New Year / Blue Notes / Robin Kenyatta

No New Year’s list of projects like last year for 2026, but in the New Year, I’ll be endeavouring to write up my notes for reviews that didn’t manage to find a home elsewhere, potentially to include all or some of the following...

—Jessie Cox’s Sounds of Black Switzerland

—Jack Spicer’s Collected Letters and some new Spicerian titles from Wry Press

—Records by the Urs Graf Concert / Gabriel Bristow and Steve Noble

—ake’s debut on Sub Jam

—Bassoonist Karen Borca’s Good News Blues

—Poetry by Ariel Yelen

—N.H. Pritchard’s The Mundus

—Archival releases from Horace Tapscott

 

 

In the meantime, as the sub-zero temperatures descend and the new year begins with the latest bout of criminal invasion, the latest oil-grab and imperialist intervention, the latest blatant violation of international law, some astonishing footage of the Blue Notes at Ronnie Scott’s Old Place on the Ogun Records youtube channel. Ian Hutchinson’s original film The Real McGregor, shot in 1967 and restored by Paul D.J. Moody in 2025, is prefaced with some brief excerpts of newly-shot contemporary interviews—including Hazel Miller, Evan Parker and the late Louis Moholo-Moholo—filmed as a part of an in-progress documentary on the Blue Notes. The (colour) footage itself follows. Chris McGregor on piano, Dudu Pukwana, alto, Mongezi Feza, pocket trumpet, Ronnie Beer, tenor, Johnny Dyanu, bass, and Moholo on drums, playing in the small original venue of Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, maintained by John Jack after Ronnie Scott’s itself moved on to a bigger premises, music every night of the week.

The only previously-available footage of the group I’d seen catches them in an earlier iteration, shortly after initially moving to Europe. Though the footage only offers truncated glimpses of a full performance, they’re still more recognisably within the bop-oriented mode with which they’d began than the free music to which they soon gravitated within the experimental laboratory of the London music scene. In terms of records, the music featured here is most reminiscent of the 1968 album Very Urgent, released under McGregor’s name, perhaps the group’s closest engagement with free jazz, and in itself marking a transitional stage to the emergence of the Brotherhood of Breath big band, documented in a chapter of Bill Shoemaker’s excellent Jazz in the Seventies.

For these exiles, uprooted from their homeland by apartheid, The Old Place became a kind of home, a lab, as well as a stage. Shoemaker notes that “without a piano in his flat, McGregor spent all-nighter after all-nighter composing in the damp, cold basement venue, often falling asleep at the piano”. Informed by material difficulty, in which the group often struggled for gigs and to make ends meet, the music has as its backround too loss, sorrow, and turmoil: The Blue Notes’ original tenor player Nik Moyake, returned to South Africa soon after the group’s original departure, dying of a brain tumour in 1965, while Moholo and Dyani would be stranded for months in Argentina, where they’d gone on tour with Steve Lacy, after the 1966 anti-commnist military coup (watched with approval by the USA). But this is not music of existential negativity, formalist exploration, or anarchic destruction, tendencies perhaps more pronounced in the European versions of free music in which it participated, so much as the persistent and insistent declaration of liberation, as a process always in motion. Key to the Blue Notes was the influence of kwela, a Zulu word meaning “get up”. In 1967, Pukwana, Beer and McGregor appeared on Gwigwi Mwrebi’s album Kwela. McGregor hung out with Albert Ayler for several days, talking and playing. Dancing, and other forms of ascension, rising. Free music was not a movement away from dance but into other ways of moving and using the body.

