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VINYL / BY PETER MARGASAK
Good for Circulation
The vinyl renaissance shows no sign of stopping,
but it has gone through calibration in
recent years. Price gouging for run-of-the-mill
albums has caused a warranted backlash, but
at its best the vinyl reissue market is gracing
us with music that’s long been out of circulation
or at least hard to find.
The brilliant 1972 album Dogon A.D. by
St. Louis alto saxophonist Julius Hemphill
has experienced a turbulent history since
dropping on the tiny Mbari Records—getting
reissued countless times since the
Freedom label took control of it in 1975. A
couple of years ago, the remarkable Chicago
indie label International Phonograph
gave it a stellar CD reissue. But even that
wasn’t true to the original. Still, the inclusion
of the 20-minute masterpiece “The
Hard Blues,” cut at the same sessions but
only issued in 1975 on Coon Bid’ness (Arista),
is a blessing. Now the label has luxuriously
brought the music to four sides of
vinyl for maximum power, so that every
cello slash by Abdul Wadud, every fraught
backbeat by Phillip Wilson, every sob and
whinny by trumpeter Baikida Carroll, and
every shuddering sigh and bluesy cry by
the leader cuts like a razor and punches like
a cannonball. The cost and treatment are
extravagant, but this music is worthy of it.
An album can’t be the holy grail of one
or another genre if nobody knows about
it, but the Danish pianist Tom Prehn still
deserves credit for offering one of the most
gripping and original iterations of freejazz—anywhere—with
his first album, Axiom.
It was cut in October 1963 for Sonet
Records, but by the time the test pressings
were approved and production impending,
the leader pulled the plug. With only two
finished copies in circulation, it is one of the
rarest free-jazz albums in the world. In 2015
the Chicago label Corbett vs. Dempsey
released the album on CD, but it’s finally
available in the format for which it was first
destined, thanks to Rune Grammofon. Collectively,
over the course of two sidelong
pieces, the group—with tenor saxophonist
Frits Krogh, bassist Poul Ehlers and drummer
Finn Slumstrup—experiments with
unmetered time, shifting harmony and a
muscular, surging abstraction of hard-bop
phraseology, all accomplished with a preternatural
rapport.
By the time German bassist Peter
Kowald got around to making his stunning
debut album for FMP—a searing, bruising
quintet session with alto saxophonist Peter
Van de Locht, trombonists Paul Rutherford
and Günter Christmann and drummer Paul
Lovens—he’d already been making serious
contributions to the advent of European
free music as a key sideman to Peter Brötzmann,
Pierre Favre and Manfred Schoof,
among others. Remarkably, that eponymous
1972 debut has never been reissued
on CD, so its reappearance on vinyl, thanks
to Cien Fuegos, is especially welcome. Kowald
carves out his own space here, so while
there are passages of wildly hurtling energy,
with the garrulous blowing of his twin
trombonists leading the charge, there are
also dazzling sections of repose, such as a
lengthy dialogue of scratching, scraping
and bowing in the middle of “Platte Talloere”
that’s nothing short of astonishing.
When the Norwegian quintet known as
Masqualero dropped its 1983 self-titled
debut for the new Odin imprint—a label
launched by the Norwegian Jazz Federation
to support up-and-coming talent—
the band went by the Arild Andersen-Jon
Christensen Quintet, after its two most
senior, best-known members. But it was
young trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer and
saxophonist Tore Brunborg who secured
the record deal that introduced the group
to the world, heralding a new generation
of Nordic jazz that continues to exert a profound
influence (the keyboardist here was
another key figure, Jon Balke). The group
took its name from the Wayne Shorter
tune that opens the album, and the influence
of Miles Davis hangs heavy over the
performances, but the band was already
finding ways to reconcile that impulse with
distinctly Scandinavian characteristics,
like the generous use of space. The group
would go on to make three albums for ECM,
and this sounds of a piece with those. It’s
great that the Grappa label has pressed this
overlooked work onto fresh wax. DB
16 DOWNBEAT FEBRUARY 2017
Bobby Hutcherson (1941–2016)