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viewing 1 To 3 of 3 items
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3LP BOX
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BEA 003LP
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"A legendary concert by one of the great unrecorded bands in free jazz history is here at last. WEBO, the third installment in the Black Editions Archive series of previously unreleased recordings from Milford Graves' private tape library, roars into the station June 21, 2024. For the first time, Charles Gayle, Milford Graves, & William Parker -- three lions of the Black American jazz avantgarde -- are finally heard together on record, presented here across three audiophile-quality LPs for two brutalizingly joyous hours of real ju-ju & musical mastery. The trio of Charles Gayle, Milford Graves, & William Parker gave only seven public performances between 1985 and 2013, and released no recordings. Their June 1991 two-night stand at the short-lived Lower East Side venue Webo, long referenced as a signal event in New York free jazz's 1990s resurgence, has been a topic of discussion among close followers of the music for decades. In the uncompromising grassroots spirit of the 1970s New York Musicians Organization and loft jazz movements from which they had emerged, the band produced and promoted the WEBO concerts themselves. Photography and audio recording were not allowed at the concerts, and this official recording, commissioned by the artists, was never released -- until now. So vivid was the lore surrounding WEBO that it topped the list of recordings sought by Black Editions Archive from Graves' private collection. The tapes maximally substantiate eyewitness accounts describing extra-sensory levels of communication within the band, and the extraordinary clarity and impact of their performance. From William Parker's liner notes: 'Imagine a village or choir of drummers, horn players and strings. You can hear the bass and drums churning with a call and response, a melodic-rhythmic propulsion. In reality there is only one drummer, one bass, and one saxophone.' Age 52 at the time of these concerts, Charles Gayle had only recently made his first recordings. To all but the most immediate insiders he was still more myth than reality. Milford Graves, two months out from his 50th birthday, was about halfway into his body of recorded work and had sanctioned just one appearance on a commercially released recording in the last 14 years (Pieces of Time by an all-drummer quartet with Kenny Clarke, Andrew Cyrille, and Famoudou Don Moye). William Parker, the young man of the group at age 39, was a mere fifty entries into his discography, now 500+ entries and counting. All three musicians were at least a quarter century into passionately developing a personal and collective music rooted in the cultural values and radical aesthetics of the 1960s and '70s Black American avant-garde. 30+ years after the WEBO concerts, Black Editions Archive is honored to make these historical recordings available to the public. The three LPs are presented in a heavy black, pigment-stamped box with mounted cover painting along with liner notes by William Parker, commentary from Alan Licht (witness to night one of the WEBO concerts), a reproduction of the original concert flyer, and a set of 6"x9" printed photos from the 2021 WEBO reunion outside MoMA PS1, Queens, NY. Cover Painting by Jeff Schlanger/musicWitness, made June 8, 1991, at Webo during the band's performance. Vinyl pressed at RTI, lacquers cut by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio." --Michael Ehlers, 2024
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2LP
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BEA 002LP
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"Black Editions Archive is ecstatic to announce the newest release in the Milford Graves Archival series, the double LP, Children of the Forest, featuring previously unreleased 1976 sessions with Hugh Glover and Arthur Doyle that re-write the book on Milford Graves's ensemble music of the 1970s. Graves recorded these sessions himself in his legendary Queens basement laboratory and workshop in the weeks immediately leading up to the March 1976 session that, with the same unit, produced what many consider his most iconic album, Bäbi, recorded at WBAI-FM Free Music Store. Following the death of Albert Ayler in 1970 and up until his storied trip to FESTAC 1977 in Lagos, Nigeria, Graves gigged fairly often as a band leader in the New York Loft scene and traveled twice to Europe (1973, 1974) with duos, trios and quartets comprised of fellow New York City based musicians -- almost always with Hugh Glover, and variously including Arthur Williams, Joe Rigby, Frank Lowe, and Arthur Doyle. The three sessions that comprise Children of the Forest date from near the end of this intensive period of grassroots activity by Graves during a peak era of musical & cultural ferment in jazz & Black American Music. The earliest recordings feature the duo of Graves (drums & percussion) and Glover (tenor saxophone) from January 24th, and Graves solo (drums & percussion) from February 2. In an interview commissioned for this release and conducted by Jake Meginsky, Glover discusses the mastery of form and execution in Graves's playing and