In this footage, we see the Blue Notes a few years into their exile from apartheid, playing as if their lives depended on it, or with a new lease of life, the formal opening up of the music to create that unique and beautiful synthesis of free playing and endless melodic capacity, song as collective repository. Within the basement club’s cramped conditions, it’s all the camera can do to keep the musicians in the frame: an intimacy and an expansion, as if the collective and individual force this group represented couldn’t be contained by the media in which it was captured. Recordings after all, as we know from Baraka’s comment on Albert Ayler, are but rumours of the original, in-person blaze of sound. Rumours, ruins. But here they are through the restored lo-fi haze, dispelling time’s mists and basement cold in blazing heat: Mongezi Feza’s foot lurching out as if kicking a football or stabilizing himself during his solos, as if otherwise his playing might cause him to levitate: Moholo stopping playing for a moment, looking exhausted but not spent, preparing himself to re-enter a music which it sometimes seems can never stop; a Dyani bass solo which cuts away to images of painting, a laughing baby, the life that surrounds the music that compresses it into the space of a bandstand and the time of a gig; the furious, raucuous, joyous collective soloing by Feza, Pukwana, Ronnie Beer. (Perhaps the least-remembered of The Blue Notes today, Beer later left music to build boats in Ibiza but was a key part of the South African jazz scenes from which they emerged: this film offers a fine opportunity to see him at work). McGregor’s piano, meanwhile, launches speedy runs that blur into the sustain pedal then come out again into staccatoed clarity, moving in surges or waves, and the music as a whole is constant movement, towards the end of apartheid, yes, but also that constant search that moves beyond any end point. Restored from another era, the music sounds out of a past but also with the promise of a future not yet arrived. The music’s quality, Evan Parker notes in his interview, is “certainty”. As the year turns, reading the news, going out on the street, facing the upending of orders or their continuance in more brazen form, the spread once more of something that moves towards a fascist consensus, all gives rise to of doubt, despair, a series of shocks. That certainty is something vital. It’s how The Blue Notes survived—and—maybe—it’s how we might get out of this.

*** 

Available to subscribers on Substack, an essay on the varied career of the neglected saxophonist Robin Kenyatta. This might be the first substantial piece on him in decades—at least, according to my initial attempts at researching Kenyatta: a player who’s been on the edge of my listening consciousness for a while now, since hearing his solos on records by Bill Dixon and Andrew Hill, but whose full career had so far eluded me. There’s still much that’s unclear, but for now, consider this something like a listening guide. Here’s a sample.

Something of the dual character of Kenyatta’s work is suggested by the fact that he was spotted by Bill Dixon—one of the most committed of the avant-gardists—while playing with Pucho and his Latin Soul Brothers. Replacing Giuseppi Logan in Dixon’s groups, Kenyatta takes a searing solo four minutes into ‘Metamorphosis 1962-1966’ from Dixon’s 1967 Intents and Purposes: a ballad feature full of yearning, somewhere between fulfilled desire and its anxious absence that always reminded me of Charlie Mariano on Mingus’s The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady—or for that matter, Mingus’s more usual alto player, John Handy, a mentor of Kenyatta’s. The same year, Kenyatta appeared—alongside a rare recorded appearance from Logan—on Roswell Rudd’s Everwhere, returning the favour the following year with Rudd’s appearance on his own debut, Until. The wide-open, folk-tinged quality that Rudd brought to Shepp’s group and his own projects suits Kenyatta perfectly: there’s a declarative, melodically-focused joy to everything he plays. Technically extremely proficient, he plays flute, alto and soprano saxophones with equal felicity, and in the late ’60s had a phase of playing exclusively on tenor. Until opens, unusually, with a ballad—the title track, written by pianist Barry Miles (not to be confused with the British writer of the same name, Miles featured Kenyatta on the Third Stream-ish album Presents his New Syncretic Compositions in 1966). As previously evidenced on his appearance on Intents and Purposes, ballads were Kenyatta’s strength. One senses he knew this. Interviewed by Robert Palmer in 1974, he noted that he attempted to convey meaning and feeling through tone rather than prolixity of notes: why play ten notes where one will do?

