McLean records, with Hutcherson replaced by Herbie Hancock, but the album in fact radically extends their sense of space, in large part due to the astonishing flexibility of Tony Williams—then in his avant-garde phase, thanks to early work in Boston with Sam Rivers—and the openness of Hancock and Wayne Shorter, whose proclivity for free playing has gone too little remarked in surveys of his career. ‘Gnostic’, as Don Heckman’s liners note, “eliminated a pulsating meter”, Moncur’s questioning melodic fragments answered by doomy unison figures with Shorter’s tenor doubled by Hancock’s left hand as his right maintains a constant tolling, in a kind of desolate version of call and response. It’s an astonishing piece: a music that could go anywhere, in which contemplation also means expansion, a world in a grain of sand. ‘Thandiwa’ gestures toward new-found Afrocentricity, taking its name from Bantu language: Moncur’s jaunty, walking-marching pieces are given a sharp, joyful twist, ironized yet at peace. The solos invariably play with that melodic earworm; Shorter’s sharp keens and caresses, Moncur’s melodic musings, Hancock’s swirling triplets and single line, notes opening out like strings of pearls, Cecil McBee elegant and to the point. Opening the second side, ‘The Twins’ plays off a single chord: like Shorter’s later ‘Schizophrenia’, it plays with mirroring, doubleness, dialectic perhaps. Along with ‘Nomadic’—which predates Miles Davis’ ‘Nefertiti’ in serving as a feature for Williams’ drums—the focus here is on rhythm: not the propulsive, Afro-Cuban inflections of a Blakey or a Roach, but a kind of thinned-out, clipped maintenance of a constant tension. Hancock’s chords on ‘The Twins’ suggest the harmonic vocabulary of his own neglected Inventions and Dimensions; McBee, who at periods plays repeated notes in a high register, extends his bass like a high- or a live-wire. Rather than resolution, the point is a constant opening: to inhabit the space of the in-between, up and down, side to side, to sustain a dissonance and see where it goes, remain in the looping ambit of a rhythm; single lines, single notes, a sparse dialogue, an enigmatic conversation of elliptical exchange and give and take.
Moncur was not overtly political as some of his peers, but had at least some involvement in the emergent Black Arts Movement activities of fellow Newarker Amiri Baraka. In March 1965, he led a group at New York’s The Village Gate, as part of a benefit concert for the newly-founded Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BART/S): also on the bill were Sun Ra, Betty Carter, the groups of John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, and Charles Tolliver. One track per group was included on the original Impulse! Records release entitled The New Wave in Jazz, Moncur’s entitled ‘Blue Free’; a second, much-longer piece, ‘The Intellect’, was first released on the Impulse double LP The New Breed: The Dedication Series Vol. VIII: Cecil Taylor/Charles Tolliver/Grachan Moncur/Archie Shepp (1978). To my knowledge, no other recordings of this group exist: the combined tracks, recorded in impeccable sound, represent almost a lost album. In some ways, we might see it as representing the ultimate stage of the ‘introverted’ tendency in Moncur’s playing represented, say, by the piece ‘Gnostic’ on Some Other Stuff: a hidden knowledge found deep inside the self through a press of isolation and contemplation, a defensive retreat into the self that is also a social affirmation of what it takes to survive in tight spaces and what expansive resources can be found there. Moncur’s music is the still centre of the swirl of sound around it: Ra’s Arkestra, entering its most experimental phase; Coltrane and the New Thing saxophonists; the life-force of Betty Carter’s post-bop vocal extensions. ‘The Intellect’ lasts over twenty minutes, and throughout is extremely slow, grave, engraved: a pause, an interlude, a call to arms, to peace, or to the abyss. With Cecil McBee spending much of the piece ruminative arco lines, Joe Chambers’ drums are often barely there, a perpetual flutter on cymbals with brushes like a kind of tremulous breathing. Bobby Hutcherson’s vibes offer a crisp counter-commentary, acidic and icy or shimmeringly lyrical, lights emerging from the haze; and Moncur solos with a sense of space rarely heard until the “silences big as a table” of the AACM, each note—often the same note repeated—considered from every angle, every possibility, before being sounded out again; like Coltrane’s polyvalent ‘sheets of sound’ but with the additional notes shorn away.The combination of a kind of static or stasis, of inscrutable gloom or wisdom, of brooding introspection—not the romantic openness or blueness of the traditional ballad, but something deeper, darker, existentially freighted and inscrutable, as if conveying or searching for some hidden meaning lost as soon as it’s uttered--as when the audience begin applauding too early, at least a minute before Moncur’s restatement of the main theme takes things out with the beautiful, solemn, terrible pace of a glacier; the soloist playing as if speaking alone, yet always in conversational tandem with the other musicians—it refuses to be anything other than it is.
