TheMarkHarveyGroupARiteForAllSouls CDCelebrationAug92020
MARK HARVEY

Online Video

Jazz music community with review and forums

Kudos from The Wire for A Rite for All Souls: “This music of bracing power was born of an alertness and sensitivity to prevailing musical currents, and offered its own strikingly original point of view on the free jazz revolution….the four players proved adept at blending and overlapping their sounds into an intricately stitched together ensemble music – churning percussion providing a magic carpet which lifts the players toward the heavens.” – Philip Clark, The Wire

A Rite for All Souls is a long-lost 1971 recording of The Mark Harvey Group in concert (Mark Harvey, brasswinds; Peter H. Bloom, woodwinds; and their late colleagues Craig Ellis and Michael Standish, percussion). The original reel-to-reel tapes, re-discovered in 2018, have been digitally remastered to offer an exquisite audiophile-quality recording (monaural), in a 2-CD set with an illustrated booklet.

This video presents a livestream celebration of A Rite for All Souls. Veteran jazz writer Bob Blumenthal interviews Mark Harvey and Peter Bloom, and plays excerpts from the newly released CD.

A Rite for All Souls has been called “strange and wonderful…cosmically unusual” (The New York City Jazz Record), “extraordinary” (JazzPress - Poland), “a potent thing to behold” (AllAboutJazz.com), and “a beautiful historical and musical document” (MusicZoom, Italy).

The Mark Harvey Group toured the East Coast in the early 1970s and appeared twice at the All-Nite Soul Concerts at Saint Peter’s Church in New York City (the celebrated “jazz church”), on shared bills with Clark Terry, Rashid Ali, Roswell Budd, Billy Taylor and other luminaries. Based in Boston, the group was resident ensemble at the historic Old West Church, where Harvey, a Methodist minister, was pursuing a jazz ministry modeled on the work of his mentor John Garcia Gensel at Saint Peter’s in Manhattan. Boston performances featured such notables as Ran Blake, Jaki Byard, Ricky Ford, and Phil Wilson. In subsequent decades, the ensemble played as The Mark Harvey Group, the New American Music Ensemble, and the Aardett, featuring a range of stellar improvisers, always with Mark Harvey and Peter H. Bloom as the core of the group.

“A Rite for All Souls (Americas Musicworks), captures a seminal live show from 1971…. an indelible recording that characterizes the immediacy of free-jazz protest music at a consequential time in American history….The musicians played without notation or preconceived ideas in a collective-improvisation framework they had honed over many performances….a release for the times, bringing the free jazz language of social justice to the fore.” - Jon Ross, Ear Relevant

For information: http://www.americasmusicworks.com/mark-harvey-group.html