"You invest in Loss": Abdullah Ibrahim Live

Abdullah Ibrahim Trio, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, September 7th 2024

As HKW Director Bonnaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung remarks from the stage, “when Abdullah Ibrahim is in town, he deserves a packed house”, and the audience duly flows into the Miriam Makeba Auditorium well past the advertised start time. Beginning fifteen minutes late, the concert lasts perhaps another ninety without a break, although it feels much shorter. Now 90 years old, Ibrahim largely follows the format of his recent trio album 3, recorded last year at London’s Barbican. Ibrahim, flautist Cleave Guyton and bassist Noah Jackson—the latter members of his group Ekeda—rarely play together as a trio. Rather, the pianist alternates extended solos with duo features, from up-tempo, traditionally-swinging jazz—Guyton playing Monk on piccolo, Jackson playing ‘Giant Steps’ on double-bass—to slower pieces characterised by Bachian counterpoint and timbral combinations reminiscent of the exquisite 1963 duos recorded by Eric Dolphy and Richard Davis. But Ibrahim is the real focus, his playing manifesting what we might call late style: pared down, all ornamentation cleared away.

 
For decades, Ibrahim’s solo performances have involved long medleys in which fragments of his familiar songbook are linked like flowers in a garland. In the past, these were often driven by propulsive groove. As he gets older and older, the medleys get slower and slower, music stripped back to the bare bones—a blues scale, a Monkian dissonance, a rich, impressionistic chord. As Ibrahim once remarked of Good News From Africa, his superlative 1973 duet with bassist Johnny Dyani, “[when] you play bebop, you fill out a space. When you play our music, you don’t play notes, you just play space!” Without a rhythm section, Ibrahim’s rubato playing unfolds introspectively, in flexible, slow time. Chords, melodies, transitions come together as in a waking dream, in which each phrase has simultaneous fragility and depth. It’s as if the weight of history accumulated in the pianist’s fingers at once lends them the collective power to strike the keys, and weighs them down, so that each note played must be wrested from the accumulated ghosts of time, ageing and history. To play is to “invest in loss”, Ibrahim remarks in a recent interview. One must “strike the note [...] with the utmost sincerity”, because “you don’t expect to get anything in return”.

 
We might, I think, view all of Ibrahim’s late performances as essentially variations on the same structure. In a 1984 interview with Graham Lock, Ibrahim linked the role of repetition in his music to the Islamic Tariqa, or state of trance. “At home we have chants – you say: ‘There is no God but He’; say that for five, ten hours, you’ll get stoned! [...] That’s where the music comes from and its purpose is to put you in that stage[.]” Previously, this could be heard in the repeated, loop-like structures which guided and grounded Ibrahim’s music. But his current mode, a set of repeated ruminations on the same pieces, might too be linked to that state of Tariqa, to the way a prayer follows a set pattern in order to address questions that remain new precisely through repetition, drawing again on that water from an ancient well. Tonight, the beautiful and sombre ‘Blue Bolero’ that emerges as the evening’s theme or leitmotif, a kind of anti-fanfare, as it did overt twenty years ago on African Magic, another trio album recorded at HKW back in 2001, as well as on the more recent Dreamtime. The piece is played three or four times, orientating the music, giving it direction.

 
Towards the end of the performance, Ibrahim plays the melody to ‘Ubu Suku (Evening)’, a piece first heard on Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar Brand Trio back in 1963, but receiving perhaps its finest rendition in a breath-catching duet version with Archie Shepp the following decade. I’d had the melody in my head all day: one of Ibrahim’s most beautiful pieces, its melodic figures rise and fall, surging into an impassioned sigh met with a lilting, halting left-hand reply. Guyton and Jackson’s arrangement for clarinet and cello gives the piece a chamber-music quality, but it’s the special weight of Ibrahim’s brief solo rendition that sticks in the mind. As the applause rings out, Ibrahim returns once again to ‘Blue Bolero’, then abruptly stands up from keyboard. His wife, Marina Umari, comes on stage to support him as he links arms with the other musicians and the audience rise for a standing ovation. Putting a hand to the side of his head, he sings, unamplified, as he’s done at the end of all his recent concerts, alternating a South African refrain with English words bespeaking the Middle Passage. (On 3, the piece is sub-titled ‘The Sound of Centuries Old Maritime Cargo’.) “When I came back, there was no one there to welcome me home”, he sings, barely audible. With everyone in the room standing, it’s as if we were at church, the music carrying the weight of those apartheid years in which Ibrahim became a kind of national composer, Mandela calling him “our Mozart”, but also of those longer and ongoing imperial histories with which those years are entwined.