approach: 'It has always been a mystery to me how Cuban drummers in Bata were able to modulate the rhythm and the meter. Well, it takes more than one player to do it Cuban style. Prof (Graves) shows you can do it as one player. The reason he's able to do it is because he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the rhythms of the Caribbean, rhythms of Africa, plus rhythms of jazz. He can move around without losing the feel.' The centerpiece of this set is the March 11 session featuring Graves, Doyle on tenor saxophone and fife, and Glover on a rather unusual pair of instruments that would not appear on the Bäbi recording just one week later -- klaxon and the vaccine, a Haitian one-note trumpet. Glover: 'The klaxon -- it's important to keep that tribal possession-state feel... because it's not a Hollywood gallop. It's very much about the energy, this gallop. Prof (Graves) talks about that, talking about the low, the galloping as in the Divine Horsemen of Haiti.' Doyle's visceral and unrestrained tenor playing on the March 11 session is further evidence as to why his work, especially during this period, has attained mythic status among aficionados of free jazz and even noise music. Graves would later discuss Doyle in Conversations (William Parker, 2011 Rogue Art Books): 'There was another horn player I know that really got into it from the gut and he had a certain kind of intellectualism when we performed? that was Arthur Doyle. (laughs) Arthur Doyle would just go into it. I mean really just go into it... something happened there that was beyond the immediate intellectual control of the people who was doing it. It was about just doing it and don't worry about all these people putting you down. The most important thing was what was coming out of your instrument and how it was effecting people.' Listening to these recordings, that spirit is unmistakable. The original 1/4 inch reel, labeled 'Pygmy' by Graves, including 15 minutes of audio from an unknown documentary on the Mbuti People of the Congo Basin, are among the few tapes we've so far encountered from Graves' private archive that seem clearly intended in his conception & sequencing to be an album. For this reason, these recordings are now presented exactly as assembled by Graves, for soonest possible release." --Peter Kolovos & Michael Ehlers
Deluxe double-LP tip-on gatefold with pigment ink foil stamping featuring photographs by acclaimed photographer and free jazz historian Val Wilmer. Includes insert with new interview of Hugh Glover by Jake Meginsky.
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2LP
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BEA 001LP
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Black Editions presents Historic Music Past Tense Future, the first ever album to feature the meeting of Peter Brötzmann, Milford Graves, and William Parker. Three of the towering figures in the history of free jazz forge an incredibly vital free music born from lifetimes of uncompromising, ceaseless artistry. Historic Music Past Tense Future is the inaugural release by Black Editions Archive and the first in a series of records that will present previously unreleased works featuring Milford Graves.
"2002-03-29, in the front room of CBGBs, fourteen years after their last performance together, three of the defining musicians in Free Jazz history convened for a third and final time. Peter Brötzmann had once again successfully talked his way into the U.S. without a visa to play this concert (organized by Arts for Art) and concerts with a historic drummer of a different era, Walter Perkins (organized by eremite). On March 31 and April 1, Brötzmann and Perkins recorded their duo album The Ink Is Gone (2003). William Parker had just returned from concerts in Italy with the David S. Ware Quartet. On April 2 and 3 he debuted his 'Curtis Mayfield Inside Songs' project in Boston & Amherst. And he still found time to sit-in for the entire March 30 Brötzmann/Perkins Amherst Meetinghouse gig. Scarcely to be found on bandstands and an even rarer presence on record, Milford Graves was a different story, a state of affairs that in 1995 prompted Thurston Moore to proclaim Graves 'a living myth.' Between 1999 and 2015, Graves appears on just six recordings, two of those solo; Brötzmann and Parker combined made half as many records the same week as this gig . . . The eremite Mobile Unit happened to be in the house March 29. The trio performed on a small riser facing the front door of CBGBs, with Graves' hand-painted, Orisha-adorned double bass drum kit, captured in its full thunderous glory on this recording, occupying most of the available space . . . For this rather hastily set-up recording, Parker's small amp was placed on a barstool behind Graves' kit, yet you still clearly feel and hear Parker's vivid contributions. By 2002 Milford Graves was four decades into developing and refining his radical approach to drumming. Graves' unique and unbounded creativity across multiple mediums is only recently entering the early stages of wider discovery and appreciation . . . The music here comes from a moment of relative high visibility for the free jazz continuum. Brötzmann and Parker, among others, were taking it to the people through relentless touring..." --Michael Ehlers
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