David

TRACKLISTING

1. El Bodeguero
2. Quizas, quizas, quizas
3. Tres Palabras
4. Piel Canela
5. No me platiques
6. Black Nat
7. Cachito
8. A Media Luz
9. Aqui se habla en amor

EXTRACT FROM THE LINER NOTES BY GARY GIDDINS

Few musicians in jazz history have proven more vigorously productive and resourceful than David Murray. During the past 35 years, from the moment he first visited New York as a 20-year-old student, playing in a walkup loft, in 1975, David has careened forward in a cool, collected, rocket-fueled streak. He has released over 150 albums under his own name. Yet more impressive than the numbers is the constancy of two abiding achievements: as a tenor saxophonist, he has perfected an instantly recognizable approach to improvisation that even in its freest flights acknowledges the gravity of a tradition he honors more than most; and he has altered the context for his improvisations as an infinite mosaic of musical challenges and explorations.

With this new album, we hear the fruit of one of David Murray’s most improbable and effective projects: an interpretation of two albums that Nat King Cole recorded in Spanish and Portuguese in 1958 and 1962, performing melodies from Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires.

The result is one of Murray’s most purely pleasurable albums. It demonstrates a tremendous leap in his approach to a world of music that has long fascinated him. The arrangements are imaginative, compelling, and wily, especially in the integration between winds and stings. The band is as tight as a fist. And there is a stunning feature for David Murray the improviser, a sensational tour de force and high spot in his massive discography.

The Cuban songwriter and flutist (known as “la flauta magica”) Richard Egues wrote the enduring El Bodeguero (the Grocer’s Cha Cha), which inspired Murray to take a more Ellingtonian approach, using an expansive swing rhythm that underplays the cha-cha-cha beat emphasized by Cole. It concludes with his own signature approach to counterpoint, a frequent joy throughout the album. David’s solo is exceptional, at times echoing the mellow strength of Ben Webster, especially in the middle section. There are also telling solos by trombonist Denis Cuni Rodriguez, a graduate of the National School of Music in Havana and an educator in his own right, and pianist Jose “Pepe” Rivero, a composer with an accomplished classical piano technique.

Quizas, Quizas, Quizas, one of two selections by Cuban songwriter Osvaldo Farrés, is perhaps the best remembered of Cole’s interpretations, complete with Romeu’s lovely strings. Composed in the 1940s, it was much covered and memorably revived in Wong Kar-Wai’s film In the Mood for Love. After the tenor and trumpet split the theme chorus, shadowed by the ensemble, we hear the insinuating, whisky-stained, darker than pitch voice (Tom Waits squared) of Daniel Melingo, a veteran of Buenos Aires rock who went to Spain to score films for Pedro Almodovar, and, in the late 1990s, returned to Argentina to spearhead a tango revival. For most Americans, this will be the first encounter with an artist who has garnered much attention throughout Latin America.

From the 1962 album, More Cole Español, the second Osvaldo Farrés classic, Tres Palabras here given a deeper emotional cast than Cole’s version by the trumpet playing of Mario Felix Hernandez Morejon, who is at home with Mozart as well as jazz. This selection features one of Murray’s most lyrical arrangements, in the way he frames the solos; it finishes with a climax that entwines Murray, Filiu, and Ruiz in an episode that might be called Tres Saxofonistas.

Piel Canela is the best known song by Bobby Capó, the Puerto Rican entertainer and songwriter who came to New York to work with Xavier Cugat, and soon became a Latin American celebrity in his own right. Murray replaces Ralph Carmichael’s vamp with a contrapuntal intro to a performance that includes another inspired alto solo and a fierce Murray wrap-up solo.

Yet Murray’s solo triumph on this session is, as noted, the remarkable No me platiques a serenade by the Mexican composer Vicente Garrido, known as The Master. This is all Murray and strings—an eight-minute, superbly paced cri de coeur, combining romance and drollery before attaining a deep, persuasive resolution. Murray original, Black Nat uses riffs to build an intricate ensemble backing for the soloists, including tenor saxophonist Ariel Bringuez Ruiz, though it is Murray who unmistakably claims the climax.
From the 1958 Cole Espanol. Cachito Cole’s first venture in Spanish was recorded entirely in Hollywood, with a Dave Cavanaugh arrangement and an orchestra made up of Latino musicians in Los Angeles. The song, written by Mexican pianist and composer Consuelo Velázquez, best known for her imperishable standard “Besame Mucho,” has three eight-bar melodies. Murray’s written obbligato for winds and the strings gives the illusion of spontaneous invention, especially during the C section—whirling in double-time responses to the melody statement by tenor saxophone. We are also introduced to the bebop radiance of the alto saxophonist. Roman Filiu, who worked with Irakere and recorded with David on his excellent rhythm-and-strings album Waltz Again.

Edgardo Donato’s legendary 1920s tango, A media luz generated a delightful Cole performance, smooth and sure, but in this version, it reclaims its tango roots in a performance featuring Daniel Melingo, himself a musical descendant of Carlos Gardel, who helped make it a standard. Murray turns to the bass clarinet, choosing his notes with care and sustaining the rare sense of accomplishment when two musical worlds discover they have more in common than is generally acknowledges or celebrated. Murray Plays Cole in Español is all celebration.

Aqui se habla en amor was the ringer in the Cole repertory, as it was composed by Jack Keller, a prolific writer of mostly forgotten Top-40 tunes (his clients ran the gamut from Perry Como to Frankie Avalon), and his mentor Noel Sherman, who had written the Cole hit, “To the Ends of the Earth.” Murray takes the tempo up and employs divergent melodies to recreate the piece as a cool, modern jazz theme—the layered themes indicating an Eastern quality as well.

Notes by Gary Giddins. Gary Giddins is the author of Visions of Jazz, Warning Shadows, and several other books. He wrote the first review of David Murray in the “Village Voice” in 1975: it was favorable.

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 Baptist 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 Los Angeles 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 worked with Hamiett Bluiett, 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 Bust 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 more than ten 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 Work of Duke Ellington' in 1997 (arranged for a big band and a 25-piece string orchestra) or his re-transcription of a Paul Gonsalves solo 'Tribute to Paul Gonsalves' in 1990 (with the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra). More recently, using a decet 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.

David Murray playing "Banished" with the Black Saint Quartet @ Jazz Standard on last January 2007, Ray Drummond (bass), Andrew Cyrille (drums) and Lafayette Gilchrist (piano):

David Murray performing live at Village Vanguard in New York in 1986 with Ed Blackwell (drums), John Hicks (piano), Fred Hopkins (bass):

INFLUENCES

Nat King Cole, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Jerry Garcia, World Saxophone Quartet, Coleman Hawkins, Jaco Pastorious, Association for the Advance of Creative Musicians (AACM), Sun Ra, Sonny Rollins, Bobby Bradford, Arthur Blythe, Stanley Crouch, Margaret Kohn , Cecil Taylor, Dewey Redman, Roland Kirk, Sunny Murray, Tony Braxton, Oliver Lake, Don Cherry, Ted Daniel Energy Band, Lester Bowie, Frank Lowe, Oliver Lake, Hamiet Bluiett and Julius Hemphill, Max Roach, Randy Weston, Elvin Jones, Jack DeJohnette, McCoy Tyner, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Albert Ayler, Cuban Son, Cuban Rumba, GwoKa music from Guadaloupe, Gospel, Soul, Funk.