Ezz-thetics

Ezz-thetics

a column by
Stuart Broomer

Eremite Records has just released an eponymous two-LP set by a band called The Ancients, made up of bassist William Parker, drummer William Hooker, and saxophonist Isaiah Collier. It reflects the label’s long-standing advocacy, begun in the 1990s, of free jazz, often in its most intense form.

In the past three years, Michael Ehlers, has been instrumental in releasing a series of recordings from Milford Graves’ personal archives, issued under the label Black Editions Archive, a new partnership between Peter Kolovos and Ehlers under the umbrella of Black Editions Group. Two of those recordings were trios with Parker and Graves, a giant of free jazz drumming. The first, a two-LP set, Historic Music Past Tense Future included Peter Brötzmann in a recording from CB’s 313 Gallery in 2002. The second WEBO, a three-LP set released last year, had Charles Gayle as tenor saxophonist in performances from 1991. As Ehlers describes the partnership, “Peter pitched me an idea to collaborate on a new historical free jazz imprint for his label Black Editions Group. The pitch was basically ‘bring me the baddest shit you’ve got that you don’t have the resources to produce on your own.’ I called Milford Graves the next day and spent the rest of 2020 on the phone with him discussing the acquisition of a substantial piece of his tape archive on Peter’s behalf.”

Both sets spoke with incredible force. Graves in both instances was making rare appearances in public and on record, and laying down as much compound, liberating rhythm as anyone might conceive. Parker was similarly inspired, and the saxophonists were giving performances as powerful as they ever had, 25 to 40 years from the explosive dawn of the idiom as developed by Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, and Pharoah Sanders, the era in which Brötzmann had emerged in Wuppertal, Germany and Gayle in Buffalo, New York.

Even at first glance, the two-LP release of The Ancients reveals an immediate closeness with those two other releases Historic Music Past Tense Future and WEBO. The Ancients, however, is contemporary, following Graves’ passing in 2021. It was recorded in California in 2023 by a band “formed by Parker to play concerts in conjunction with the Milford Graves Mind Body Deal exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.” It represents a special segment of the free jazz tradition, whether it’s called “spiritual jazz” or “energy music,” a branch that Ehlers has lovingly recorded and released since the 1990s.

There’s something special about that name, The Ancients, which functions here to name the trio and the records and might name the genre, a wonderful turn on a music that was once called the “new thing.” It’s a music that is both tied to black cultural freedom, as Ehlers makes clear in the record’s info sheet, but also to an on-going cultural expression. Those previous releases with Parker and Graves, as different as they are, have been among the most powerful music released on record in recent years, further confirmation of Graves’ special power and the commitment of each of those musicians. Its ties to black expression and culture are central, and in each of these occasions has a kind of sacramental quality, born of a special intensity.

If in its sixty five-year phase of jazz history, it has at times seemed bracketed out of much jazz dialogue and journalism, it may well be because of its special power, its centrifugal force. It’s one of the musics that mean the most, and its relationship to other jazz is tangential. My personal term for this music is eschatology jazz (jazz that expresses knowledge of the last days), and its companion term is jazz eschatology (the last days of jazz). It’s now built into jazz history, however uncomfortably, in the late work of John Coltrane and the music of Albert Ayler. Considered as a style, it's always the last word in jazz, and at times might even be considered the ritual sacrifice of the audience.

It is both tied up with “knowledge of the last days” and a kind of “last days” jazz, that is, somehow, outside jazz as a progression of “styles” which jazz has sometimes become in a blandly sophisticated marketplace. It makes perfect sense that the one-time “new thing” would now reveal itself as The Ancients, music as old as the energies invoked in Randy Weston at a Gnawa healing ceremony.