 
I hear a voice from the audience quietly harmonizing behind me, and imagine if the whole hall had raised their voice in anthem. But that would not have been appropriate, for this is about quietness, about ‘solotude’: being alone, but with witnesses. Ibrahim keeps singing as he’s guided off stage, and as he disappears into the shadows and the applause gets louder, I swear I can still hear him singing, and I wonder where his mind has travelled. For this music is not just about one person, but about those legacies which have formed and informed his music, and this song is neither a statement of facile resolution nor fatalistic acceptance, but of a kind of hope that comes out of facing the abyss, plucking a note out of it, a word, a song. I swear I can still hear him singing.

'Why?' Alan Shorter's Parabolic 'Free' Jazz

A heavily revised and much expanded version of these initial notes now appears in Point of Departure, Issue 71 (June 2020): http://www.pointofdeparture.org/PoD71/PoD71Shorter.html. Thanks to Bill Shoemaker.

Spurred by the randomised algorithm of online listening to pay attention to some things I hadn’t heard, or, really, thought about, for years, I thought I’m going to briefly focus here on the two records released under his own name by Alan Shorter: trumpeter and flugelhorn player, elder brother of Wayne, obscure even amongst the already obscured field of the 1960s “New Thing”. Growing up in Newark, New Jersey, with Wayne, friends with Amiri Baraka, Shorter initially played saxophone before switching to trumpet, perhaps due to Wayne’s growing fame. Baraka knew the ‘weird Shorter brothers’ in Newark, NJ (back when Alan was a bebop player) and provides a helpful essay in the CD reissue liners to Shorter’s debut album Orgasm, noting that they reconnected at Howard University – where both were blackballed from the fraternity – and Shorter’s switching from saxophone to trumpet. Though nowhere near Wayne's soon-meteoric rise, spurred by membership in the Jazz Messengers and Miles Davis’ ‘Second Great Quintet’, the elder Shorter nonetheless had some sort of presence within the burgeoning New York free jazz underground, playing with the New York Art Quartet (hitherto-unheard tracks have recently surfaced on the massive ‘Call it Art’ boxset), and on dates by Marion Brown and Archie Shepp – most especially, Four for Trane (1964), as well as some more obscure later dates from later 1960s and early 1970s, when both Shorter and Shepp were plying their trade on the European circuit – as well as a kind of cameo on Wayne’s own The All Seeing Eye with a recording of his piece ‘Mephistopheles’.

On the latter, Herbie Hancock, normally the expert builder of solos full of melodic and harmonic invention, is reduced to repeating a single note at the lower end of the piano while the Shorter brothers take slow, odd solos that promise to build to a climax that never comes. Piano disappears on Shorter’s first record, Orgasm, recorded in 1968 with a quartet format of Shorter (playing flugelhorn on all but one track), a ‘fire music’ tenor player as a foil (on Orgasm, the role if filled by Gato Barbieri; on Shorter's sophomore album, Tes Esat, it's the more obscure Gary Windo). Don Cherry had made similar use of Pharoah Sanders and Barbieri on his own records from a few years before, in which bands move through suite-like structures, full of changing moods and generic nods. On Shorter's record, Charlie Haden’s bass and Muhammad Ali’s splashily boxy drums offer a more insistently forward momentum (check out the back-beats on ‘Rapids’!), and Barbieri’s solos more often swirl around iterations and reiterations of melody – as well as harmonics that sound like the Surrealist meeting, not so much of a sewing machine and an umbrella, as of a drill and a lyre bird. Shorter’s heard more here than he will be on Tes Etat, his solos brightly buzzing. The playing sounds less burnished, less introspectively moody than his contribution to 'Mephistopheles': both the bright openness and the thinner buzzing around the edges of that sound recall Cherry, but the odd pauses are something else again. Shorter seems always to wait just that little bit too long before re-entering with another melodic variant or set of fast-repeating, trilled burrs, giving a kind of ante-chamber, limbo, waiting room feel – a destabilising effect that’s not so much the sardonic, ironic, quizzical sound pianist Andrew Hill was getting in this period from a similar playing with time, as a constant holding-in of breath, sound of claustrophobia, anxiety, but more on the part of listener than player, perhaps. In the multiple sense of musical 'playing', something’s been toyed with, though that toying's not necessarily playful.

