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The six-CD set includes liner notes by pianist Ethan Iverson, who criticizes some of the music’s imperfections—he doesn’t care for the cold digital sound or Bill Frisell’s guitar-synthesizer on the final two albums, Psalm and It Should’ve Happened a Long Time Ago—and clearly adores others. (I think any music critic can learn something from the way he doesn’t allow his analysis to undermine his fandom.) He breaks down the albums into three pairs. Conception Vessel and Tribute (1974) were exploratory sessions, with pieces that often broke out in a small combinations of players; the title track of the former is a duet between Motian and Jarrett. The first album features compositions by Motian, while the second makes space for iconic tunes by Ornette Coleman (“War Orphans”) and Charlie Haden (“Song for Ché”)—Motian was already playing with Haden in the bassist’s Liberation Music Orchestra. The next two albums—Dance (1977) and Le Voyage (1979)—were trio sessions with criminally overlooked saxophonist Charles Brackeen (David Izenson played bass on the first, J.F. Jenny-Clark on the second), where Motian really began to exert a more idiosyncratic, clunky style. The final two albums introduce a band that Motian would work with for the rest of his life—on Psalm, Frisell and saxophonist Joe Lovano are joined by reedist Billy Drewes and bassist Ed Schuller, but by the next album the latter two are gone. As noted above, Frisell is still experimenting with the guitar-synthesizer, but the dynamic three-way conversations are already in evidence, so there’s never really a single soloist—it became about an improvised ensemble sound. Below you can check out “The Sunflower,” a track from Le Voyage.
https://chicagoreader.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/04_the_sunflower.mp3Paul Motian, “The Sunflower”
Writer, gallerist, and educator John Corbett is as responsible as anyone for setting the stage for ongoing renaissance of Poughkeepsie multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee. As coprogrammer for the Empty Bottle Jazz & Improvised Music series, Corbett (and Ken Vandermark) brought McPhee to Chicago for the first time in 1996, and since then he’s devotedly worked with the musician, particularly by reissuing long-out-of-print early recordings, first on his Unheard Music Series imprint and more recently on the label operated by his gallery with Jim Dempsey, Corbett vs. Dempsey. Last year the label reissued some key McPhee recordings originally released by Hat Hut in the 70s, but the imprint’s most ambitious project is the recent Nation Time: The Complete Recordings, a four-CD box that appends the original 1971 album with three additional discs of music, all recorded by McPhee colleague Craig Johnson (who formed the CjR label to release McPhee’s music) around the same time, between 1969 and 1970.
Vinny Golia Quartet, Take Your Time (Relative Pitch)Steven Daverson, Shadow Walker (Col Legno)Freddie Hubbard, The Artistry of Freddie Hubbard/The Body and the Soul (Impulse!)The Pop’s, Agora e Samba (Discobertas)Roomful of Teeth, Roomful of Teeth (New Amsterdam)
