Charles Tolliver’s Music Inc
Live At Slugs’ Vols I & II
Mack Avenue/Strata-East CD/DL/2xLP

Stanley Cowell
Musa: Ancestral Streams
Mack Avenue/Strata-East CD/DL/LP

Pharoah Sanders
Izipho Zam (My Gifts)
Mack Avenue/Strata-East CD/DL/LP

Charlie Rouse
Two Is One
Mack Avenue/Strata-East CD/DL/LP

Strata-East: The Legacy Begins
Various
Mack Avenue/Strata-East DL

Strata-East Records was founded in New York in 1971 by trumpeter Charles Tolliver and pianist Stanley Cowell, drawing inspiration from pianist Kenny Cox’s shortlived, Detroit based Strata label. Like Cox’s endeavour, Strata-East was an independent label committed to giving musicians greater artistic and financial control, creating a platform for daring sounds overlooked by major labels. Strata-East was also Black-owned, placing it in the radical tradition of African-American artist-run labels like Debut, founded by Charles and Celia Mingus alongside Max Roach in 1952 (Tolliver and Cowell had, in fact, first met in 1967 as sidemen in Roach’s quintet).

Much like its West Coast counterpart Black Jazz Records, Strata-East plugged into the consciousness raising energies of the day, proposing an artistic response to many of the social, political and philosophical concerns that informed the Black Power movement. Thematically, that meant an exploration of non-Western spirituality allied with the kind of street smarts that made Gil Scott-Heron’s socially aware Winter In America a hit for the label in 1974. Musically, it manifested as a diverse range of approaches that were searching for new Afrocentric forms of expression while remaining rooted in the jazz tradition. This carefully chosen first tranche of an extensive reissue programme neatly covers all of these bases.

Tolliver and Cowell had paid heavy dues playing on 1960s Blue Note dates by the likes of Jackie McLean, Andrew Hill and Bobby Hutcherson, and both remained committed to the purity of acoustic post-bop – a not particularly fashionable stance in the early 70s. Strata-East’s first releases were by Tolliver’s Music Inc, a quartet featuring Cowell plus bassist Cecil McBee and drummer Jimmy Hopps. The two volumes of Live At Slugs’ – recorded at the East Village venue in 1970 and released in 1972 – capture an ensemble blazing bright from the deep and eternal source of jazz.

Tolliver’s “Drought” and “Our Second Father (Dedicated To The Memory Of John Coltrane)” are brash, up-tempo hard bop belters with Tolliver firing up finely honed chops. “Spanning” is an audaciously tight composition built around a careening piano intro in 7/8. Cowell’s “Orientale” is 17 minutes of glowering exoticism in the tradition of John Coltrane’s “Olé”, with a McCoy Tyner-esque extended opening piano solo. The digital edition includes 40 minutes of previously unreleased – and every bit as essential – music from the same dates. File alongside Lee Morgan’s Live At The Lighthouse and other take no prisoners early 70s deep jazz sides.

While Music Inc display an unwavering devotion to jazz as essential artform, Cowell’s 1974 solo piano album Musa: Ancestral Streams pushes in less familiar directions. In contrast to Keith Jarrett’s contemporaneous albums of sprawling, improvised solo piano, Cowell presents a tightly drawn suite of pristine compositions. “Equipoise” – Cowell’s signature tune, which he’d recorded with Max Roach in 1968 – is gorgeously wistful in its solo vulnerability. “Departure No 1” nods to the fugue-like complexity of early Bud Powell. “Emil Danenberg”, a skilfully constructed exercise in dissonance, namechecks the classical pianist Cowell studied under at Oberlin Conservatory of Music. It all adds up to an intimate portrait of the artist.

By contrast, Pharoah Sanders’s 1973 album Izipho Zam (My Gifts) seems to be straining to break free of individual identity and luxuriate in oceanic consciousness. Recorded in 1969, near the beginning of Sanders’s extraordinary run of albums for Impulse!, it anticipates many of the themes he’d go on to explore. Here, Sanders is the devoted disciple of John Coltrane, continuing his late mentor’s search for spiritually healing sounds. “Prince Of Peace” is a plea for divine blessings enlivened by vocalist Leon Thomas’s ecstatic yodel and Lonnie Liston Smith’s rippling piano. “Balance” is a mutant New Orleans second line groove spiralling into unhinged mania with Sanders’s tenor screaming and Sonny Sharrock unleashing wild paroxysms of electric guitar. The 28 minute title track achieves similar levels of intense fervour, based around an insistent polyrhythmic groove and African tuned percussion, positioning Izipho Zam as a strident statement of self-determination.

Charlie Rouse played tenor saxophone in Thelonious Monk’s quartet between 1960–70 but with the dark funk/rock/jazz of 1974’s Two Is One he stretched out into stylistic territory far removed from Monk’s orbit. The rhythm players are drummer David Lee, bassists Stanley Clarke and Martin Rivera, and Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira, who between them generate locked-in grooves, with guitarist George Davis and electric cellist Calo Scott adding scalding textures. A version of Joe Chambers’s composition “Hopscotch” commands the date, with Rouse floating dreamily over a bull-necked vamp just as tough as some of the prescient breaks Miles Davis was then exploring.

The full diversity of the Strata-East aesthetic is made clear on a 33 track digital only compilation released to celebrate the current reissue plans. Alongside the core post-bop nucleus of Tolliver and Cowell, there’s the raw, Ornette-inspired free bop of saxophonist Charles Brackeen featuring Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell. There are quixotic projects like The New York Bass Violin Choir, with Bill Lee leading an ensemble based around seven double bassists. And there are undisputed classics such as Clifford Jordan’s ever-living treatment of the modal anthem “John Coltrane”. If this is a hint of some of the albums yet to be reissued, untold riches await.

This review appears in The Wire 495 along with many other reviews of new and reissued albums. To read them all, pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.