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| 1. | Blues For Felix
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| 2. | Like A Kiss That Never Ends Como Un Beso Que Nunca Se Acaba
For Valerie
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| 3. | Dedication
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| 4. | Suki Suki Now
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| 5. | Ruben's Theme Song
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| 6. | Mo' Bass
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| 7. | Let's Cool One
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Jazz
Andrew Cyrille - drums
Ray Drummond - bass
John Hicks - piano
David Murray - bass clarinet and tenor saxophone
Like A Kiss That Never Ends is the fifth David Murray album released by Justin Time Records since his signing to the label in 1995. Murray with his Power Quartet have created more than 60 minutes of “pure, unlabeled” music, but it’s undoubtedly the finest jazz among the “unlabeled” even for the most pragmatic observers worried that David Murray is becoming unclassifiable, after taking his “world beat” chances.
Nevertheless, the title track Like A Kiss That Never Ends, laid on a tango-habanera grid, impassioned and unrestrained like a rebel tango band jamming in an empty dancehall, is a superb example of the universality of jazz transcription. Pianist John Hicks, drummer Andrew Cyrille and bassist Ray Drummond are musicians Murray has played with extensively over the last couple of decades, and this recording certainly displays the group’s affinity.
Like A Kiss That Never Ends is full of Murray’s tenor saxophone, equally extraordinary at any step of its tonal range; as Juan Rodriguez states in the album’s liner notes, this outing is “a potent reminder that Murray remains the outstanding tenor saxophonist of his generation.”
---Liner Notes
David Murray: Like A Kiss That Never Ends
"A good concept would be not to have a concept - just write some good songs and play them," said David Murray on the eve of the new millennium. The irony could not have escaped him. Murray spent much of the 1990s involved in concept albums - musical journeys to Africa and the Caribbean, a tribute to Miles Davis with the World Saxophone Quartet, a paean to John Coltrane with his octet - that stretched his musical horizons. Yet he's always marched to his own drummer, dating back to being pigeonholed as an "outbound" player when he first blew in from Berkeley onto New York's loft scene in 1975. "Someone says left, I'm going right. The other way is very interesting to me," he told Down Beat in 1998.
It would be tempting to say that the only concept behind The Kiss That Never Ends is its lack of one. Yet his full-bodied attack and tireless ideas have always been his strongest musical concepts. Proof positive is revealed in the 60-plus minutes of unfettered Murray herein, a highlight among the 200-to-300 albums (depending on who's counting) he's played on. Murray, 46, is no longer the young phenom hailed helping save jazz from the doldrums following the premature deaths of Coltrane and Albert Ayler, and a beacon of light in the jazz-rock blight. However, jazz critics tend eat their young; spitting them out in neat categories they're forever expected to live up to. So after Murray performed fiery solo gigs, wrote a seminal theme dedicated to Ayler (Flowers for Albert, 1977), and played with the likes of Fred Hopkins, Butch Morris and Steve McCall, he was called upon to be the second coming of the "new thing."
After he tackled Coleman Hawkins' saxophone holy grail Body and Soul, and arranged Paul Gonsalves' endurance-test 27-chorus solo on Ellington's Crescendo and Diminuendo in Blue - for a 40-piece orchestra, no less - he was dubbed a "neo-traditionalist." (This from someone who led a 15-piece soul band playing James Brown tunes in the Bay Area as a teenager!) After he collaborated with Senegalese pop musicians on Fo Deuk Revue (1997), and Guadeloupe's finest players on Creole (1998), he was said to have jumped aboard the "world beat" bandwagon. (Besides, went another hopeless critics' query, was it really jazz?) Yet it is precisely this restless spirit that made Murray's co-production of the WSQ's timeless African percussion-based Selim Sivad (1998) the most stunningly original Miles tribute album. And it is this selfless devotion to music, period, that allowed Murray to give much of the limelight to soul singer Fontella Bass and organ discovery Jimane Nelson on the brilliant gospel and R&B-infused Speaking In Tongues.(1999) - as befits a son whose mother played organ and piano at The Missionary Church of God and Christ in Berkeley.
