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| 3.906 Ft
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| 1. | Suki Suki Now
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| 2. | Netdown
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| 3. | Bit's N' Pieces
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| 4. | Goin' Home
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| 5. | Over a Cloud (Sobre Una Nube)
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| 6. | Stock
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| 7. | The New Chapter
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Jazz
Hamiet Bluiett - baritone saxophone and contra alto clarinet
Oliver Lake - alto saxophone
David Murray - bass clarinet and tenor saxophone
John Purcell - alto flute and saxello
The New York Times calls the World Saxophone Quartet " the most original and important group to emerge since Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane redefined group improvisation in the late 1950s."
Formed in 1976, the World Saxophone Quartet marks this important anniversary with their sixth Justin Time recording of more than twenty recordings that they have created together through the last quarter of a century. The breadth of their repertoire draws amplitude close to 360 degrees and the diversity of the compositions on this recording justly reflects this.
Each member brought in a different, 'personal' score, but whether they 'play with' an old traditional tune, elaborate a classic piece or deliver a brand new original, the World Saxophone Quartet explores in a different trajectory. Oliver Lake (on alto), John Purcell (on saxello, alto-flute and tibetan bells), David Murray (tenor saxophone and bass clarinet) and Hamiet Bluiett (baritone saxophone and contra-alto clarinet), created the material for this recording not expressly to mark their silver celebration; but even so, the seven tracks included represent each member rightfully.
Bluiett's words about the last track ("The New Chapter" composed by John Purcell) will help us capture the essence of their venture: " It's the first time we've done 'overdubs'… it sort of gives you a prototype of the future to come, it opens a whole 'nother window, exactly. That's what we've been doing for a long time anyway: opening it up and doing different things. Because it is the World Saxophone Quartet."
Liner Notes
We Are The Moment: WSQ@25
1976: The red, white and blue is flying high for the Bicentennial but America's only indigenous art form is suffering. Jazz record sales are down like never before. Festival gigs are too few and far-between; the nightclub and cabaret circuit has all but dried up, even in the Big Apple. The survivors of -and newcomers to New York's proud creative community are forced to fend for themselves. Bluiett, the baritone saxophonist who first hit New York in the headier days of 1969, was by then a free agent fresh from a residency with Charles Mingus.
He recalls the scenario well. "In '76 we were going through the so called 'loft period: We were going to different places, renting them and playing. Sometimes churches, sometimes civic buildings, some happened in people's houses - then it started hitting the lofts. [Drummer] Rashied Ali had one, so did saxophonist / composer Sam Rivers. We made a way for ourselves so we could play. "Most of the stuff was done in the East Village - that was the epicenter. Guys were coming from all over the country, all over the world actually. There was a lot of activity, a lot of musicians all over the place.
The experimental momentum of the '60s free explosion was dissipating. There was a shared disdain for the only new jazz faction that seemed to be prospering in its wake: pop-oriented fusion bands assembled by major record labels. "Our scene wasn't industry-catapulted. During that time a lot of the groups that were coming along, the industry was putting musicians together and giving them money: 'You play with this, you do that!'"
In such self-propelled, unpropitious circumstances, Kidd Jordan, a jazz player and educator visiting from New Orleans, met and sat in with four saxophonists on the scene: two altoists -Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, tenorman David Murray and Bluiett. Thwarted in his effort to bring down Ornette Coleman or Sun Ra and his Orchestra, Jordan asked the four to return with him and perform for students at the Southern University of New Orleans. The World Sax seed was planted. "This part of the story never gets told. Kidd Jordan basically started it because the four of us had never thought about getting together and starting no saxophone quartet, even though a year before that we had done a record with Anthony Braxton. Kidd had a sabbatical during the summer, came to play with all of us and enjoyed the whole thing. His students at SUNO were sort of getting tired of what was happening in New Orleans. Their status quo was wanting to become more contemporary.
