Pat Thomas & XT (Seymour Wright, Paul Abbott) with Will Holder - “Akisakila” / Attitudes of Preparation (Mountains, Oceans, Trees)

The Free Jazz Collective 0

By Lee Rice Epstein

Edwin (Eddie) Prévost wrote recently, “The personality, and quirkiness, of a jazz artist is an indicator. Although, jazz has become, in recent decades, increasingly formalised, there are now subtle, insidious, prescribed approaches on offer. Jazz has become more codified, and commodified: even if clothed within an artificial narrative of modernity… Certainly, it became the ‘go to’ music of the Western professional classes. Whole books would be devoted to significant exemplars, like Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue or John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Given such a cultural/market push, it should surprise no-one that newly emerging jazz musicians would find a postmodern response as the only viable market position to adopt. We return to alienation. We note the history and social trajectory of the inventors of jazz.”

The duo of Paul Abbott and Seymour Wright, under the name XT, has inherited the mantle of AMM, releasing some of the most forward-thinking, freely improvised music out there—way, way out there in many cases. Credits bill each as playing “actual & potential” drums (Abbott) and saxophone (Wright), and performances stack samples, loops, enhancements, and other layers over their rich, sharply honed improvisations. To pay tribute to the grand master of free jazz, Cecil Taylor, Abbott and Wright team up with the legendary Pat Thomas.

As a pianist, Thomas both is and is not like Taylor. Starting around 1979, Thomas constructed a unique set of improvisational languages—used in solo, duo, and small-group contexts—linked closely to Taylor through their mutual association with Tony Oxley. Recently, Thomas has played with Wright in the quartet أحمد [Ahmed], another example of the postmodern response, revisiting another inventor of jazz, Ahmed Abdul-Malik. Just as Abbott and Wright use XT to (re-)invent the semantics of improvised jazz, Thomas’s music with Wright and Abbott deconstructs Taylor’s circa-1973 compositional approach by gradually pulling it apart into referential bits that obliquely recall Taylor, Lyons, and Cyrille without over-cleverly aping or outright quoting. “Attitudes of Preparation (Mountains, Oceans, Trees)” was recorded live in 2018, with the trio playing an extended improvisation inspired by and recontextualizing Taylor’s classic Akisakila, the Unit’s 1973 “comeback” performance. On the hour-and-a-half “Bulu Akisakila Kutala,” Taylor, Jimmy Lyons, and Andrew Cyrille’s first recorded performance together since 1969. Akisakila was the precursor to Taylor’s return to New York City . In revisiting this vital moment, Thomas, Abbott, and Wright begin by de-/re-contextualizing the spoken introduction into a syncopated loop, “drums, piano, sax, Unit,” a wind-up from which Wright immediately jumps into a Lyons-esque melody line.

Digitally, the live performance runs unbroken for over an hour, roughly equal to the length of the original “Busu Akisakila Kutala.” Although, “Attitudes of Preparation (Mountains, Oceans, Trees)” is something of an investigation and a questioning, of sorts. The group asks “Who was Cecil Taylor?” and also “What is improvised jazz after Cecil Taylor?” The answer is wickedly complex and eminently listenable. Scraps of interviews and written words from Taylor and a dozen others move to the forefront towards the second half of the performance. The samples play in conversation with Thomas, Abbott, and Wright’s improvisation, the answer to our questions sure to emerge from listeners’ re-experiencing the whole. On vinyl, the unbroken performance is cut into four sides, emphasizing different aspects of the night in a suite-like restructuring, yet another re-presentation of “Akisikala” itself. The cover consists of interviews from Taylor, Thomas, Abbott, and Wright, edited and assembled by Will Holder, who appropriately receives a credit on the album’s liner notes. The text serves as a fourth voice, adding a literary dimension to the aural experience, and providing listeners with more material to enjoy and explore.

As a recording, “Akisakila” / Attitudes of Preparation (Mountains, Oceans, Trees) is undoubtedly in the running for album of the year. The trio’s music is deliriously engaging, frenetic and charged with a hot energy that burns brilliantly. Sidestepping all of Prévost’s warnings about “subtle, insidious, prescribed approaches,” XT and Thomas instead create something direct and uncommonly provoking, a must-own.

Available in digital and limited-edition vinyl

"Akisakila" / Attitudes of Preparation (Mountains, Oceans, Trees) by Pat Thomas & XT (Seymour Wright, Paul Abbott), Will Holder

The Free Jazz Collective 0

It doesn’t make me very happy but there’s a certain polarization that’s sweeping many western societies (including the one I live) right now. On the one pole you have all this neoliberal, racist, fascist, misogynic dreadful rhetoric that, thankfully, provokes many healthy reactions from all those people that still believe a better world is possible. Music (as always) couldn’t stay away or hide from this struggle.

I’m really happy to comment that a lot of people seem to look back at the great, radical tradition of free jazz and improvisation as a means to express or, even, free themselves. I do not know if this may sound like a Hubris, even to emancipate themselves as human beings and artists. We know by now that free jazz in the 60’s and 70’s, before it became commodified, was a force of change in many ways. The sad part in my miniscule dialectic is that it had to be for this polarization for a lot of people to look back with new eyes. But a lot of people do and the products are fruitful and forward thinking. And, yes, it is indeed great black music, ancient to the future.

There isn’t a lot to say, that hasn’t been said, about the music of Cecil Taylor, one of the greats for 20^th century music. As for the duo of XT, Seymour Wright and Paul Abbott are continually pushing the envelope by being one of the few who still can be recognized as making new music –whatever that means in 21^st century music. They have also made it to my top ten lists for this site, if that matters to anybody.

Apart from the music itself in “Akisakila” /Attitudes of Preparation, which is burning free jazz, what strikes me as more important is that the three of them (with Pat Thomas on the piano in full blow out form) create something like a bridge connecting the past with the present. This double vinyl (yes!, we the fetishists applaud in joy) is not a product of three musicians who rely on the past and it’s not, either, the result of the present manifestations of what jazz is. The three of them have managed to create a timeless album, one that incorporates music, words with radical avant-garde tactics and practices.

All the above are handled in the most sublime way. This is not a showing off of how deep informed they are about jazz or about the amazing, still to be discovered, work of Cecil. It is just three great musicians that present their music, or their take on musics past and present if you like. As our societies are immersed in negativity, art will (or I wish it will) present one of the barriers to stop all this. “Akisakila” /Attitudes of Preparation is one of the works that stays in the forefront, on the right side of history and in a more banal point of view should be a strong candidate for best album of 2022.

Dig in.

@koultouranafigo