The same is true of the composed melodies to the pieces, which are just as important as the improvisations that follow. They’re slow, but not ballads, knotty, but not fast or virtuosic. They sound very much composed (to the extent that the drummer will often seem to be playing the melody with the same melodic and rhythmic accentuation as the horns), and they’re repeated many times – they’re not just throwaway prefaces to ‘blowing’. One review describes them as ‘sinister’ - and, indeed, Wayne Shorter notes that Alan was inspired by Dracula and Frankenstein movies (Wayne himself preferring musical and sic-fi) – and this sense of the (bend) sinister, the left-ward curve, maybe has to do with that sense of waiting again, the expectation of something, but a something of which one’s not quite certain, an expectation of expectation. Their emotional tenor lacks – to run through a fairly random list - the rhapsodic or hopeful quality of one strain of free jazz – the Noah Howard, Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders kind of melody – the ecstatic religious fervour of the Ayler variety, the Romanticism of Cecil Taylor’s composed pieces, the spring-in-the-step joy of Ornette or Cherry. This lack of placeability (which often gets named in the little commentary there is on Shorter ‘intellectual’ – for want of a better word, as ever) is both why Shorter’s music has been neglected (as well as the massive shadow of his brother) and the reason it still fascinates.

Orgasm is not the title one would immediately associate with the music – hence, perhaps, the re-issue of the session under the name of another of the tracks, Parabolic. There’s deliberation if not ecstasy (one always knows who’s doing what on this record), a sustained plateau of concentration, intensity and pleasure if not particular moments of release. But metaphors are not what's important here. If this is music that always suggests an elsewhere - a scene of action that's taking place outside the sphere of the music itself - it doesn't have a the vocabulary to express this elsewhere that metaphor in language provides. In his retrospective liner note essay, Baraka describes the music as “weird, thorny, stylishly tenuous”. That’s stylishly, not stylistically – the music is tenuous, yet it also has a kind of forward momentum, an insistence - “the march or marked stride of something portentous, even dangerous”. Yet, as Baraka put sit in a later poem of his ownL "I seen something / You seen it too / You just can't call its name". And so this intuition, this half-knowledge, this inkling of a mood or a thought may bring a forward “thrust” to the music – perhaps the insistent drumbeat (so different to Tes Esat, at times approaching the military taps that the Ayler band would channel) - yet that "thrust" will always be belied by a sense of uncertainty, or possibility – “it could be this way, but then again…who knows”. Parabolic. In Baraka’s narrative account, Shorter will periodically turn up in the same social orbit, from high school to university to New York bohemia to the Black Nationalist context of the Congress of African Peoples (CAP), but it’s never clear what directions he’s going in musically (he may have switched instruments, or styles). For Baraka, this is reflected in the music, which he links more broadly to the uncertainty of the '60s jazz avant-garde or ‘new music’ in general, an uncertainty central to the awkward ways in which that music was phrased in relation to what Werner Sollors famously dubbed, from a phrase of Baraka's own, a ‘populist modernism’.