“These musicians change what is given and hopefully understood. What the normal feeling of adventure is [...] show you the music is changing before yr very ears,” wrote Amiri Baraka in the liner notes. Steve Young, music co-ordinator at BARTS, was more dramatic. For Young, the music conjured up:
“the lands of Dada-Surreal a la Harlem, South Philly and dark Georgia nights after sundown, night-time Mau Mau attacks, shadowy figures out of flying saucers and music of the spheres [...] This music, even though it speaks of horrible and frightening things, speaks at the same time so perfectly about the heart and to the heart. This music, at the same time it contains pain and anger and hope, contains a vision of a better world yet beyond the present and is some of the most beautiful ever to come out of men’s soul or out of that form of expression called Jazz.”
Following the Village Gate Benefit, Baraka remembered Moncur as one of the musicians, alongside Coltrane, Ayler, Ra, and McLean, who participated in the outdoor music programme the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School ran in Harlem that summer, in which the musicians would “play in playgrounds, housing projects, parks, vacant lots, along with four other trucks we sent out Summer of 65, carrying Poetry, Drama, Graphic Arts, Dance into the Harlem Community”. Moncur himself was not politically outspoken, but his next major collaborator was amongst the most politically outspoken of all the New Thing musicians: Archie Shepp. From around 1966 onwards, Moncur formed Archie Shepp’s phenomenal two-trombone band alongside Roswell Rudd: Rudd extroverted, satirical, Moncur a brooding heart at the centre of the storm. The albums from this period, with studio ensembles of various sizes, are unparalleled—Mama Too Tight, The Way Ahead—but it’s the live album from a European tour with a disgruntled Miles Davis, later released as One for the Trane: Life [sic] at The Donauschingen Music Festival where the music really takes off. (Radio broadcast recordings also exist of a gig in Rotterdam the same month, October, 1967, and a December gig in France, released as Freedom on a 1991 bootleg).
While Shepp’s early work with Bill Dixon and the New York Contemporary Five emphasized sparse, Ornette Coleman-style heads and improvisations, exacerbated by the absence of chordal instrument, and his work with Bobby Hutcherson on New Thing at Newport and On This Night imparted a kind of sardonic cool to his flurries, his new music, likely under the influence of Roswell Rudd, now turned towards timbres more reminiscent of pre-swing jazz than of bop. The band’s key feature was its unusual two-trombone timbre—Rudd’s raucous upper-register blares contrasting with Moncur’s propensity for dark-toned, melancholic and menacing shades—and for its suite-like form, as Sousa marches, blues and standards emerged and disappeared from extended improvisations in long pieces that flowed without a break. Shepp later recalled the kinds of reception the band encountered.
"We performed [...] one time in Paris at a big hall called the Salle Pleyel, where we followed Miles Davis. Now, Miles had gotten a standing ovation. This was in 1967, [soon] before the student rebellion in Paris. And so we came on, and we were shocking to look at: Roswell was wearing a baseball cap; I was wearing a dashiki. And there was this explosion of sound, cacophonous, and we only played one song, one long piece for about an hour and a half. [...]
When we finished, contrary to Miles, there was an outcry of boos – oh, it was terrible. But up in the balcony — where all the young people were seated, in the cheap seats — everyone was cheering. So there was a standoff for about ten minutes between the boos and the cheers. And finally I was asked to do an encore; it was amazing. And the following year they had that student rebellion, so I guess it was an indication of things to come."
