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 | World Saxophone Quartet25th Anniversary - The New ChapterLabel: Justin Time | Jazz | March 13, 2001Format UPC Order # Unit Price |
Credits 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 Production Credits | TracksNo Title Duration Excerpts 04 Goin' Home 00:05:59 05 Over A Cloud (Sobre Una Nube) 00:09:11 06 Stock 00:05:55 07 The New Chapter 00:12:06 Album DetailsThe 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. Liner NotesWe Are The Moment: WSQ@251976: 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 weve 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" thats 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 Im 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. |
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