“New, but relative to what?” Baraka asks. “Aggressive and determined […] not altogether certain of what”. The music is meant to “call for a ‘new dispensation’, perhaps, of the whole order of things”. Note that perhaps. Clarity and uncertainty, declamation and the tenuous, “mood and emotion”. Baraka links Shorter’s use of flugelhorn to Miles Davis (on those 1950s Gil Evans records) and the notion of ‘cool’ – a certain secrecy, a holding back which yet gives a sense always that there is more to say, held back either deliberately, out of diffidence, out of calculation, hesitation, control. A new dispensation of the entire order of things: the destruction and remaking of the world itself. These are the revolutionary and cosmic messages of much music of this era, of Baraka's own writing from that era too - these later liner notes, written in 1997, adopting a more reflective, diffident approach in keeping with Shorter's own music, and in that weird sense, making Shorter's music seem all the more timely in the '90s than in the present of its recording. What we have here -- 'perhaps' -- is the fantasy of a music that does not yet exist (which includes both the mysteriousness and apparent incompleteness of Shorter's own discography and the incompleteness of the music in general) poking out from around the corner of these traces that do. Baraka’s vocabulary suggests that this music is a "warning", a "short, fearsome message", offering bursts of "proto-rational description": not celebration, not ecstasy, but cryptic declamations, reports on a state of reality that, for those who mendaciously broker power and for those who do not stop to think on it, does not appear to actually exist. This is emphatically not mystical, however, but a rational report on states of collapse, of transfers to other states, other ways of being. It's interesting too that Baraka sees Shorter’s solos not, in the vocabulary familiar from much free jazz criticism, as ‘explosions’, but ‘implosions’, "somehow removed, as a statement from the whole […] as if he is commenting on, rather than existing as part of the whole". For Baraka, this is to do with Shorter not having found his own voice as soloist – the compositions containing the real sum of his individuality, even as they sometimes sound like the "outline of a tune" more than the tune itself.


If, then, free jazz is often seen as a model for and reflection on social conditions – both in terms of protesting existent arrangements and offering models of cooperation that could challenge it – Shorter’s concerns seem more abstruse. As Wayne puts it, "Alan created his own world. He had some ideas about breaking through the old of the mass-aimed [i.e. commercial] forms […] no bands behind him, no arrangements." This meant that Alan "was always in confrontation, or there were confrontations on the horizon…with record executives, rehearsal places, front offices, professors in school." Similar tensions emerged in the recording session for Orgasm, though it seems, not this time at his own instigation – in the liners, Rashied Ali recalls how he accused producer Esmond Edwards of deliberately playing with the musicians by requesting multiple takes of a piece that already had a successful recording, ultimately walking out of the studio. This led to the music being recorded by two rhythm sections on two separate dates, with Charlie Haden and Rashied's brother Muhammad subbing for Reggie Johnson and Ali. Though there's little to go on apart from this story, we might speculate that Edwards' apparent hostility had to do with lack of familiarity with, or hostility to, free jazz (Edwards had come up as a pioneering photographer and producer during the 1950s, working for prestige records). Whatever the case, what emerges here is a doubleness: the enforced framing of artistic vision within the confines of recording booth, the control of a producer managing and controlling expectation; and the doubled recording session.

A more conducive home seems to have been found in Europe, though again, recorded evidence is sparse: some dates with Shepp (the sprawling and somewhat unfocussed Pitchin' Can, Coral Rock, Doodlin', and 'Full Moon Ensemble' albums, and appearances in large group contexts with Alan Silva, Francois Tusques, and apparently (though this seems somewhat unlikely) the Kenny Clarke-Francy Boland big band. Two years after Orgasm, Shorter recorded his only other album as a leader, Tes Esat, in London. In the liner notes, Shorter tells Val Wilmer: “Everybody is a leader, there’s no sidemen any more – sidemen are decadent. Free music has a kind of leadership of its own”. Certainly no ‘decadence’ here, no excess or ornamentation – this is free jazz as sometimes austere focus, implosion rather than explosion, muted and mysterious even in its outbursts. Tes Esat – the title is uncertain, an anagram, a play on sitting and having sat, or a test, a private joke? I guess the obvious word is ‘estates’ – not ‘states’ (states of being – Shorter in the liners talks about ‘living’ rather than what one is doing while living) – but legacies, propertied repositories of wealth or dispersed traces of preceding lives. Anagrams involve the rearrangement of fixed elements, a working with, worrying at the edges of, the given, that works in terms of the spirit if not the structural operations of Shorter’s music. One feels here not so much that the musicians are discovering new ideas in their playing as working at the cracks of what already exists, and finding that as mysterious, as inexplicable, filled, perhaps with horror, or a more inscrutable sense of dread, as the ostensibly unknown. As we've seen, Shorter’s best-known piece is called 'Mephistopheles' – the broker of the devil’s bargain in the search for knowledge; the risks of the unknown, but also the risks of the given. Ostinato rumble, smoothly off-tumble, extended wail, clipped report / retort. Again, Baraka’s notions of 'description', combined with his notions of ‘cool’ – an apparent oddity when talking about the ‘heat-filled’ music of free jazz – fit well here. Description is about telling what you know; cool, often, about holding back what you know to give the impression of knowing more than you're letting on--secrecy, holding-back, as tools of power. Shorter's music falls somewhere in between.