"So he got the four of us and hooked us up with Alvin Fielder on drums and London Branch on bass. We did a concert at SUNO then went to Lou & Charlie's - a place which is no longer there - and did the rest of the weekend acapella." The brief excursion had a lasting effect. Upon their return to New York the idea of maintaining the quartet -acapella, sans rhythm section - grabbed hold. Bluiett is quick to point out that though the New Orleans weekend "had something to do with what we did, [it] had nothing to do with us putting together a group. The group and everything else came later." Blowing hard and free - their earliest recordings bristle with the passion and joy of the time - the four agreed on an unusually pragmatic maxim from the outset: all for one, and each for themselves. "We had seen a lot of groups where musicians would try to hold together and would always fall apart. So we said 'Wait a minute, we know we all got egos -let's let everybody work on their own projects and do this group too: I think because of that - I KNOW because of that we've been able to stay together . . ."
Twenty-five years later, the World Saxophone Quartet is still standing - and thriving. Their ability to adapt, at times expand and then return to their inaugural lineup (John Purcell now holds the original Hemphill slot) speaks to the wisdom of their independent, flexible philosophy. They've recorded over twenty albums, offering a dizzying variety of original and previously composed music in a variety of settings. They've paid tribute to the sounds of Miles and Duke, R&B and South Africa, and performed with a rhythm section, with percussionists and with an augmented frontline. They've bounded between bubbling, collective improvisation and methodically constructed harmony-and-solo arrangements: on the same album, sometimes on the same track.
Steering between those stylistic poles - between recognizable melodic structure and free spontaneity - is something Bluiett has thought about at length. "We're into the development of the textures and sonorities and the melodies and all that, and not just a development of the so-called chord changes, which is another way of doing it. That's another way of doing it. So sometimes the melody's done to familiarize whoever's listening to where we're coming from. There's no sense in throwing away all that information, the building blocks that we have. We just use them in a new, creative direction, you understand?
"We played music where we had no melody and said: 'Nahhh, let's give people something to think about or sing to.'" Yet, with pride and unflagging commitment to the free spirit of '76, WSQ still bears the standard of avant-garde improvisation. "We're supposed to be the masters of being -like they say - "in the moment." But we ARE the moment!"
Not originally intended to mark the foursome's silver celebration, Bluiett reflects that the range of style and approach on 25th Anniversary reproduces their far-reaching, adventurous timeline. "It's sort of a statement - it goes a long way from "Goin' Home" all the way out to John [Purcell]'s tune - "The New Chapter". That's quite a bit of a stretch."
With track listing in hand, he adds: "Goin' Home" is an old, old traditional - David wanted to do it because he realized the importance of that tune in the past for a lot of black people. It was played when someone died instead of "Amazing Grace", "Precious Lord" or some of the others. It has a long significance that we've sort gotten away from. So the idea was to bring the tune back around. "Suki Suki Now" is a kind of R&B tune that David wrote - just sounds like what it is [Writers note: no doubt influenced at least in part by King Floyd's opening exhortation on the 1970 soul hit "Groove Me".] Like "Bits 'n' Pieces" - that's me, I wrote that. That's exactly what it is - bits and pieces of music that I've done throughout the years that I put together.
"Over a Cloud" is mine too. I was thinking of a whole lot of stuff when I did that. It's kind of an accumulation of other things I thought about in terms of the travels of the group. Matter of fact I think everybody was. We don't really get together and talk about it that way, but I'm sure they did. "Stock" and "Netdown" are both Oliver's - all these computer-generated sounds and names and everything [Oliver has always written this way]. And "The New Chapter" - that was so out - it's the first time we've done overdubs. So it's better to put it on the end. That was the whole idea - it sort of gives you a prototype of the future to come. It opens a whole 'nother window, exactly. That's what we've been doing for a long time anyway: opening it up and doing different things. Because it is the World Saxophone Quartet.
Twenty-five years of stellar exploratory music. Twenty-five years of world travels and recordings, accolades and applause, challenges and changes. Back in '76 -born in the Lofts of the East/West Villages, brought together in New Orleans - Bluiett still remembers with fondness and slight awe. "We came back to New York and people started calling . . . and they just never quit calling."
---Ashley Kahn
Ashley Kahn is author of Kind Of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece (DaCapo, 2000); primary editor of Rolling Stone: The Seventies (Little, Brown, 1998) and a primary contributor to The Rolling Stone Jazz & Blues Album Guide (Random House, 1999). He has also been tour manager for a variety of jazz artists, including the Jazz Passengers, Cassandra Wilson and Henry Threadgill.