Moncur in rehearsal with Archie Shepp, 1966. Photograph by Guy Kopelowicz.
In the summer of 1969, Moncur accompanied Shepp to the more conducive environment of the Pan African Festival in Algiers. Anticipating the trip, Moncur had written a piece entitled ‘New Africa’, which Shepp had recorded for an expanded group that February. Though the recordings would not be issued for another five years—eventually appearing on the unjustly-neglected Kwanza—they’re among Shepp’s finest, Moncur’s enormous spaces turned to the expanded future so many saw unfolding on the African continent, calling across to those other cities of Algiers from the inner cry of New York’s inner city with clarion certainty and turbulent purpose. In Algiers, Moncur played with Touareg musicians, on the streets and on a boxing ring converted into a stage: though he can often barely be heard on the lo-fi recordings of Live at the PanAfrican Festival, the experience was crucial to all involved. Interviewed by Algerian newspaper El Moudjahid, Shepp affirms jazz as a weapon in the popular struggle. For Moncur, though, music is just music. “Music and politics are two very different things. Music is spiritual, politics is, if you like, material. There may be some rapport between them, but they are two distinct things”. (My translation) Afrocentricity and a wide-open experimentation both the atmosphere of Algiers and of post-May ’68 Paris nonetheless suffuses the recordings the members of Shepp’s group would make for BYG Records on departing Algiers. Recording everyone and everything, while hardly paying anyone, the BYG sessions are an invaluable document, despite the business practices of the label’s owners. Moncur appears amidst the dense ensemble textures of Alan Silva’s Luna Surface and Dave Burrell’s Echo, two of the loudest free jazz recordings ever made; by contrast, his featured role on Burrell’s La Vie de Boheme, an instrumental adaptation of Puccini’s opera, sees his trombone replaces operatic voices with a kind of measured, mournful cool, and contains perhaps the sweetest playing of his career.
The two albums recorded under his own name are fresh takes on the introspective spaces from earlier in the decade. For the first of the sessions, Moncur’s New Africa, three members of the Algiers quintet—Moncur, Silva and Burrell—are joined by Andrew Cyrille and Roscoe Mitchell, with Shepp appearing on the final track. The pieces tend to operate on vamps, repeating figures, slowly pulsing ostinatos, over which Moncur teases out and develop simple, leisurely melodies, their cast suggesting something of the various ‘folk’ musics he might have heard in Paris or Algiers. His second BYG album, Aco Dei De Madrugada (One Morning I Waked Up Very Early), would indeed, feature Brazilian singer/pianist Fernando Martins and drummer Nelson Serra De Castro, the record divided between Moncur originals and arrangements of Brazilian traditional songs. Mitchell, meanwhile, functions in a kind of update of the Jackie McLean role: his alto thinner and, if anything, even more sour than that of McLean, his playing relatively restrained compared to the stream of notes he would unleash with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, he offers tonal contrast to Moncur, the lyricism of his playing delivered with a timbral sharpness that gives it a piquant clarity. The title track, here recast as a suite, again bursts with the sense of possibility, of wide-open space; hard, concise and lapidary, ‘Space Spy’, by contrast, conveys an impression of relentlessness, seriousness, a brooding and oppressive atmosphere in which repetition is the spur of tension and uncertainty rather than familiarity and comfort, as Burrell stabs out a two-note motif, like rumbling morse code, while Moncur explores gnomic, fragmentary dissonances. ‘Exploration’, as its title implies, is the ‘freest’ track on the record; another menacing low-end melody gives way to a period of collective soloing that finds Moncur and Mitchell initially, elusively, suggesting clock-tower chimes. The horns and Burrell then proceed to riff off each other, picking up, varying, developing and discarding each others’ melodic figures in a sometimes sprightly, sometimes deliberately lugubrious fashion. Another unison melody opens ‘When’, this time more simple, song-like and hopeful, the sort of material that could easily be turned into a collective chant. The temperature boils up when Shepp joins on tenor: the extension of pauses to create tension and uncertainty; the sudden re-entrances in a blurring, blarting blast; the use of particular forms of tonguing, slurring, notes trailing away after that initial fortissimo impact; the combination of languor and passion, romanticism and fury, sometimes within the same phrase; the timbral reminiscences of Ben Webster or Jonny Hodges tied to the multiphonic innovations of John Gilmore and John Coltrane, sliding between smoothness and acidic sharpness. Moncur follows, blowing some delicious, voice-like high notes that seem to pre-echo Mitchell’s bleats, trills, and smooth melodicism, and Shepp ends the piece with fluttering harmonics that seem to momentarily transform his tenor into a flute.