I discovered jazz as a child partly through television, most notably The Sound of Jazz and Miles Davis’ appearance Robert Herridge Presents. In the fall/winter of 1961-62, I both entered high school and discovered free jazz. I realize now that the mood of the times – the civil rights struggle, the cold war, and the Cuban missile crisis (just as immediate in Canada as in the United States) – and the music I discovered I needed had a special relationship. When you’re told to crouch under your desk, a 3/4” slab of wood between you and annihilation, Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, Charles Mingus’ “Haitian Fight Song,” and John Coltrane’s “Chasin’ the Trane” make perfect sense. The music would grow even more intense in the next few years, until it exploded with Albert Ayler’s Bells and Coltrane’s quintet with Pharoah Sanders and Rashied Ali. Both came with apocalyptic, religiously apocalyptic, imagery and force. It’s that spirit that inhabits the music of The Ancients, and it may feel even more insistently contemporary than it did when it was recorded in 2023.

Parker’s strengths are even more prominent with The Ancients than on the discs with Gayle, Brötzmann and Graves, the latter a virtual drum corps rather than a single musician. An essential root and foundation, the bassist comes rightfully to the fore in a sonic balance that foregrounds his essential component. No currently active musician more authentically channels the New York “new thing” of the mid-sixties than Parker, and in part it’s his relationship to the bass playing of Lewis Worrell, a rarely mentioned musician who Parker readily references. Lewis Worrell had a bass style all his own, no doubt developed far from any bass player’s academy, whether Koussevitsky’s, Jimmy Blanton’s, Paul Chambers’, or Scott LaFaro’s. Worrell might share the term “claw hammer” with five-string banjo, though it’s distinctly a bass, a swarming multi-string approach, out of which short melodic phrases erupt.

Parker maintains both a fundamental pulse and a compound drone, each note resonating with the preceding and the fundamental, a thick, grouped thrum. Worrell appeared on both the New York Art Quartet’s eponymous ESP-Disk (with Milford Graves) and (less audibly) Albert Ayler’s Bells. It's this legacy that informs The Ancients and inevitably extends to Hooker, a veteran and contemporary of both Graves and Parker, whose forceful, propulsive drumming covers a substantial spectrum of densities from spare to thunderous.

While one might expect inspired performances from Hooker and Parker, there’s undoubtedly something special here, both in the homage to Graves and the extraordinary performance of tenor saxophonist Isaiah Collier, a musician roughly fifty years their junior who is virtually channeling the authentic energy of the 1960s, finding his own voice that yet touches on Albert Ayler and Sonny Rollins (no easy range) and a few others. Each side of the two-LP set comes from a different performance, each fading out between 22 and 24 minutes. Sides A to C come from two days at 2022 Arts & Archives in Los Angeles; Side D from The Chapel in San Francisco. None of the performances is “complete,” eventually fading out, but one might consider that tacit recognition that one is listening to a record and is a reasonable compromise between fidelity and duration.

True to the improvisers’ goal, the four performances are very different, from their opening premises and voices to their developing dynamics, evolution, and emotion. Each, as far as it goes, is a distinct, well-formed musical Odyssey, by a trio that manages to sound at once like they’ve just met and have been playing together for years. Each is also a study in transformation. Side A (2023-05-12 Set II) begins in gospel suffused reverie then passes through numerous evolutions to end in wrenching shout and thrashing percussion. Side B (2023-05-13 Set I) has stretches of remarkable minimalism, the trio reduced to single drum strokes, punctuating bass tones and saxophone yips, only to conclude with Parker playing hojǒk, a keening Korean woodwind. That feeling of immediate spirit-calling arises as well on Side C (2023-05-13 Set II). Collier demonstrates sustained development and expansion of materials, eventually relaxing the long tension curve before the side fades amidst a concluding melody. Side D (2023-05-15 Set I) stretches to musical riot, with dense bass, drums, and shouts eventually prodding Collier’s ultimate cataclysm of sound, beginning with a siren and eventually alternating (one assumes from the instrument list) Aztec death whistle and the squall of overblown tenor. It’s a series of memorable performances and fitting tribute to Milford Graves’ expansive art.

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