David Murray Takes Flight

David Murray turned 70 in February. That feels wrong somehow, not because I’m unaware that time only moves in one direction but because Murray doesn’t fit the mold of an elder statesman. Since his arrival in New York in the mid-’70s, he’s been on a unique creative path, releasing a torrent of material — his Discogs page lists close to 300 credits — in contexts ranging from solo recitals to big bands to collaborations with musicians from all corners of the globe. He never seems to stop moving, and he’s never stayed on a single path for any length of time. Typically, when a jazz musician gets this far into their career, they settle down. Even fire-breathing radicals get predictable. But Murray is still taking chances, as his new album Birdly Serenade proves.

David Murray was born in California and raised in the Church of God in Christ; he grew up playing gospel music alongside his parents, his brother, and a cousin, and the church is still very audible in his music. His first instrument was the alto saxophone, but he switched to tenor and also played guitar. He went to Pomona College where he studied with trumpeter Bobby Bradford, alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe, and poet and sometime drummer Stanley Crouch. As a teenager, he came to New York on an independent study program and interviewed John Cage, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and McCoy Tyner, meeting many other jazz musicians in the process.

“They were all in their own way very helpful to me in entering in my career, you know, people associated with them,” Murray told me the first time we spoke, in 2018. “I met Billy Higgins and Dewey Redman; Dewey was the guy that said, put down the pencil and pick up the saxophone. Which I was going to do anyway… I wanted to be some kind of writer or poet at that time, too, which I didn’t pursue, but I think I could have had two careers, but the music took over. Next thing I know, I’m making records and this and that, and then more records and more tours…”

In about 1975, Murray began performing on New York’s loft scene and drew a lot of attention very quickly. Some of his earliest work can be heard on the compilation Wildflowers: The New York Loft Jazz Sessions, recorded at Sam Rivers’ RivBea Studio in the summer of 1976.) Writing in the Village Voice, Gary Giddins recalled, “When he first showed up in New York — a 20-year-old student on furlough from Pomona College, playing ‘Flowers for Albert’ in Stanley Crouch’s Bowery loft — he had two big things going for him.” Those were a sound unlike anyone else’s, one that mixed free jazz squalling with an old-school romanticism derived from players like Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, and Paul Gonsalves, and “an exceedingly legato approach to time, the obverse of the usual free-jazz assault.” Giddins noted that “Murray’s inclination to play free and even ecstatic was tempered by a desire to play pretty,” and that’s remained true to this day.

Murray has recorded for a stunning array of labels over the years, starting with indies like India Navigation, Circle, Cadillac, and Red and moving to imprints like Black Saint and, for most of the 1990s, DIW. Later, he recorded for Justin Time and Motéma, and he’s just made his first album for Impulse! Records. Birdly Serenade, out this week, features his current quartet of pianist Marta Sánchez, bassist Luke Stewart, and drummer Russell Carter, a group that debuted on last year’s Francesca (named for Murray’s wife and collaborator, Francesca Cinelli).

The album is being released under the aegis of the Birdsong Project, and was produced by Randall Poster and Stewart Lerman. The Birdsong Project began in 2022 with a 20LP box, For The Birds, which featured nearly 250 tracks of original music and bird-related poetry from a stunning array of artists across every possible genre, including Shabaka Hutchings, Makaya McCraven, Yoko Ono, Mark Mothersbaugh, John Cale, and many, many others. Birdly Serenade is the project’s first single-artist release and includes five instrumental pieces with titles like “Bird’s The Word,” “Capistrano Swallow,” and “Bald Ego” and three with vocals: “Birdly Serenade” and “Song Of The World (For Mixashawn Rozie)”, both performed by Ekep Nkwelle, and “Oiseau de Paradis,” featuring Cinelli.

The album’s gestation began at a retreat at Blue Mountain Center in New York’s Adirondack mountains, where Murray and Cinelli lived and worked for 10 days. When I spoke with him by phone earlier this month, he told me that the music was inspired by the poems she wrote, rather than the other way around, as might be expected.

