Children of the Forest, an archival release of 1976 recordings featuring Milford Graves on drums, Arthur Doyle on saxophone and fife, and Hugh Glover on klaxon and the vaccine (a Haitian one-note trumpet) sits amongst the most breathtaking musical discoveries of 2023. It offers free jazz unfettered by any constraints, thundering and soaring and skronking with passion that tips over into sheer ferocity. It’s out now on 2LP through the Black Editions Archive in a tip-on gatefold jacket with pigment ink foil stamping and photographs by the great free jazz historian Valerie Wilmer, plus an insert with a new interview with Hugh Glover by Jake Meginsky. As serious as your life? Oh hell yes!
Along with Sunny Murray, Milford Graves was the primary catalyst liberating jazz drumming from its timekeeping role. A Professor Emeritus of Music, a sculptor and a visual artist in addition to drummer-percussionist, Graves played on a lot of records (as is the jazz norm), with the majority as a sideman (Albert Ayler, Sonny Sharrock, Paul Bley, Giuseppi Logan), co-leader (Nommo with Don Pullen, Dialogue of the Drums with Andrew Cyrille, Beyond Quantum with Anthony Braxton and William Parker) or as a member of an ensemble or collective (New York Art Quartet, Jazz Composer’s Orchestra).
Graves’ leadership shelf is a lot slimmer. His debut Milford Graves Percussion Ensemble with Sonny Morgan (a duo record) came out on ESP-Disk in 1966, and on the other end of the spectrum, there are two CDs issued on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, Grand Unification (1998) and Stories (2000), both solo. In the middle, both released in 1977, is Meditation Among Us with a Japanese band including the sax scorcher Kaoru Abe, and Bäbi, which was recorded live on March 20, 1976 at the WBAI FM Free Music Store with the contributors to Children of the Forest, Doyle and Glover, credited with reeds.
Arthur Doyle is the on the short list of the most idiosyncratic and uncompromising of free jazz players, first heard on Noah Howard’s The Black Ark, recorded in 1969, released in ’72, and debuting as a leader with Alabama Feeling in ’78. Along the way he was part of guitarist Rudolph Grey’s post no wave ensemble Blue Humans, cut a few disks with drummer Sunny Murray, led the Arthur Doyle Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, and was captured on two discs for Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label, Plays More Alabama Feeling (a one-sided LP) and the lo-fi cassette deck-recorded solo endeavor The Songwriter.
Having cut no albums as a leader, Hugh Glover’s body of recorded work is directly tied to Graves, as heard on Bäbi and the album under review here, plus one track in duo with Graves on the 1975 Folkways compilation New American Music Vol. 1. It’s important to note that the Corbett vs. Dempsey label’s CD reissue of Bäbi adds a second disc with a 1969 recording by Graves, Doyle, and Glover, which drives home that the strength of their union on the original Bäbi LP and now Children of the Forest was built on an extended creative relationship.
Indeed, Glover traveled to Europe with Graves twice for playing purposes in the years immediately prior to the recordings documented on Children of the Forest, which took place on three days early in 1976. On January 24 it was a duo of Graves on drums and percussion and Glover on tenor sax with four pieces spanning side three and most of side four. On February 2 it was Graves solo for a short piece to end side four. And on March 11, nine days before the Free Music Store performance heard on Bäbi, it’s the trio in full effect with three pieces.
To say that Doyle blows with a fierceness that’s essentially unmatched in the annals of free jazz isn’t an exaggeration in the slightest. It’s a reminder that free jazz, while sometime alternately called ecstatic jazz, was also in its early days occasionally tagged as “energy music” (reliably in connection with Cecil Taylor). As many in the 1970s lofts were calming down (often to productive effect) Graves, Doyle, and Glover were keeping the intensity way up in the stratosphere.
If a free jazz novice were to stumble onto these recordings, their reaction might be that it’s all a bunch of undisciplined fucking around, but the reality is that is takes a lot of control, as well as collective understanding (plus stamina) to play with this level of intensity. And it’s clear that Graves thrived on just this sort of unrestrained soul purge, having played with Ayler, Logan, Abe, Zorn, David Murray, and Peter Brötzmann (the first release by the Black Editions Archive, released last year, is Historic Music Past Tense Future by Graves, Brötzmann and bassist William Parker, a live performance from March 29, 2002.
My introduction to Graves’ work came in union with Brötzmann and Parker in performance on the video cassette Mouthful of Sweat, a compilation assembled by the magazine Chemical Imbalance and released by the Atavistic label. That live excerpt (from The Knitting Factory in NYC) was a jaw-dropper, and the four sides of Children of the Forest are even more astonishing over 30 years later.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