As well as playing in Shepp’s live group, around this time, Moncur and Burrell joined with drummer Beaver Harris and saxophonist Roland Alexander to form a group entitled the 360 Degree Music Experience. Though they wouldn’t record for several more years, footage of an early live appearance with poet-vocalist Bazzi Bartholomew Grey has recently surfaced online the humour in Moncur’s music illustrated by his exchanging duck calls with Grey on ‘Blues for Donald Duck’. Here was the ‘inside-outside’ sound of the time: repetitive vamps, extended solos, a steadiness and optimism more extroverted than the earlier, ‘gnostic’ recordings.
Moncur’s playing still had that burnished tone, that sense of space, but to different means. The results can be heard to the full in what was perhaps the summit of his achievement, the album Echoes of a Prayer, one of a series made by the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra and released on the JCO label in 1975. Opening with a trombone prelude, Moncur’s album-length suite is organised on that repeat: ‘Reverend King’s Wings’, ‘Medgar’s Menace’, ‘Garvey’s Ghost [Space Station]’, ‘Angela’s Angel’, and ‘Right On’, separated by a drum transitions, featuring Congolese drummer Titos Sompa alongside Harris. The cycle plays twice, ending with an ‘Amen Cadence’ and a bitter coda, featuring Bley on piano, pointedly entitled ‘Excuse Me, Mr Justice’. The circling structure offers an analogy both for the lack of progress made—the deaths of martyrs—King, Medgar Evers—the attempted silencing of figures of resistance—Garvey and Angela Davis—and for the recurrence of collective resolve—‘Right On’, while also suggesting a rejuvenative notion of the cyclical, the figure of ‘sankofa’, of ancestral return and inspiration as a means of moving forward.
The operative mood of much of Moncur’s earlier music was brooding, minimalist, melancholic: but what stands out above all is the joy of the music, as often wide-open and celebratory as ominous and questing, with storm-clouds averted for a blazing sun. This is often connected to the consciously diasporic heritage of the music and to the insistence on a group sound, with soloists embodying certain aspects or moods within an overall texture: much of it is riff driven, and the drums that boil up in the transitions are a central part of the music. The album packs a wider variety of moods, textures, feelings into its running time than some manage in an entire career. Moncur’s solo over rising, choraled brass chords and fluttering cymbals on ‘Garvey’s Ghost’ is like the sun rising: checking the time, it’s hard to believe that only eight minutes have passed. The up-tempo drive of ‘Angela’s Angel’ is another highlights: in the first version, Moncur follows Pat Patrick’s flute with serene confidence, in the second, Hannibal Marvin Peterson blows to the heavens. The album has never been reissued and remains almost never discussed. One day someone will analyse together the JCOA recordings made in the 70s—Bley’s Escalator Over the Hill, Don Cherry’s Relativity Suite, Roswell Rudd’s Numatik Swing Band, Leroy Jenkins’ For Players Only—as a necessary chapter in the history of jazz, ‘free’ or otherwise. For now, seek out the music while you can.
