Sunny Murray

Love his drumming, know it mostly through his work w/ Albert Ayler. But recently I picked up a solo album called *An Even Break (Never Give A Sucker)* and I am enjoying it. His whole approach to drums is very exciting to me.

I like listening to jazz albums for a while and then reading about them, but there is very little writing online about so many of them. Including this Sunny Murray LP I just bought. Guess that means jazz writers still have a lot of work to do.

Question: Did he ever release a track or album that was him alone? Just him soling?

This is cool:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUz_nATeNn4

Was incredible when I saw him in Montreal in 2002.

currently sick in hospital :(

oh no :(

i was just listening to this over the weekend, i forgot how great it is--
http://eremite.com/uploads/albums/mte-51-mte051_main.jpg

RIP. One of the most revolutionary drummers to ever sit behind a kit.

Mandatory listening:

Cecil Taylor, Nefertiti, The Beautiful One Has Come
Albert Ayler, Spiritual Unity, European Radio Studio Recordings 1964, Live In Copenhagen 1964
New York Eye & Ear Control
Sunny Murray, s/t, Sonny's Time Now, Sunshine, Homage To Africa, An Even Break (Never Give A Sucker), Big Chief
Sabir Mateen/Sunny Murray, We Are Not At The Opera
Louie Belogenis Trio, Tiresias
Charles Gayle, Kingdom Come

So much incredible music from this dude. He changed everything.

Goddammit.

Also the two volume of "Perles Noires"

:-(

Was incredible when I saw him in Montreal in 2002.

Fuck. I still remember this gig.

RIP Sunny.

This interview (from 2000-2001) is incredible. So much history.

That interview is so great, so many people were pissed, haha.

Also this is amazing music biz advice: "BE CAREFUL: NEVER HIRE A GUY MORE FAMOUS THAN YOU. Even if it's your friend. You hire Ray Charles they ain't gonna see you. Ain't no car gonna pick you up! "

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UnDp8NJwpT8/WirMw4cCQvI/AAAAAAAAJtM/cVX_dh93WUE9xtULsl2yVg5At5KyWqVOACLcBGAs/s320/ayler%2Bfront.jpg

have been blasting this out, seriously loud, this morn. What a band!

and the Kingdom Come one with Charles Gayle/William Parker - truly awesome.

documentary here: http://www.cultureunplugged.com/documentary/watch-online/play/8970/SUNNY-S-TIME-NOW

My expat music writer buddy John Wojtowicz just sent me these quotes:

"There's a record you can probably still find by the great tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler which was called Spiritual Unity and it was a trio with him, Gary Peacock on bass, and Sonny Murray on drums, and they got to a kind of time on that session which, if you've been following at all what I've been saying ... I realize it's hard if you don't have any technical sense of musical metric, but understand that in a 4/4 measure there are always (even to some extent in Bop) strong beats and weak beats, the off-beat or the on-beat, whatever style you're playing. But these guys made a time where there was no strong or weak beat. It was all like one-one-one-one-one-one-one to infinity. In other words, you could play anything at all over that time, you could go anywhere and not worry about how to come back."

--Clark Coolidge, from "Kerouac" (emphasis added)
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/kerouac-per-coolidge.html



“When Ayler uses Sonny Murray, the group has a completely different total sound. There are more things on Murray’s mind, more sentimental precisions that he tries to resolve like a violinist…. Murray sometimes makes you think he might just want to disappear.
“Murray’s ‘flying’ style is visually as well as musically provocative. Sonny lunges and floats over the drums and cymbals striking, near-striking, brushing, missing, caressing all the sound surfaces, while accompanying himself with a deep wailing that cuts deep into the flesh.
“Murray’s rhythmic organization makes the drums songful. His accents are from immediate emotional necessity rather than the sometimes hackneyed demands of a pre-stated meter, in which one cymbal is beat on coyly in the name of some fashionable soulforce.
“The drums surprise and hide and are subtle, or suddenly thunderous. In some passages Murray has both feet working, straightout, and the drumsticks (which are metal tubes, or knitting needles, even, sometimes, wood) are not even visible.
“The drum ‘line’ swoops, is loud, is soft and sometimes seems to disappear, as well. But it is a total drum music Murray makes, not just ear-deafening ‘accompaniment’.”

--Amiri Baraka, Black Music (1968), p.125f.



"When Sunny was involved, first of all you were dealing with vibration of sound. He was vibrating sound, and pulsing without a separated rhythm. Out of that pulse or vibration, you heard a certain number of harmonics, you heard little countermelodies happening, and you heard a very inner sense of what they call 'swing' happening, all at the same time. It would rise, and it would fall, and it would shimmer, and it would glisten. It was totally a different approach to drums."