“I’ve had a lot of experience with words,” he said, “because I’ve worked in the past with the great Amiri Baraka, with Ishmael Reed, with Ntozake Shange, and I’ve worked in theater as well, with Joe Papp and the Public Theater. And when you write something from words, even if you take the words away, that song is more powerful, because when you know the words that are behind the song, it almost feels like an anthem to me. And even if I take the words out, I still hear the words, even if I’m playing an instrumental.”

Murray’s current quartet has come together gradually over a period of several years. Russell Carter was in his previous group along with his brother, the bassist Rashaan Carter. Luke Stewart, possibly best known as a member of Irreversible Entanglements, was brought in by Cinelli; Murray said, “He reminds me of the sound I used to have with Fred Hopkins. And he’s even taken it further.” Marta Sánchez, from Madrid, is the most recent addition to the group — she and Murray first performed together in July 2022, when she guested with his quartet and then played a duo show with him the following night.

Murray is clear that this is a working band with a collective identity. He says, “To put them all together and really form a unit is very important to me because they’re younger than me. And they listen to me. And I’m inspired by them. And they push me, yes. I want to be pushed. And it keeps me young to be with these young people. It keeps my spirit — how can I say? It keeps my spirit ready for anything that’s coming my way.”

The group’s sound has evolved quite a bit from its first album to its second. Where Francesca was a set of big, brash tunes with hooks for days and relatively old-school solos, Birdly Serenade is significantly more out. His own playing is wilder, full of squawks and growls, and everyone else is swinging harder and driving the music skyward. “Black Bird’s Gonna Lite Up The Night” in particular is old-school ecstatic free jazz, on a level with the David S. Ware Quartet’s 1990s albums. “The quartet is growing, we’re becoming freer and more elastic than we were at that time when we did the preceding album,” Murray told me. “So I’m sure that the next one will be even freer than this one.”

I asked Murray if there was a gradual transition from playing with peers to the position he now occupies, leading a band of musicians decades younger than himself, or if it was sudden. “Well, first of all, most of the musicians I used to play with are not with us anymore. So they had to be replaced at some point,” he said. But he doesn’t seem particularly interested in playing with those musicians in his peer group who are still around. “I know a lot of musicians that are my age that are all just retiring from their very comfortable teaching positions all over the world. They call me all the time and want to be in my band, but in so many words I just kind of let them know that, well, you’re too old to be in my band.”

He added, “And as far as picking musicians, it’s very obvious in my mind when I get to the point where I analyze why I’ve chosen this musician to fill in certain spots, because you want a piano player that has actually studied the people that I really have liked in the past. I mean, Marta has obviously studied Don Pullen, she’s studied John Hicks, she’s studied Randy Weston, Duke Ellington.” The various backgrounds of the current quartet members are also important to him. “Luke is from Mississippi, Russell is from Washington, and she’s from Madrid. I mean, you have to bring all these aspects of an international kind of a band that can appeal to, first of all, to my ear, and secondly to my international audience and have the strength to push me.”

Appealing to the audience is vital to Murray, and live performance is a major crucible for his music. He likes to take a band on the road before making an album, to allow the new tunes to sink into their bones. “By the time we get into the studio, that music is off the paper and it’s in our minds. We’re playing the music. We’re not just reading the music in the studio. We’ve done that already. We’ve played through the written charts until the songs have become seamless. And when songs become seamless behind me, I mean the band giving that support, then I’m allowed to be free, which frees them up too.”

Then, once the album’s in the can and he can go back out on the road to promote it, Murray wants to give people a genuinely memorable experience. “Someone said about my music once, I think it was Russell’s brother’s girlfriend said, when you go to a David Murray concert, you’re going to dance. And that’s what I want. I want them to dance, scream and holler like they were in the juke joint. Even if I’m playing in a concert, more of a staid kind of concert setting, I want to bring the feeling, I want people to feel like even though they can’t, that they want to dance. I’m dancing, so they should dance too. And scream and holler when there’s something good to holler about. That spurs me on. It gives me energy when I’m on stage to see that the people are enjoying the music enough to move their bodies.”

from  www.stereogum.com