Children of the Forest

Any recording of unreleased material from master drummer/percussionist Milford Graves is noteworthy. When it is excavated from the artists most visionary period, its an occasion for celebration. The venerable Los Angeles label Black Editions group (that also houses the Thin Wrist and VDSQ labels), has for years unearthed and/or licensed vanguard material from improvisers, noisemakers, rockers, and more; from Masayuki Takyanagi and the PSF catalog to Nagisa Ni Te and Shizuka Miura, there are many pleasurable stops between. The three sessions here were recorded between January and March of 1976 in Graves Queens basement studio. He had taken groups to Europe in 1973 and 1974 and traveled to Lagos in 1977, but was, in 1976, leading groups on the New York loft scene. The activity captured a March 1976 gig at the WBAI-FM Free Music Store that netted his most important album, Babi, with Arthur Doyle and Hugh Glover. Here the three men dont always play simultaneously, but they do appear together on the four selections from January. The first three tracks feature Graves drum kit and percussion and Glover on tenor saxophone. The nearly 12-minute opening section is incendiary. Glovers playing is on the far edges of skronk, as the drummer oscillates between improvising, intense layers of circular rhythms, and forward-thinking jazz drumming. The passion and technique in Glovers wonderfully noisy playing are immense. He goes right at the drummer, playing into his patterns, bleating with pain, rage, and transcendence, then surrenders, allowing the drummer to lead. Graves introduces the January session by giving the exact date and time. Its four parts feature Doyle on sax and fife, and Glover playing vaccine (a Haitian one-note trumpet) and a klaxxon. This is an urgent conversation that winds into and out of a free jazz monolith tempered by Eastern modalism and extrapolations from Caribbean, Afro-Cuban, and Malian rhythms. The interplay between Doyle and Glover sounds like Pentecostal churchgoers worshipping in tongues, yet the tonal, timbral, and textural contrasts are underscored, explored, and exploded at every turn by Graves in a world-class rhythm exhibition. "Part IV" finds the drummer establishing an incantatory tom-tom/kick drum pattern answered by squalling fife, vaccine, and tenor sax. Graves tempers the wild-eared improvisers by employing his frenetic drumming as a guiding vehicle that leads them all back into dialogue, no matter how far they travel. The final cut here is a three-and-half-minute drum solo in which Graves displays not only his vast polyrhythmic vocabulary, but also his ability to find melody and modulation inside the grooves. He effortlessly stretches his palette of colorful beats and global rhythms to fit an unshakeable, turbulent, but pronounced inner lyricism. Taken whole, or as the sum of its incidental parts, Children of the Forest is not only a major revelation in Graves catalog, but a mirror of the creative state of improvised music in New York during the mid-70s. ~ Thom Jurek