There’s a photo of Sam Rivers at the White House, most likely
from the so-called “White House Jazz Festival” on the South Lawn during
Jimmy Carter’s administration. “That blue suit he had on? He made that,”
said Monique Rivers Williams, daughter of the revered
multi-instrumentalist. “He sewed all his own clothes ... he wasn’t just a
musician.”
Hundreds of artifacts like that photo—including some of Rivers’ own
hand-made dashikis—tell a more personal story of this renaissance
artist, who, along with others like Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman and
Andrew Cyrille, helmed the free-jazz movement. The responsibility for
telling this story falls to Williams, who grew up in Studio Rivbea,
Rivers’ Greenwich Village loft where free-jazz flourished in the 1970s.
Since 2006, she’s been organizing a catalog of her father’s personal
effects, all of which recall a childhood spent at the epicenter of the
New York jazz scene. “These are memories I can’t let go of,” she said.
Among Rivers’ lifetime collection of materials—more than 50 storage
containers’ worth—lie a trove of mostly never-heard recordings in every
format available during the past 50 years, from reel-to-reel to
cassette to CD and VHS. “There’s an extraordinary amount of historical
information there from a critically important decade in jazz,” asserted
Ed Hazell, the music writer and producer currently tasked with curating
the collection. “For someone like me, who’s loved [Rivers’] music since I
was a teenager, all of this information was just heart-stopping.”
With Williams’ permission, Hazell spent a year poring over Rivers’
archive with an ear toward selecting the most choice recordings for
release on NoBusiness Records, a pre-eminent imprint for free-jazz and
improvised music based in Lithuania. The time seemed right, he said, to
start unveiling these important works. “The Loft Era [in jazz] is just
starting to get attention from scholars,” he pointed out. “A lot of
books have been written on it lately, and I think it’s just the tip of
the iceberg.”
In May, the label released Emanation, the first of
eight albums in the Sam Rivers Archive Project. The album depicts a 1971
concert at the Jazz Workshop in Boston, after Rivers had completed
stints with Miles Davis’ and Cecil Taylor’s bands. He was heading up his
own trio with bassist Cecil McBee and drummer Norman Connors, and
feeling out the limits of extended improvisation. “It’s fascinating as
an early example of what he was setting out to do ... developing a
characteristic voice for each instrument, letting the rhythmic feel be
fluid and changing without any preagreement,” Hazell noted.
The two tracks that make up the album, each more than 30
uninterrupted minutes, crackle with intensity as Rivers uses horns,
flute or piano to navigate the unsettled terrain that lies between bop
and the avant-garde, classical and modern. The ephemeral moments of
these lengthy improvisations begin to take on a restless shape as the
trio borrows from these lexicons; on each, what starts with a simple
(albeit out) melodic intro descends into cacophonic splendor before too
long. But hidden in and among the squeals and screams are moments of
quiet impressionistic beauty. It’s a masterly display.
After Emanation, the label plans to release two albums a
year for four years, in roughly chronological order, drawing from the
archive and Rivers’ own portfolio of intended releases; the label will
choose the album titles from a list of possibilities written in Rivers’
own hand. “There’s still a lot to go through, so we haven’t finalized
all the releases yet,” Hazell said.
With the launch of her father’s legacy recordings, Williams
concedes that it’s probably time to find a permanent home for his
carefully maintained collection. Organizations and scholars have
expressed interest in acquiring it, and she’s begun to take these
proposals seriously.
“It’s time for me to turn it over, hopefully, to an educational
institution that will teach and play Sam Rivers’ music,” she said.
“Because that’s what my father wanted.”
from http://downbeat.com
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