Murray, Sunny

Sunny Murray

Label: ESP Country: USA

Classic and important '66 release from the innovative drummer Sunny Murray in a quintet session, remastered and with bonus interview track between Murray and ESP label founder Bernard Stollman.

"Sunny Murray is the only drummer who ever played the Theory of Relativity," commented Alan Silva in a recent interview, and barely seconds into the drum solo that opens this album it's not hard to see exactly what he means. Murray's percussion work, setting up complex webs of pulsations using a remarkably small kit -- what he does with a snare, floor tom, and cymbals beggars belief -- is without precedent in the history of jazz (though Murray has always considered his work as being the next evolutionary step forward from the drummers he admired: Roy Brooks, Louis Hayes, Denis Charles, and Edward Blackwell), and even today this quintet outing featuring Silva on bass, Jacques Coursil on trumpet, and the twin alto sax attack of Byard Lancaster and Jack Graham is as wild and disturbing as the bare black-and-white photograph of Murray that adorns the original cover. Lancaster's wailing on "Hilariously" might recall the classic Albert Ayler Quartet that Murray played with in Europe in 1964, but Murray's compositions are no longer anchored by references to folk and gospel, as Ayler's were -- instead, they exist as strange energy fields in their own right. Murray revisited some of these pieces on later occasions -- notably "Giblet," which pops up on his BYG Actuel classic An Even Break (Never Give a Sucker) -- but for sheer raw power and ferocious creativity, this 1966 set needs some beating."-Dan Warburton, All Music