DAVE BURRELL — Echo (review)

DAVE BURRELL — Echo album cover Album · 1969 · Avant-Garde Jazz Buy this album from MMA partners
1.5/5 ·
Ricochet
Surely even free-form music has its limits. This album by Dave Burrell could be one of the most horrid free-jazz albums I ever heard. There's an anarchistic, antimusical dope in the endeavour, in a time of strong interest for limitless gusto; thus Echo could fit in the late '60s "olatunjinian" wave of expressionism. Even so, I like the think of Burrell as simply a provocateur, crafting something wild of his own after being impressed by others, only wretchedly.

You can't say the collective is made up of hobos either, especially when you have Archie Shepp (which, I suspect, had already released his own extreme music by then) or Clifford Thorton at the cornet (a musician who launched, among others, a favourite of mine these days, Joe McPhee). Burrell told in an interview that they all just blasted in the darkness of the recording room until half an hour would have passed, plus that the Frenchmen from BYG didn't really knew how to record and mix the whole chunk. The title-track is truly brutal, while its LP counterside is rather loose. Initially (yes, I did listen to this more than once!) only Burrell caught my attention, as he mercilessly pounds his instrument in the first part, then, almost in an attempt to screw with us listeners, practices his do-re-mi or plays motifs from romantic serenades in the second part. But the others change their moods as well, and I can almost say I prefer them constricted to the bluster (in "Echo") than each playing whatever they feel like (in "Peace"). So everything on this album is either tasteless, either aimless.

Burrell was excentric enough to follow up this nervous breakdown, the same year and again for the radicals over at BYG (Don Cheery's Mu, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Gong's Camembert), with a weird version of Puccini's La Boheme, getting stuck somewhere between classical and jazz. After a nine-year hiatus, he reverts to drawing inspiration from Ellington or Monk.
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