Crew's Choice July 2000

"History and personal experience are inescapably encoded in this music. Although you might not find much on any of these four players in the jazz encyclopedias, it doesn't really matter: everything essential about them is heard in their music anyway."
-- Ed Hazell from the liner notes

Obviously, when we first heard of this project from Eremite last year, we were extremely interested. We have been a big fan of Kidd Jordan for a number of years around here, which is why we released Southern Extreme two years ago, and have always believed that he is one of the most under documented musicians of his generation. And here, Kidd is joined by a kindred soul, Fred Anderson, who like Kidd has been equally under documented. So, let's get this out of the way...and believe us, we really dislike these cliches, but in this case, it must be said...if you don't buy another cd this year, you've got to have this. That's how good this is.

We can't think of a better way to welcome the new century than with a recording that is so powerful it takes the listener on a 50-year journey into the past, straight on through today, and well into the next 50 years. From the standpoint of the improvisational jazz tradition, this is the long awaited shining path that Ornette so eloquently blazed but far too few have had the courage to follow.

Edward "Kidd" Jordan has been performing from his home base in New Orleans for over 40 years. Along the way, he has worked with everyone from Fats Domino to Aretha Franklin, mostly as an anonymous session player, found time to be a fully tenured professor at Southern University of New Orleans, help found the New Orleans Jazz Festival, started the Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong Jazz Camp, and picked up a knighthood in France for his contributions to the arts. But, still, far too few documents existed of his creative side. Fortunately, over the past couple of years that regrettable fact has started to be remedied with releases on Kali, Drimala, and now, Eremite.

It is an amazing parallel between Kidd and Fred Anderson. Like Kidd, Anderson has been virtually ignored by the media outside of his hometown for the past 40 years. Yes, he was one of the founders of the the AACM and like Kidd, worked with many of the same artists in the mid-60s AACM orbit, but few in the media cared about covering Fred's remarkable artistry. So for 25 years, like Kidd, Fred went about raising a family and continuing his craft far from the spotlight, and even further from the vicissitudes of commercialization that would overtake and remake in its own image the jazz tradition during the 70s and 80s. Not until the early 90s, when several small Chicago labels started recording Anderson, did the word get out that there was something of import going on down at the Velvet Lounge, and the Birdhouse before that.

And, yes, it is true that William Parker can walk a bass with the finest..as he proves in this recording...but he can also find the spaces between the phrases that prove to be the perfect counterpoints to the music going on in front of him. Hamid Drake completes the rhythm section with an absolutely flurry of propulsive motion. From his opening solo, Hamid maintains a continuous rhythmic intensity throughout both CDs that modulates somewhere between the eloquent influence of Ed Blackwell, Hamid's world music experiences (see last month's Crew's Choice) and a pure Chicago funk. Actually, this would have been a really excellent project had Eremite never mastered the sax tracks and just released the rhythm section tracks. Now, how many sessions have you heard that you can say that.

Which brings us to this recording. The overall recording sound is excellent for a live performance. Powered by the twin-tenor engines of Anderson and Jordan, these two CDs move the listener through various combinations of solos, duos, trios and quartets that flow effortlessly from hard driving free jazz to intimate one-on-one conversations that we can only wonder at the translation. The influences that can be heard in the music are as varied as the backgrounds of each of the masters on this recording. Yet, in the hands of these maters, the influences don't stand apart, they meld into a whole that is its own entity.

Recorded over two successive nights of performance, this project represents the finest statement of free jazz eloquence the jazz tradition has to offer. Not free jazz in the unfortunately poorly defined sense of the term that too many have come to associate with anger and random unconnected phrasing. This is music rooted firmly in a long tradition of American jazz expression that continues to evolve and mature. You can hold on to this music in your mind because the phrases connect, feel its joy, flow with the artists' exuberance, but mostly you can experience the freedom and oneness of collective improvisational expression at its highest level.

We close this month's review, with a quote from Ed Hazell's excellent liner notes that pretty well sum us this recording.

"The best free jazz -- and the music on this CD qualifies as that -- is the result of dues, craftsmanship, experience, judgement, intuition, and artistry, just as surely as an Ellington suite, a Charlie Parker solo, or a Robert Johnson song."

--- The Drimala Crew