sonny murray

...sonny murray, a mainstay in the freejazz world, top player back in the day and still laying into the traps, exploding the heavens, firing into the unknown with mind melting hammers of noise, re-imagining the eternal NOWness before its began...in the mid '60s the NYC avant garde jazzers were throwing out joints on impossibly small labels in even smaller amounts (ESP-Disk by comparison was a major league contender) to be checked and treasured by cats on the block and in the know, cats who know the score, freeing their mind from the daily grind of keeping one step ahead from going under...this first effort from sunny was taped in NYC for the jihad label who were based out in new jersey in the late days of 1965 and featured his colleage in chaos, albert ayler, trumpet maniac don cherry and leroi jones reads a poem on the last track...gliding, crashing, swooping, in and out of the cosmos, defying the standard normality's of temporal rigidity, weaving the untried patterns of some lost-planet beatnik bop into shards of white light bullets of revolutionary beauty...giving new hope, a stronger fortitude is built on old ills, troubles that cannot be swept totally aside, the new jazz was hated by the critics (downbeat was extremely hostile to the free jazz movement, paranoid of its intent they just plain ran scared, took every opportunity to denigrate it) ignored by the suburban jazzer fans, who got as far out as brubeck,and as far as college dates went, nothing happening there...getting paid in the avant jazz world of NYC was another major non event, clubs didn't like to hire these far out cats as they wouldn't stick to four minute tunes, wouldn't cooperate by doing 3-4 sets a night(a lot of clubs had drink minimums back in the day where the paying customer had to order two/three drinks per set so therefore more sets/more drinks/more bread in the owners pocket), they wanted to do just the one set and let it flow, maybe for as long as it takes, even longer, who knows the eternal length of intangibility...sunny worked as a bouncer at clubs to supplement the meager bread he could scrape up jazzing the skins, which though it sapped his energy gave him the impetus to 'kick out the jams', to work it on out and get in the groove as this extremely heavy and cool joint ably shows, its different every time its spun, it never wears out, its fresh and funky, OUT THERE FOREVER and a day...
...freedom...