Charles Tolliver & Stanley Cowell: Music Inc
Black lives mattered a lot in 1970s America. Myriad calls to attention included the Black Power movement and black-run artistic ventures, such as the one instituted by trumpeter Charles Tolliver and pianist Stanley Cowell under the banner of Music Inc.
Tolliver-Cowell was as much about ownership of the means of musical production as about the music itself – in this case, the embedding of the Tolliver-Cowell quartet (with bassist Cecil McBee and drummer Jimmy Hopps) – inside an expanded supporting orchestra of 13, including Jimmy Heath and Howard Johnson. “Supporting” meant more than accompaniment, but not that much.
It was a time when many black American musicians looked to their African roots. Fifty-six years on, the music sounds unremarkable but the societal legacies probably always need renewing. Considering that the Thad Jones – Mel Lewis Orchestra had recorded three years earlier, Music Inc’s hard-as-granite sound in 1970 had driven itself into a corner. Tolliver was seemingly competing with his own brass section, and the quartet was not so much comfortably embedded as under constant attack. Cowell’s Abscretions is a standard 70s rocker in which his piano lines struggle against ongoing background burial. In Tolliver’s Household Of Saud, it’s almost as if the quartet has broken free of its accompaniment, which sometimes sounds like a giant shackle; Cowell leads the sprint, taken up by Tolliver while the greater band seemingly fires shells at its rear but not accurately enough to stop Hopps’s rolling solo. On The Nile opens with fanfare flourishes as a signal for a heavy-laden caravanserai to move off. McBee’s solo flurry towards the end mutes the heavy brigade, and it returns chastened.
Discography
Ruthie’s Heart; Brilliant Circles; Abscretions; Household of Saud; On The Nile; Departure (39.24)
Tolliver (t, arr); Cowell (p, arr); Jimmy Hopps (d); Cecil McBee (b); Richard Williams, Virgil Jones (t); Jimmy Heath, Clifford Jordan (f, reeds); Howard Johnson (tu, bar); Garnett Brown, Curtis Fuller (tb); and others. New York, 11 November 1970.
Mack Avenue/Strata-East Records SES-1971-25
Nicolas Leirtrø’s Action Now!: Entrance
Norwegian bassist Leirtrø’s new band is not backward in coming forward, as my mother would have said. But it advances with a wild intensity she would have found forbidding. The band’s called Action Now!, that exclamation a forewarning of the clamorous energies to come. My mother, bless her, would have wanted to know what was troubling this quartet of manically restless spirits.
On a couple of tracks, members of the band are allowed to deal mostly unaided with what bothers them. Mats Gustafsson’s anxieties are expressed in a virtuoso belabouring of his flute (mostly he plays baritone sax) on Pitch Black White Noise, and Leirtrø’s bass on Shapes Of Noise raises the garnering of gut ’n’ wood sounds to new levels of febrility.
On baritone, Gustafsson enjoys frequent unison affinity for the organ played by Kit Downes, a conjunction sometimes concordant, sometimes as threatening as a taxi-ing jumbo jet about to crash lyrically into the side of an airport terminal. Their joint embarkation on Errantry, however, seems almost pre-planned and orderly, and the later mixture of residual tone and multiphonic texture from Gustafsson’s flute begins to suggest that sheer mastery of musical antidotes to unease will lead to its resolution.
That sax-organ tandem releases the louder of two apotheoses on Darkness; the second is relatively more subdued and fades for drummer Veslemøy Narvesen to engage percussively in kaleidoscopic self-communion and thereby bring the tumult to a paradoxical close. Action Now the chart (no exclamation mark on my copy) begins with the rhythm section in heavy-duty mode and ends in strange, Debussy-like adumbrations on piano, with – again – drums and bass controlling the fire.
High-powered free-ish jazz, creatively engineered with few methodologies barred apart from the encouragement of anarchy, can be exciting; it can also imitate sound and fury signifying Inquisitional torment.
Discography
Entrance; Darkness; Errantry; Pitch Black White Noise; Shapes Of Noise; Action Now; Organ Cycle; End Dance (61.08)
Leirtrø (b, pc); Kit Downes (org, p); Mats Gustafsson (f, bar, hca); Veslemøy Narvesen (d, pc). Trondheim, May 2025.
Sauajazz SAU011
Javon Jackson: Jackson Plays Dylan
Only two of the 11 tracks on saxophonist Javon Jackson’s tribute to Bob Dylan require someone to sing the words – guests Lisa Fischer and Nicole Zuraitis – and neither song is a choice one might have expected. In any case, Dylan’s songs are as much about the lyrics as the melody.
Former Jazz Messenger Jackson’s quartet, however, is unfazed and turns the Dylan vehicles into excellent jazz. One of its innovations is sometimes to fade out one chart in the tone or tempo of the next when faded in. But restyling is not so much a quirk as a necessary requirement on an album that too often reminds the listener of how these charts are almost exclusively the composer’s property.
Fischer is the smoky-smooth singer on Gotta Serve Somebody and Zuraitis the purveyor of quiet sincerity on Forever Young. Maybe those tunes were chosen for add-on lyrics because Dylan’s ownership would have been too high a hurdle to clear on Blowin’In The Wind, The Times They Are A-Changin’, and Mr Tambourine Man.
Jackson’s admiration for Dylan’s sense of social justice is unquestionable, but the often unadorned theme statements, deferring to Jeremy Manasia’s piano on The Times They Are A-Changin’ (on which Jackson’s tenor then offers an oblique take), and to Isaac Levien’s bass on Lay, Lady, Lay is maybe taking reverence too far.
On Like A Rolling Stone, Jackson mimics Dylan’s vocal trajectory unembellished. Despite some late refuelling by Ryan Sands’s drums, the modalesque Tombstone Blues just goes through the motions. Manasia offers beguiling keyboard echo effects on Hurricane and elsewhere, and Blowin’ In The Wind begins with unnecessarily strophic head statements by Jackson. The opening One For Bob Dylan is a Jackson original, not a bit like a Dylan tune but no less genuine a salute.
Discography
One For Bob Dylan; Blowin’ In The Wind; Hurricane; Gotta Serve Somebody; Lay, Lady, Lay; The Times They Are A-Changin’; Forever Young; Tombstone Blues; Like A Rolling Stone; Mr Tambourine Man; Make You Feel My Love (61.15)
Jackson (ts); Lisa Fischer, Nicole Zuraitis (v); Jeremy Manasia (p, kyb); Isaac Levien (b, elb); Ryan Sands (d). New York, 18 November 2025.
Solid Jackson Records/Palmetto SJ1010