--William Parker, quoted in the documentary "Sunny's Time Now"
http://www.cultureunplugged.com/documentary/watch-online/play/8970/SUNNY-S-TIME-NOW"> http://www.cultureunplugged.com/documentary/watch-online/play/8970/SUNNY-S-TIME-NOW



"I sensed why it was difficult to grasp. I had the impression that with the cymbals, Sunny Murray created sound vibrations which spread throughout the entire space. And from there, he used the big drum for counterpoints ... But the vibrations were the most important, and this is where the idea of space is important in terms of rendering the sound. When you have only 2 speakers to spread the sound, it doesn't really convey what was heard, not only by the spectators, but also by the musicians and what inspired them -- something unheard so far, fluctuations, at times in the high notes, the higher notes or the super-high notes, in what you call the harmonics. It was magic, absolutely magic!"

--Daniel Caux, ibid. (subtitles translated from the French)



"It wasn't until quite later that I was able to incorporate anything of Sunny Murray's. But it was always there, as an ideal. The trouble with the drum kit is that each part of the drum kit has a completely different sound -- you have the high-hat, bass drum, tom-tom... So it's very kind of stark: boom!, bang, psshh!, all this ... And what Sunny Murray did, more than anybody (Elvin Jones was pushing it that way as well) was to make it into a single, fluid, organic whole. And it's very hard to do! Because first of all, each instrument has a different volume to it. You hit one hard and it's going to be much louder than another. Secondly, your extremities are doing this [he stretches his arms out the breadth of a drum set]. It's not like a close-fingered thing [he makes a motion like clarinet-playing]. And to measure the pressure you're putting on hands and feet, and the movements across, and to get some sort of way of keeping a flow going, while you're moving around -- it's a wonderful thing, the way he plays. It's like films of the sea where you can see the tide coming in. There's a kind of surging to it, but it's not metronomic. And it struck me as really, really organic. And it had a momentum to it. It was jazz because it had that momentum, and the pulse, but it wasn't identifiable in terms of the normal geometric patterns of jazz. And I found it really moving -- like a cross between the wind and someone actually breathing, as if nature was a living, breathing thing through him."

--Robert Wyatt, ibid.

Thanks for those quotes; borrowed the Baraka and Wyatt for a Wire piece that'll probably be on their site tomorrow.

Two of his latter-day albums, Perles Noirs vols 1 and 2, have been put up on Eremite Records' Bandcamp page.

http://eremiterecords.bandcamp.com

i just ordered this:

http://ni-vu-ni-connu.net/film/sunnys-time-now-film/

https://vimeo.com/62376041

The documentary feature Sunny’s time now explores the life and work of the avant-garde drummer Sunny Murray, one of the most influential figures of the Free Jazz revolution. Through a series of interviews with key time witnesses as well as historic and contemporary concert footage, it reassesses the relationship between the libertarian music movement and the political events of the 1960s whose social claims it so intimately reflected. It also recounts how the most radical forms of musical expression were excluded from all major production and distribution networks as the libertarian ideal went out of fashion.

Beyond its historical approach, the film follows Sunny Murray on current gigs, showing his daily struggle to perpetuate a musical genre which is still widely ignored by the general public. In doing so, Sunny’s time now also dwells on the near-clandestine community of aficionados who continue to worship the gods of their musical coming of age and have thus permitted free improvisational music to live on.

LUX/FR 2008, 108’, English/French, HD video, Dolby SRD

Tony Bevan is selling some of his trio albs w/ Murray and John Edwards for low low prices on his bandcamp page btw:

https://tonybevan.bandcamp.com/merch

ah, cool, thanks for the tip

Just bought Sunshine and was wondering whta else I needed. I see that the s/t on ESP is out on cd in expanded form which I must have missed at time of release.

Also wonder what Milford Graves was essential. I think I always link the 2, possibly free drummers on ESP or something. Does Beaver Harris fit there too?

Graves has his own thread.

Re Murray, I posted this list upthread when he died, and I stand by it:

Cecil Taylor, Nefertiti, The Beautiful One Has Come
Albert Ayler, Spiritual Unity, European Radio Studio Recordings 1964, Live In Copenhagen 1964
New York Eye & Ear Control
Sunny Murray, s/t, Sonny's Time Now, Sunshine, Homage To Africa, An Even Break (Never Give A Sucker), Big Chief
Sabir Mateen/Sunny Murray, We Are Not At The Opera
Louie Belogenis Trio, Tiresias
Charles Gayle, Kingdom Come

oh yeah, must have just come from looking at the titles i was seeing available from Milford Graves so forgot there was a thread on him active recently.
Right, that's who's on the cover of As Serious As your Life?

There have been several covers of As Serious As Your Life: one with Rashied Ali, another with Milford Graves, and a third that has Jimmy Garrison. Ali was on the first edition, Graves was on the ‘90s reprint, and I think Ali is back on the latest edition.

This is the current edition (the one I own).

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61GE39Ar9nL.jpg