Editor's Idea: April 1997
ISSUE 158, April 1997
Editor: Tony Herrington
"I don't think the reality (or unreality) of it has settled in with any of us here just yet." The line comes from Bill Murphy, e-mailing from the New York offices of the Axiom label just a few days after the news broke of the death from a heart attack of the drummer Tony Williams.
Williams died in a Los Angeles hospital on 23 February following what should have been a routine gallstone operation. There are rumours floating in the ether of the World Wide Web that his death could have been avoided had the LA medical team been more alert to the critical nature of his condition, but until speculation solidifies into stone cold fact, let's concentrate on some of the details of a life that was remarkable even by jazz standards.
One of the last acts of Tony Williams's professional life, maybe the very last, was his participation in the second instalment of a recording project called Arcana, instigated by Bill Laswell, administered by Bill Murphy, which was directly inspired by the music Williams recorded in the late 60s and early 70s with guitarist John McLaughlin and organist Larry Young (aka Khaled Yasin) as Lifetime.
Williams, a prodigy who had performed with the two towering giants of jazz percussion, Art Blake and Max Roach, while still a child, was thrust into the public arena at an improbably early age. He joined Miles Davis's group in 1963 aged 17, and via the murderous combination of a radical aesthetic sensibility and stunning technical abilities, single-handedly altered the direction of the music of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. So Williams is valorized by jazz fans as a musician who turned notions of jazz-time on their head, galvanizing Miles into yet another sustained period of creative activity. But for a later fan-musician like Bill Laswell, Lifetime provided a more provocative model for a music that united both personal interests and the prevailing social and cultural imperatives into one unruly package, applying the flexible improvisatory nature of jazz to the bone-crushing intensity of hard rock.
Like Miles's contemporaneous shift towards an increasingly amorphous, electric music, Williams's work in Lifetime was regarded as a betrayal of his earlier pure jazz life, a cynical attempt at commercialism. But the group's genesis, as revealed in the sleevenotes to a new anthology of the music Lifetime recorded for the Polydor label, was more complex. Inevitably, Williams felt the need to define himself anew, away from the ultimately claustrophobic embrace of Miles's patronage, but Lifetime was also inspired by the lounge-jazz organ trios he had played in as a youth in Boston, as well as his desire to perform music that reflected his admiration for improvising rock groups such as Cream, The MC5 and The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and that moved beyond the hermetic world of jazz to mirror America's increasingly incendiary political climate.
"It was an emergency for me to leave Miles," he is quoted as saying, explaining the title of the first Lifetime album, Emergency. "I wanted to play an emerging music that was my own." About the group's 1970 Turn It Over album, he said: "Recording that album wasn't a pleasant experience. There was a lot going on socially at the time and it was a reaction to that. There was a lot of tension and anxiety. The title was about turning over society. The album art was black, the liner notes were very hard to read - it was aggressively antagonistic."
As it transpired, Lifetime came apart rapidly due to a combination of public and critical hostility and the conflicting personalities of the group members. Williams was so affected by the experience that he quit music altogether between 1973 and 75; when he returned it was to play an inevitably less ambitious version of the music he had been making with Miles a decade earlier.
Unlike Bill Laswell, I can't claim any strong feelings for Lifetime's music; in comparison, similar experiments being conducted at the time by Miles, The Herbie Hancock Sextet, even Williams's Lifetime partner Larry Young on the long-forgotten Lawrence Of Newark record, seem more rich in future possibilities, more open-ended, less weighted down by self-conscious virtuosity and metal bombast. But I remain aware that the first Arcana project, a trio made up of Williams, Laswell and guitarist Derek Bailey, was responsible for one of 1996's most sensational moments, The Last Wave, a record which finally seemed to vindicate the music Williams had dreamed of making a century earlier. Meanwhile, the second Arcana project has become a valediction, "a tribute to Tony," as Bill Murphy writes, "a document to show that his talents extend way beyond the limits of 'jazz' drumming. You'll hear it soon enough."
