Customer Reviews

Live at the Village Vanguard

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

With all due respect to the other reviewers, I who am a Murray fan find this live performance disappointing, due not so much to Murray himself - whose beautiful tone and wild flights of creative energy are characteristically exciting -- but to the rhythm section. An improvisor as daring as Murray (I have him on my listmania of '25 Unsung Tenor Sax Heros') needs a solid, precise rhythm section to keep him grounded. He doesn't get it here.

The best parts of the session are Murray's bass clarinet cadenza, where he is freed from the other instruments; and the moving 'Desegregation of Our Children,' the one slow piece of the session, where Murray's stunning tenor rises from his warm, burgundy, low register tones to a soaring altissima chant. During this piece, the piano is lyrical in accompaniment and the drums are hushed to brushwork. There is hypnotic and subtle interaction between all the members of the quartet. The listener longs for more quiet and contemplative interactions like this. But the rest of the CD is ragged and noisey.

The piano player, Hilton Ruiz, tends to imitate the late Don Pullen on the up-tempo pieces, but he can't quite bring off Pullen's percussive piano clusters. In other words, he does a lot of atonal banging on the keys. The bass, Kelly Roberty, is poorly recorded: muffled lumps of wet cotton. The real problem is the drummer, Pheroon Aklaf, who sounds amateurish on most of the session: he gets lost in ragged gratuitous rolls and can't keep even 4/4 time steady.

For a more outstanding quartet session, I recommend 'Lovers.'

David Murray displays on this 1995 live recording once again his incredible sound on the saxophone. Murray is a great mix of blues and gospel tradition expressed with a gritty, yet gorgeous tone that knows no bounds. The only caveat to this program is the less than sterling sound quality on this Sound Hills product, and the track listing that indicates the presence of one more song than actually appears on the cd. Label issues aside though, Murray is in top form with these extended tracks blowing in the fabled Village Vanguard setting both powerfully and tenderly. Murray has a rich deep resonant tone on the saxophone that ranks with the most beautiful in the history of jazz. His sound emerges from the Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster school and is the antithesis of the lightweight, whimsical tone now seemingly in favor with the listening public. This is jazz on the cutting edge with a bite, steeped in tradition, with an avant-garde edge, but at the sametime capable of delivering a ballad such as The Desegregation Of Our Children with such uncommon beauty and emotion that you are left scratching your head as to why this modern titan is not esteemed more highly by the jazz buying public.

David Murray and his group have taken the legacy of "Live at the Village Vanguard" and returned it to it's rightful place for the jazz listener. Murray shines and the quartet as a whole has an unbelieveable communication. Kelly Roberty's bass is rock solid and his solos are a wonderful display of how to give a tune a signature. Aklaff and Ruiz are, as always, right in the music. But this CD as it is the stuff of legends.

I've always been a fan of David Murray, based on some great spastic free solos I heard on the radio in the '80s, and his recorded work with the WSQ and Jack DeJohnette's "Special Edition." Murray is a monster tenorman who breaks out the bass clarinet from time to time, and is equally comfortable stretching out on free-jazz solos as on straight-ahead, mellifluous ballads (though like many aging players, he seems to have taken a solid detour away from free jazz in recent years). I've long been in search of the perfect Murray album -- something edgey (closer to "avante-garde"), in a quartet with a good piano player (rather than the Murray Octet or Big Band), and including some bass clarinet playing. The closest I've come so far is Andrew Cyrille's wonderful sextet recording "Ode to the Living Tree," a great album, but I'm still without the optimal Murray date as a leader. And so, Live at the Village Vanguard (from a 1995 date with Hilton Ruiz on piano, Kelly Roberty on bass, and Pheroan Aklaf on drums) was on my wish list for some time and I had high hopes.

The result, for me, is... mixed. Most disappointing is that the recording, on the Sound Hills label, is not good -- the entire album is so quiet that you really have to crank up the volume to hear it, and even with that adjustment the bass and drums sound muffled and underwater throughout. Also, though the first three numbers are extended pieces in the 15-20 minute range, a lot of the 60+ minutes of music is meandering and Murray needlessly yields generous solo space to his sidemen who are less than dazzling. Strangely, a fifth track ("Obe") is listed on the CD notes, but it can't actually be found on the recording.

On the positive side, Murray is in fine form and the program is richly varied. The first track, "Red Car" (a "Butch" Morris tune) is straight-ahead in spirit though Murray's first solo stretches into squawky embellishments. An extended piano solo in the middle is fairly conservative and a bass solo fails to excite before Murray jumps back in to restate the theme and close out the tune. The second track, "The Desegregation of Our Children" is a 20-minute ballad that starts out in classic full-bodied blowing by Murray that gradually erupts, in places, into upper register wailing. Really nice playing here, but again Murray sits out the middle while the trio takes over and Ruiz occupies solo space. The most fun tune is without a doubt the 3rd track, Murray's "Acoustic Octfunk," a 22-minute romp that starts with a truly funky bass clarinet riff backed by a groovy rock-like drumbeat and a one-note bass vamp. Ruiz really takes off here and gets pretty adventurous, at times approaching Don Pullen territory, but unfortunately the music is pretty muffled before Murray comes back with a bass clarinet solo. After that, the full quartet erupts again, having fun with a reprisal of the theme. It would have been nice to hear more of this kind of communication, but the band soon gives way to another rather meaningless drum solo before the tune closes. Then there's the last number, the 5-minute "Hope/Scope," another classic Murray original, that features Murray free soloing with abandon, backed by able support from the rhythm section. Unlike the rest of the album, there's very little melody here and truth be told, I wish more of the album was like this, but it's not.

Not a bad album, but not the one I'd hoped for. Murray though lets loose and does his thing, but the recording quality is fair at best, the program is diverse but lacks cohesion, and the sidemen solos do not inspire. I'm still in search of the perfect David Murray album.