Raqib Hassan Trio

Faruq Z. Bey
Atlan-Tan Suite
Entropy Stereo ESR 023

Creative improvised music faced tough times in the 1980s and 1990s. After barely surviving a watering down by popularizing Jazz-Rock fusion bands, the Jazz industry put its faith in the Neo-con proto-Bop movement, whose imprimatur was Wynton Marsalis 1990 TIME magazine cover story. Meanwhile other committed and non-trend-following players rejected both fads, continuing – or beginning –  to play uncompromising free music. These newly available sets from that era confirm the excellence of those efforts. Crucially each group chose antithetical modes of express. Interesting neither group was based in a primary Jazz centre.

Live at the Western Front is exactly as promised. It’s a more than hour-long slab of Free Jazz from a Cambridge, Mass. club in 1994 propelled by three veteran improvisers, associated with Boston’s Full Metal Revolutionary Jazz Eclectic (FMRJE). They are reeds player Raqib Hassan (1951-2014), who also worked with Ensemble Mongra; bassist Larry Roland (1949-2023), who recorded with Charles Gayle; and drummer Dennis Warren, now 72, who besides leading the FMRJE, recorded with Raphe Malik. Coming from another direction, and supposedly atypical of its gritty Detroit base, is 1982’s Atlan-Tan Suite, more correctly a Jazz-improv tone poem. Composed by saxophonist Faruq Z. Bey (1942-2012), who played with the Northwoods Improvisers and led the Griot Galaxy (GG), it also features two GG members  – saxophonist Tony Holland and bassist Jaribu Shahid –along with violinists Marlene Rice and Gwen Laster and vibraphonist Robert Allison.

Although officially divided into several sections, the only true break on Live at the Western Front comes with “Echoes of Being”, a slow-moving coda. A threnody for a deceased friend, composed by Hassan, it features his split tone respirations and choked defiant reed screams plus tolling drum beats and downward string thumps by the bassist. Otherwise most sounds are in the high energy realm which gave Ecstatic Jazz its name. Playing tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, wood flute and oboe Hassan excels on each instrument. Uncompromising snarls and snorts, expressive speaking-in-tongues and steadily widening overblowing arise from his saxophone, while timbral smears and irregular clarion flutters come from the clarinet. Flute and oboe are more prominent in the second part of the program, with the former peeping with spidery suggestions, while the  oboe is almost transformed into a high-pitched ney, with Warren’s percussion at times resembling darbuka thumps or adding  cowbell pops, Caribbean junkeroo drumming, while Roland’s usual arco prestissimo rubs, walking bass line or guitar-like plucks take on strained oud-like qualities. In spite of the number of scoops, multiphonic sputters and altissimo textures reveals, Hassan includes interludes of lyricism. Usually preceded by silence and backed with straight-forward bass and drum accompaniment, particles of horizontal melodies briefly arise.

Warren’s detours into timbalitos shakes and coloring don’t detract from his enterprising accompaniment elsewhere. Using just enough cymbal clatter and drum pitter patter to break up the tempos, his rim shots, ruffs and hi-hat clanks intersect frequently with Roland’s pressured and splaying stopping to create a boiling tandem rhythmic thrust. Whether Hassan is involved in scooping honks, undulating altissimo screams or measured drifts towards lyricism, the appropriate response is advanced alternating agitation and abatement.

Unlike the rhythm-directed material on the other disc, the drummer-less Atlan-Tan Suite takes its cadences from the dynamism of Shahid’s bass thumps and the ringing sustain from Allison’s vibes. Its use of delicate, almost flute-like tones from the reeds harmonized with resonating violin pitches seems as if the four-part suite is through composed. This also puts a lie to that musicians of certain backgrounds couldn’t or shouldn’t compose and play certain types of music. As it is the overlap and interaction among defined sections as well as its melodic expression judiciously balance tougher group surges with juddering and popping motifs. Specifically the thematic material is always reflected, with the concluding repeated climaxes confirming Bey’s skill in writing and arranging this sort of suite.

Closer to Bey’s other work, the three remaining tracks create a kaleidoscopic meeting between hard-driven expression from tandem saxophone parts and the harmonized elaborations from the arco strings. Emphasizing neither side over the other, vibe ringing, careful bass thumps, reed slurs and string stops provide the ballast for the ballads. Shahid’s speedy and sliding bass solo backed by vibraphone glissandi and contrapuntal strings on “Liberty City Rundown” is the most protracted instance of this. It includes a POMO  turn at the top which dissects a stop-time swing pattern with contrasting sax solos, one of biting split tones and the other buzzing as if played by comb and tissue paper.

Confirming that compelling and adventurous creative music was being played by improvisers throughout the supposed barren 1980s and 1990s, both discs establish that going outside of the main Jazz centres is often where these sounds could have been found and encouraged.

–Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Live:  1. Live@Western Front-1 2  Live@Western Front-2

Personnel: Live: Raqib Hassan (tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, wood flute and oboe); Larry Roland (bass) and Dennis Warren (drums and timbalitos)

Track Listing: Suite: 1. Atlan-Tan Suite (Marava Mode) A) Alif B) Alap C) Zini Lebarb I D) Zini Lebarb II 2. Ink 3. Liberty City Rundown 4. Kins

Personnel: Suite: Faruq Z. Bey (alto and tenor saxophones); Tony Holland (alto and soprano saxophones); Marlene Rice and Gwen Laster (violins); Jaribu Shahid (bass and cello) and Robert Allison (vibraphone)