From the end of the ‘70s to the beginning of the ‘90s, David Murray recorded seventeen albums for the Italian label, which brought him a certain degree of fame, with the World Saxophone Quartet, the group to which he has remained attached, body and soul, but also with Randy Weston, Dave Burell, Lawrence “Butch” Morris, Olu Dara, Anthony Davis, Craig Harris, John Hicks, James “Blood” Ulmer, Don Pullen, Steve Coleman and many others… Most of these albums have since became to be more difficult to find in record shops. But they are all now available again on Internet as digital , each record accompanied by comments by David. What a store of moving souvenirs of musician colleagues who are no longer with us! It was time to reorganize this catalogue, to make it available for the younger generation, and for those who enjoyed the old vinyl LPs, who have since learned to adapt to the CD era. Yes, of course, but what would the past and the future be without the present?
This is why the saxophonist has decided to revive the Black Saint Quartet, which has already existed for more than twenty years, both for live performances and on records, with a new approach which revisits the numbers that were first performed for this label but also features new compositions. David Murray has also just recorded a new album in New York, in January 2007. It’s entitled “Sacred Ground”, and features two key members of the Black Saint Quartet, old friends who are an illustration of the open attitude of the saxophonist, the bassist Ray Drummond and the percussionist Andrew Cyrille. This is jazz built up on its old traditional roots, but also new open and polyrhythmic jazz … To play along with these two who do far more than just accompanying David, Lafayette Gilchrist replaces the late John Hicks... This young pianist from Baltimore has all the history of jazz and a good part of its future at his fingertips. And to make this «crowning achievement» perfect, the quartet has a guest artist, the queen of a subtle sort of jazz, who has already sung on some tracks on the Black Saint label. With a technique marked by soul and folk music, Cassandra Wilson interprets the words written by Ishmael Reed, the surrealist writer, whose incisive style influenced a whole generation, including Black Saint David Murray, with her well-known subtle approach …
Below are the weblinks where you can find the digital tracks and the hard CDs :
www.finetunes.net
BIOGRAPHY :
Be Bop and shut up! No way would the young David Murray bow down : his country was to be the state of free jazz, the last unconquered territory open to the jazzman at the end of the 20th century, where this born-and-bred Methodist would enconter Coltranian terrain and Aylerian temptations, which led him on to the Negro spiritual.
Today, aged 45, David has more than 220 albums behind him that tell of this journeyŠ
At the end of the 90s he has been frequently associated with fusion, world music, even pan-Africanism, reflecting his journey back through time from the West Indies to the Central American islands, via South Africa and Senegal.
From Blaise Makossa's biography of David Murray (2000)
Before embarking on this "journey through time", David Murray had already worked his way brilliantly through the history of jazz. Born in Oakland, he grew up in Berkeley and studied with Catherine Murray (organist and David's mother), Bobby Bradford, Arthur Blythe, Stanley Crouch, Margaret Kohn and many others before he left Ponoma College (Los Angeles) for New York where he moved in 1975.
In New York he met and played with Cecil Taylor, who along with Dewey Redman, gave the young musician the encouragement he needed. The city would again be a source of new encounters, with people and with music from all horizons : Sunny Murray, Tony Braxton, Oliver Lake, Don Cherry. In Ted Daniel's Energy Band he worked with Hamiet Bluiett, Lester Bowie and Frank Lowe.
In 1976, after an European tour, David Murray set up the first of his mythic groups, the World Saxophone Quartet, with Oliver Lake, Hamiet Bluiett and Julius Hemphill. This marked the beginning of an intensely creative time, when one recording led to another, with an endless permutation of formations.
From Jerry Garcia to Max Roach, from Randy Weston to Elvin Jones, David Murray worked as widely as possible until 1978, when he set up his own quartet, then octet and finally his quintet. From this time on his focus is more on his own formations, although he frequently works with other musicians, drawing in a whole range of different sounds, from strings (the 1982 concert at the Public Theatre in New York), to Ka drums from Guadeloupe (Créole in 1998 and Yonn Dé in 2002) and South African dancers and musicians (Mbizo, 1998), just some of the treasures he has discovered on his journeyŠ
David Murray's awards include : a Grammy and several nominations; a Guggenheim Fellowship; the Bird Award; the Danish Jazzpar Prize; Village Voice musician of the decade (1980s); Newsday musician of the year (1993); personality of the Guinness Jazz festival (Ireland, 1994); the Ralph J. Simon Rex Award (1995). Two documentaries have been made about David Murray's life : "Speaking in Tongues" (1982) and "Jazzman", nominated at the Baltimore Film Festival (1999).
"Murray's music stems from the post-free movement, combining the innovations of free in the 70's and New Orleans jazz. It is characterized by its paroxystic effects, producing a harsh, extreme sound. He draws explicitly on African traditions, and symbolizes a return to a raw sound".
From Le Dictionnaire du jazz, éd. Laffont, 1995