After nearly two dozen recordings and in celebration of their 25th anniversary, the World Saxophone Quartet has proven that they are still on the cutting edge of avant-garde jazz in the new century. 25th Anniversary: The Next Chapter features the four brilliant saxophonists: Oliver Lake on alto saxophone; John Purcell on saxello, alto-flute, and Tibetan bells; David Murray on tenor saxophonist and bass clarinet; and Hamiet Bluiett on baritone saxophone and contra-alto clarinet doing what they do best, creating daring concepts as a collective. This CD offers their first-ever experiment with overdubbing on Purcell's title cut, "The New Chapter." David Murray's funky "Suki Suki Now" finds him extending his range on the tenor saxophone with intensity and abandon. This is the WSQ's sixth recording for the Justin Time label and exceeds the listening possibilities and interpretations of their Takin' It to the Next Level CD because of their extensive range of approaches, new sonorities, hi-tech themes, and the overdubbing experimentation.
---Paula Edelstein, All Music Guide
World Saxophone Quartet
Active Decades: '70s, '80s, '90s and '00s
Born: 1977
Genre: Jazz
Styles: Modern Free, Post-Bop, Free Funk, Avant-Garde Jazz, African Jazz
Probably the first of several saxophone-only ensembles who proliferated in jazz after 1975, the WSQ is unquestionably the most commercially (and, arguably, the most creatively) successful. Of course, commercial success is a relative thing in jazz, especially when one is speaking of an avant-garde group. But unlike most free jazz artists, the WSQ managed to attract an audience of significant size; large enough to have garnered a major-label record deal in the '80s, an almost unheard-of occurrence in that retro-jazz decade. The band did it on merit, too, with only a hint of compromise (manifested mainly by albums of R&B and Duke Ellington covers). By the time their first record on Elektra/Musician came out in 1986, the band had evolved from their fire-breathing, free-improvising, ad-hoc beginnings into a smooth-playing, compositionally minded, well-rehearsed band. At their creative peak, the group melded jazz-based, harmonically adventurous improvisation with sophisticated composition. All of the group's original members (Julius Hemphill, alto; Oliver Lake, alto; David Murray, tenor; and Hamiet Bluiett, baritone) were estimable composers as well as improvisers. Each complimented the whole, making them even greater than the considerable sum of their parts. As a composer, Hemphill drew on European techniques (though his tunes were not without an unalloyed jazz component), while Bluiett was steeped in blues and funk. Lake and Murray fell somewhere in between. As soloists and writers, the early WSQ covered all the bases.
The WSQ were founded in 1976 after the four original members (all of them well-established solo artists) accepted an offer by Ed Jordan, the chairman of the music department at Southern University in New Orleans, to conduct a series of clinics and performances with and without a local rhythm section. The enthusiastic audience response to the unaccompanied saxophones convinced the musicians to develop the concept. They played a gig at the (now defunct) Tin Palace in New York, calling the group the Real New York Saxophone Quartet. They were later forced to change the name after reportedly being threatened with a lawsuit by the preexisting New York Saxophone Quartet; hence, the World Saxophone Quartet. In 1977, the band recorded their first album, an almost completely improvised effort called Point of No Return, for the Moers Music label. Later releases on Black Saint document the band's increasing interest in composition. The membership stayed constant until Hemphill's departure in 1989. Arthur Blythe was the first of Hemphill's several replacements. Blythe was with the band from 1990-1992, and from 1994-1995. James Spaulding joined briefly in 1993, and was quickly replaced by Eric Person. In 1996, after Blythe's second tenure, John Purcell took and held the chair.
Although they're a sax-oriented group, the WSQ's members have been multi-instrumentalists. The band always incorporated a wide variety of woodwinds into their sound. After Rhythm & Blues (1986, Elektra/Musician), the WSQ began using other musicians in their recordings and performances. Metamorphosis (1990, Elektra/Musician) added African drummers and electric bassist Melvin Gibbs. Later records utilized pianists, vocalists, bassists, and drummers. In adding other musicians, the band sacrificed part of their distinctiveness. The novelty of the band's original approach, and their ability to swing so hard sans rhythm, set them apart. By the end of the '90s, the WSQ had lost their major-label deal and much of their identity.
---Chris Kelsey, All Music Guide |
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