Cool jazz for the free jazz age? Perhaps. In any case, this is not music about soloing, or virtuosity. What’s extraordinary about Tes Esat, even more so than Orgasm (though Orgasm is probably the better record overall) is how little Shorter's own playing is foregrounded, and how little in fact the horns appear at all. Before the melody statement comes in, tracks will open with a minute or two of just bass and drums, in a kind of abstract territory where a lot is happening, in terms of notes and switches of register, but at the same time almost nothing seems to be happening: again, we’re in an anteroom, a pause, a limbo, waiting for the ‘head’ that we know will appear. (Instead it’s a bass player rather than one of the horns that dominates the record: the great Johnny Dyani’s slipping, sliding harmonics, swooning and scrabbling, as well as his piano playing on the first track.) When the melodies do appear, they’re somehow both curt and extended, always played in unison by the horns with long held, repeated notes that are stabbed out over a busy backdrop, their repetitive stasis all the more emphasized by the business of bass and drums. Shorter’s music is far from Ornettish, a comparison that’s been made on the basis of the piano-less format of his two albums as leader. While some free jazz melodies/heads are overtly stripped down, essentially just preliminaries to free playing, Shorter’s – like, say, Albert Ayler’s – are very much a part of the piece, and thus, more than ‘heads’. Not that the improvisations take place on their harmonic frame, but the sound of the composed material being articulated at the beginning and end of the piece is as vital to the piece as are the improvised sections. Can one imagine a through-composed free jazz? Where's the freedom here, what spaces do we traverse. When the 'freely' improvised sections do occur, Shorter tends to lay out, while Windo’s saxophone, possibly put through some sort of electronic effect (unless it’s just the distortion on the recording), is as abrasive in its tone as any I’ve heard, not through playing hard and fast so much as the well-judged screech or smear, sounds which sometimes appear as if from another world – I think some of these are also the yelps, the vocalised exhortations, the bits of percussion and so on that Dyani employs. But really, that’s the total effect of this music too. Music that’s present yet somehow doesn’t fully reveal itself, material in its sometimes limited focus yet ghostly in its otherness. “Listening to Alan Shorter gives one the impresions of being felled by a feather duster” writes
poet Ron Welburn. in a rare review of his work in a 1973 issue of Black World . Or “an open night, with things flying around in it”. Mechanical birds, organic industrial objects, claustrophobic ghosts on an open plain.

On the album cover to Tes Etat, the musicians are caught in a spotlit against a dark background, dressed in Afro-centric dashikis and wearing shades in the 'cool' vein of which Baraka speaks. Though we see Shorter relaxed and laughing in a studio shot on the back of the LP sleeve, the light's harsh glare here seems designed to appear intimidating, capturing the musicians, catching them (out). Yet rather than looking caught -- whether in cop-headlights, military searchlights, the spotlights of an often hostile 'entertainment' business -- they stand, even sit, their ground. They're not going anywhere, won't be read. And so this music, its insistent (un)availability. Wrecked estates, plentiful absences, the dip and curve of parabolic reverie or nightmare; even, of some kind of detached rest, if not peace. As Wayne Shorter notes of Alan in an interview with Baraka printed in the reissue notes to Orgasm, "Teachers would mark his papers, and he would ask 'Why?' on top of the teacher’s marks."

Alan Shorter’s music continues to ask questions – of us, the world, itself.