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While the national remembrance day for slavery and its abolishment is being celebrated in Paris, David Murray is landing in Sainte-Lucia with a group of African-Americans and Guadeloupians who form the Creole Project. Gathering together on this small, peaceful English-speaking island that resembles Jamaica, the musicians take part in a live session and work out a few final details before heading to Pointe-à-Pitre the following week to record their new album. First and foremost, they must break in newcomer Renzel Merritt, a funk-oriented drummer who, like Murray, grew up on the West Coast. Although this is the first time the musicians play together in months, the steamy one hour jam proves that they haven’t lost the fever. They are more than ready to make their way to Pointe-à-Pitre. On this land inhabited by the spirit of the Maroons, the saxophone player has been pursuing a spiritual journey spanning over ten years and three recordings.

In the end, the seven tracks are in the same line as their predecessors. The music is very funky as always, with a bit more soul. The wide variety of tropical grooves translates a stronger urge to burst out onto the dance floor. The careful listener will also notice that the album contains many sung texts, reflecting Murray’s passion for literature. Blues singer Taj Mahal handles the vocals on two tracks, one of them being Africa, which includes a poignant writing by the incisive and allusive poet Ishmael Reed. The very punchy and gospel sounding Devil Try to Kill Me features another one of Reed’s writings, performed by American singer Sista Kee. The two vocalists are joined on Southern Sky, a purely delightful rhythm and blues piece. Also on the recording is Canto Oneguine, an excerpt from an opera about Pushkin, the author of Cameroonian descent considered to be the father of Russian literature. David Murray wrote the music for this opera two years ago, and this time, François Ladrezeau is in the leading role. Congo mi matelas features Klod Kiavué and Christian Lavizo. On this classic song by the late René Perrin, a champion of the lewoz who laid his flow with the American saxophonist, the Guadeloupian trio’s sound is not without reminding 60’s soul classics. Impressions of America in the tropics.

And then there’s Kiama, “a Swahili word I got from a Kenyan author, now a refugee in the United States,” explains Murray. A composition that is written with precision, yet free in form. Marked by a long tenor chorus with drum rolls, emphatic protests, a muffled trumpet, a swinging guitar and pulsating drums, Kiama reflects the true spirit of these Gwo Ka Masters: a fusion in no way unnatural that proves to be extremely powerful, bursting with soul and drive for creative release, extending the declaration of intent of the timeless Body And Soul. Deep, penetrating blues that celebrates the likely reunion of a nation’s people, who remember their roots without ever refusing to look ahead. As the Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant eloquently puts it in his Traité du tout-monde: “It doesn’t undermine identity to question the identical.”

BIOGRAPHY

For many enthusiasts, David Murray is already a jazz legend, if we look at the number of albums he has recorded, of concerts he has performed and at the number of awards with which his career to date has already been crowned (Grammy Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, Bird Award, Danish Jazz Bar Prize, musician of the 80’s by the Village Voice…). However, just over a quarter of a century into his career, his music still expresses the verve and inspiration of youth, throughout a career which is prolific as much in terms of output as in terms of musical orientation (from the World Saxophone Quartet, of which he is one of the founders, to his octet, not forgetting his big band and the encounter with the Gwo Ka Masters of Guadeloupe, amongst many other groups and creations), all of it with the greatest musicians. David Murray goes down as a worthy successor for some of the biggest names in jazz, and he is now contributing to the rise of young talents such as Lafayette Gilchrist, a young pianist who has already been widely acclaimed by the critics.

"Be Bop and shut up! An impossible task for the young David, at the time of the free jazz and civil rights movements, the last adventure of the end of century jazzman. Impossible, too, for the son of Holly Roller parents, discovering the Negro spiritual style in the time of Coltrane and during Ayler's best period, not to be political right down to his tenor-playing fingertips. David Murray, now in his fifties, has 130 albums to his name and contributions to around a hundred other recordings as a guest artist behind him.

At the end of the 1990's, David Murray was referred to in terms of fusion, of world music, and even of Pan-Africanism, ever since he took on a backwards tour through the Caribbean and the 'little' Americas, via South Africa and Senegal. Before setting off on this journey, David Murray jumped the gun somewhat for a jazz musician. Born in Oakland, he grew up in Berkeley and studied with Catherine Murray (his mother, an organist), Bobby Bradford, Arthur Blythe, Stanley Crouch and many others until the 2nd March 1975 when he left Ponoma College in Southern California for New York, which he made his base.

In New York, he met many new musicians and musical styles: Anthony Braxton, Don Cherry, Julius Hemphill ... Within Ted Daniels' Energy Band, he also met Hamiett Bluiett, Olu Dara, Lester Bowie and Frank Lowe. In 1976, after a first European tour, David Murray set up one of his mythical groups, the World Saxophone Quartet with Oliver Lake, Hamiett Bluiett and Julius Hemphill. From Jerry Garcia to Max Roach, via Randy Weston and Elvin Jones, David Murray continued working with ever more artists and making ever more recordings. From 1978 onwards, he entered into a period of intense creativity, one flexible grouping of musicians following on from another.

At the same time, he was writing film music ('W Dubois', 1989, 'Dernier Stade', 1996 and 'Karmen Gaye' in 2000), working with the 'Urban Bush Women' dance company ('Crossing Into Our Promise Land' in 1998) and regularly working with Joseph Papp of the New York Public Theatre ('Photograph', 1978 and 'Spell Number' in 1979) and with Bob Thiele, founder of Impulse and Red Baron, who became his producer in 1988 and signed him with Columbia. Thiele produced six of his albums on Red Baron up until his death in 1997.


David Murray also likes rearranging the works of great composers, as in his project 'The Obscure Works of Duke Ellington' in 1997 (arranged for a big band and a 25-piece string orchestra) or his orchestration of a Paul Gonzales solo 'Tribute to Paul Gonzales' in 1990 (with the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra). More recently, using an octet and 12 strings, he updated the classics of Nat King Cole's Hispanic songbook with 'Cole in Spanish' in 2009.

In addition to this, he has written two operas: 'The Blackamoor of Peter the Great' in 2004 for strings and voices, based on a selection of twenty poems by Pushkin, and 'The Sysiphus Revue', his 2008 bop opera sung by a gospel choir on an Amiri Baraka libretto.

In 2006, his Black Saint Quartet was reborn with 'Sacred Ground', on which Cassandra Wilson can notably be heard. The compositions on this album pay tribute to one of his most auspicious periods with the mythical Italian label Black Saint, and to the republishing of this entire catalogue in digital format on the major digital download sites. This work was moreover followed by the rediscovery of 26 rare tracks recorded on the DIW label, which are now available exclusively for downloading on Emusic, and are a good way for fans to get the measure of the scale of a career which already is dizzying.

In 2010 he will be back out on tour with the Gwo Ka Masters. After giving 200 concerts all around the world during their last tour (2005), the group will set off again to promote their fourth album, 'The Devil Tried to Kill Me', recorded in 2007 at the mythical Deb's Studio in Pointe-à-Pitre with the great Taj Mahal.

At 54 years of age, David Murray has a rosy future ahead of him, and a successful past behind him and, since a glimpse of this exceptional career with a very promising future was felt to be essential, several directors have brought his musical career to the screen, in 'Speaking in Tongues', a saga which follows him for ten years from 1978 to 1988 or in 'Jazzman', in 1997. In 2007, Arte produced 'Saxophone Man', in a reference to the title of the Stanley Croutch play written at the time of Pomona College: a year's filming from New York to Pointe-à-Pitre, via Oakland and Paris, a year of images which reflect the David Murray of today, a citizen of the world.