Editor: Tony Herrington
"I don't think the reality (or unreality) of it has settled in with any of us here just yet." The line comes from Bill Murphy, e-mailing from the New York offices of the Axiom label just a few days after the news broke of the death from a heart attack of the drummer Tony Williams.
Williams died in a Los Angeles hospital on 23 February following what should have been a routine gallstone operation. There are rumours floating in the ether of the World Wide Web that his death could have been avoided had the LA medical team been more alert to the critical nature of his condition, but until speculation solidifies into stone cold fact, let's concentrate on some of the details of a life that was remarkable even by jazz standards.
One of the last acts of Tony Williams's professional life, maybe the very last, was his participation in the second instalment of a recording project called Arcana, instigated by Bill Laswell, administered by Bill Murphy, which was directly inspired by the music Williams recorded in the late 60s and early 70s with guitarist John McLaughlin and organist Larry Young (aka Khaled Yasin) as Lifetime.
Williams, a prodigy who had performed with the two towering giants of jazz percussion, Art Blake and Max Roach, while still a child, was thrust into the public arena at an improbably early age. He joined Miles Davis's group in 1963 aged 17, and via the murderous combination of a radical aesthetic sensibility and stunning technical abilities, single-handedly altered the direction of the music of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. So Williams is valorized by jazz fans as a musician who turned notions of jazz-time on their head, galvanizing Miles into yet another sustained period of creative activity. But for a later fan-musician like Bill Laswell, Lifetime provided a more provocative model for a music that united both personal interests and the prevailing social and cultural imperatives into one unruly package, applying the flexible improvisatory nature of jazz to the bone-crushing intensity of hard rock.
Like Miles's contemporaneous shift towards an increasingly amorphous, electric music, Williams's work in Lifetime was regarded as a betrayal of his earlier pure jazz life, a cynical attempt at commercialism. But the group's genesis, as revealed in the sleevenotes to a new anthology of the music Lifetime recorded for the Polydor label, was more complex. Inevitably, Williams felt the need to define himself anew, away from the ultimately claustrophobic embrace of Miles's patronage, but Lifetime was also inspired by the lounge-jazz organ trios he had played in as a youth in Boston, as well as his desire to perform music that reflected his admiration for improvising rock groups such as Cream, The MC5 and The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and that moved beyond the hermetic world of jazz to mirror America's increasingly incendiary political climate.
"It was an emergency for me to leave Miles," he is quoted as saying, explaining the title of the first Lifetime album, Emergency. "I wanted to play an emerging music that was my own." About the group's 1970 Turn It Over album, he said: "Recording that album wasn't a pleasant experience. There was a lot going on socially at the time and it was a reaction to that. There was a lot of tension and anxiety. The title was about turning over society. The album art was black, the liner notes were very hard to read - it was aggressively antagonistic."
As it transpired, Lifetime came apart rapidly due to a combination of public and critical hostility and the conflicting personalities of the group members. Williams was so affected by the experience that he quit music altogether between 1973 and 75; when he returned it was to play an inevitably less ambitious version of the music he had been making with Miles a decade earlier.
Unlike Bill Laswell, I can't claim any strong feelings for Lifetime's music; in comparison, similar experiments being conducted at the time by Miles, The Herbie Hancock Sextet, even Williams's Lifetime partner Larry Young on the long-forgotten Lawrence Of Newark record, seem more rich in future possibilities, more open-ended, less weighted down by self-conscious virtuosity and metal bombast. But I remain aware that the first Arcana project, a trio made up of Williams, Laswell and guitarist Derek Bailey, was responsible for one of 1996's most sensational moments, The Last Wave, a record which finally seemed to vindicate the music Williams had dreamed of making a century earlier. Meanwhile, the second Arcana project has become a valediction, "a tribute to Tony," as Bill Murphy writes, "a document to show that his talents extend way beyond the limits of 'jazz' drumming. You'll hear it soon enough."