Through the seventies, Moncur continued to work with the 360 Degree Music experience, to work with Shepp on live tours, and to participate in New York’s Loft Scene, where Dave Burrell recalls him bringing the likes of vocalist Eddie Jefferson over from Newark. In general, though, he recorded far less. His obscurity was in part to do with health issues, included dentistry, as well as artistic control of the music. As his widow, Tracy, remarked to WBGO:
“After he made the albums for Blue Note, he wanted to own his own music. He wanted to not only get royalties as a performer but also as a composer. He was told that he was never going to work again. Basically, he still worked, but he was one of the first to get out there and actively try to own — and did end up owning — his own music.”
Shadows, released under Moncur’s name in 1977, features strong performance from vocalist Andy Bey on a set of standards and ballads, and is not what one might expect given Moncur’s previous work. The determined strangeness of the album lies, not, as on Evolution or Some Other Stuff, in the spacious inscrutability of playing or compositions, in its balance of the straightahead—swing, chord changes, ballads—with the textural oddness of Bey’s vocals, treated at times as a kind of instrumental third horn alongside Moncur’s trombone and Marion Brown’s alto. Dave Burrell’s typically expert composition ‘Teardrops for Jimmy’ is meltingly traditionally, beautiful, Bey entering half way through and channelling a higher-pitched, more emotionally extroverted, Johnny Hartmann, Moncur offering sweeping, lilting cadences in glorious tandem.
I’m less familiar with the later work than the earlier, though there are fine turns on albums like Butch Morris’ debut, In Touch...But Out of Reach, from 1978, merging with Morris’ dark-toned cornet on lengthy explorations, and, in particular, on Frank Lowe’s Decision in Paradise (1983), its crisp bop edge contrasting Moncur’s burnished tone with Don Cherry’s bright trumpet and Lowe’s rough-edged tenor—the tone and placement of notes within a ‘freebop’ context suggesting an airier version of the work to come of the David S. Ware quartet—and with an early feature for the late Geri Allen. On the heads, alternately jaunty, sardonic, lushly intellectual, long phrases spool out with a post Ornette-Coleman feel; Allen offers smoothness, doubling, a variety of voicings; Lowe breaks things up in truncated riffs and melodic fragments; Cherry pitches and sails; Moncur discloses his hidden knowledge with inspiring steadiness. He knows! Throughout his late recordings, Moncur’s playing maintained its qualities, adding layers of emotional expansiveness that brought it closer in line with ‘inside’ playing: up-tempo joy, balladic serenity. More important than technical terms is the feeling or quality of the tone: it’s there, you know it. In 1995, Moncur’s trombone graced William Parker’s In Order to Survive. My favourite cut is the ballad, ‘Anast In Crisis Mouth Full Of Fresh Cut Flowers’, in Parker’s words, “written about a poet named Anast whose words cannot get out to the world, so the words turn to flowers. Anast cries out but no one hears her because her words are now flowers”. This paradox of communication and non-communication, the offerings the musicians make. “From the infinite number of sounds available”, writes Parker, “[Moncur] chooses the right notes, and places each note in the middle of its tone centre. His sound is full of hope and is laced in the tradition of change.” 'Laced' is a lovely metaphor: flowers, lace, delicacy, the blooming richness of his sound in tandem with the other horns, Lewis Barnes’ trumpet and Rob Browne’s alto, words that become flowers, in and beyond crisis, resplendent.
In his final years, Moncur recorded a couple more albums as a leader, returning to his classic earlier compositions in new arrangements with Mark Masters on Exploration (2004) and on Inner Cry Blues (2007). Sporadic as they were, his relatively few appearances were always welcomed; his sound now opened up to a more straightforwardly swinging joyousness that leavened the intensity of his early work, within a relaxed, post-bop idiom. His real legacy, though, remains that work of the sixties and seventies, a time when anything was possible: the inner explorations of Some Other Stuff, of Evolution and Destination...Out, the wide-open spaces of New Africa and, above all, the cleansing collective propulsion and catharsis of Echoes of a Prayer. Moncur’s music emerged at a time whose implications are still little understood. His work and life open up a gnostic possibility, dismantling illusion, going the way of the hidden, pursuing knowledge by other means, opening onto new vistas, “a vision of a better world yet beyond the present”.
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