Last year saw the WSQ return to strictly quartet status on Requiems For Julius: solid as rock, multi-layered as redwood, negotiating the waters between chamber jazz and avant-harmonies in breathtakingly powerful, soulful fashion. And finally, after all these years, his first overt encounter with the immortal modernist master on Octet Plays Trane: incandescent inspiration instead of slavish imitation of Coltrane. He "typically sounds like no one but himself," noted Down Beat critic Ted Panken. With such "a massive mode" charted for them, he told Jazz Times. "So they come out in this little mode with their little suits on... They're too young to be in that country club."
In fact, one of Murray's discoveries, pianist D.D. Jackson, helped spark his association with the Justin Time label. Playing on Jackson's two duets albums in 1996, he was impressed by the Montreal indie's commitment to quality production values and to wide North American distribution of uncompromising jazz. (Let's face it, those pricey Japanese DIW and Italian Black Saint albums are hard to find.) Like A Kiss That Never Ends begins another contract cycle. There's more of Murray's saxophone here than on any other album in recent memory, a potent reminder that he "remains the outstanding tenor saxophonist of his generation" (as Village Voice critic Gary Giddins wrote last year).
The album opens with Blues for Felix, a classic limbering up based on a delightful melody, giving everyone to flex their muscles without blowing their wad. It serves notice on Murray's promise of "good songs"; indeed, their strength is borne out in how quickly the ingenious tunes go by, their firm melodic foundations offering critical jumping- off points for improvisation. Keynoted by Cyrille's martial drum rolls, Like A Kiss That Never Ends (Un Beso Que Nunca Se Acabo) begins with a magnificently faux tango-habanera swaggerthat by turns evolves to pride to sensuality to desperate need to everlasting passion. It's a sterling example of Murray playing at the top and bottom of his tenor's tonal range. It's dedicated to his wife, Valerie Malot, who runs their 3D Family agency in Paris, where he moved in 1995.
Dedication, composed by Drummond, is the set's lush ballad; it's like your first long embrace and kiss, with Murray's lovingly languorous lines complemented by Hicks' rose petal motifs. The 58-year-old pianist, who for years negotiated Betty Carter's complex vocalisms and is a favourite with the edgier players in jazz, is a proud romantic with a strong extroverted attack that depends more on single-note enunciation rather than chordal cluster.
Suki Suki Now is an expository summing up of Murray's extraordinarily wide musical palette. His particular genius is the ability to uncompromisingly incorporate "out" language high shrieks and squeals, deep foghorn blasts, cracked notes, great crowded runs - in the evolution of his statements. It would be inaccurate to say Murray plays somewhere between free and trad. With daring and confidence and judicious taste, he uses all the tools at his disposal to create fully formed statements. No one does it better.
Rubens Theme Song, dedicated to his young son, is a delightfully urban soul-strut. Mo' Bass (For the Bulldog) begins as a dialogue between Drummond, the 55-year-old -bassist who's comfortable playing with the likes of Pharoah Sanders, Joe Lovano, and Kenny Barren, and longtime partner Hicks, and 60-year-old drummer Cyrille, who cut his teeth for a decade with Cecil Taylor and gives a compositional bent accompanying forward-thinking jazz musicians. For nearly four minutes, they map out the tune's myriad rhythmic possibilities, punctuated with pointillisms from Hicks. Then Murray darts in with an intense skittering solo, exiting as quickly as he arrived so the others can finish what they started. A conceptually stunning piece.
The set closes appropriately with Let's Cool One, the 1952 Thelonious Monk tune. It's an affectionate, wistful tribute to Monk and a tip of the hat to the equally idiosyncratic Eric Dolphy, the man who inspired Murray to take up the bass clarinet he spotlights here. The tune features a tour de force drum solo by Cyrille, in which he literally plays and improvises the melody from top to bottom.
"When all is said and done," Murray told Jazz Times last year, "when we're all on our deaths beds ... then we can go back and say, - Oh, I shoulda did that, I shoulda did this.' But right now, I could care less what [critics] think 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." This time, the soulful heads-up musical explorer calls it The Kiss That Never Ends.
---Juan Rodriguez, March 2001
(Juan Rodriguez has been writing about music and popular culture since 1966 for a variety of publications, including The Gazette, Montreal, and East BayExpress, Berkeley. He is working on The Scene Changes, a book of personal and analytical essays on music.) |
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