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Tony Oxley - Four Compositions for Sextet
Tony Oxley: drums
Jeff Clyne: bass
Derek Bailey: guitar
Evan Parker: tenor saxophone
Kenny Wheeler: trumpet
Paul Rutherford: trombone
A few years removed from hearing this, I think
I must have posted something on this recording a few years back - but I was prompted by listening to this this morning and at lunch today
at full volume, of course
Or at least in hearing it – and listening closely. Oxley sounds at timesw very American in his approach – more broad strokes and Graves like thrashing and crashing at times than I remember. However, his solo towards the end of the third track reveals the subtlety within his power drumming.
Hearing the great improvising horn players fairly near the beginning of their musical lives reveals an excitement not always inherent in some (or much – or most?!?) of their more recent improvising. Well, I can’t vouch for Rutherford as I havn’t been a close follower of his work over the years. But I am pretty familiar with Wheeler – and very familiar with Parker. Parker is possessed. Possessed by the possibility that he might be, is he?
Having little of the massive technique that he would pretty much invent for himself by the 1980’s – ten years before, he is man not in the throes of post-Coltrane enthusia – but a man trying to find his own way to speak – maybe without the mean yet to say it. Maybe Bailey is doing something to him. I believe that this is the first time I have really heaqrd Derek bailey speak – and to this last listen, it only happens with a few notes – or within a few phrases. Through the opening tenor solo after the theme (yes – there are themes here), one realizes it really isn’t a tenor solo – it is Parker/Bailey re-inventing improvisation before our ears.
Imagine this then
Imagine that you don't know that the saxophone player is Evan Parker
raw nerves, baby
when he finally lets it all go about 5-10 minutes into the third track, with the great brass players in unison (or not in unison - who knows - this stuff must have just happened), we stop hearing a tenor saxopne, I think
I think we hear Evan Parker - maybe it is the first time - I think he can't play what he wants to play yet
he will play that music - then *maybe* it is too easy
- here it is raw - as cold as ice, as hot as scorched earth
The whole 40 minutes is superb – and it sure must have been off-putting then – and must be off-putting now – today this record *made* me listen to the massive middle track from Ivo Perelman’s Seeds, Visions & Counterpoint – as I knew there was a small section in that piece that approaches the massive intensity that these guys created when they didn’t even know where they were going.
The core (Parker/Bailey/Oxley/Rutherford) shortly stepped away from the compositional component in whatever they were playing – Although Evan did play in the Brotherhood of Breath throughout much of the 70’s – and really most of what he did for them was take the music even farther away from the melodic aspect of the band. Wheeler drifted into calmer and more melodic areas. What we have here is the second of the transitional Oxley recordings (the first being The Baptized Traveler) where these guys are in the middle of the search
And the joy and real fruits for this sort of music comes when one doesn’t know where one is going
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