One of the biggest thrills I have ever experienced in listening to jazz since I first got into the music as a teenager was hearing Rashied Ali for the first time live back in 1997. I was blown away that time at the Jazz Cafe in London's Camden Town, chatted to him a bit later and heard him a few more times in the Finnish cities of Tampere and Pori. He advised me in a brief chat to go listen to Interstellar Space which I did and have done a lot since. That album, the acme of Ali's duo rapport with John Coltrane, has inspired so many improvisers down the decades notably in recent years Binker and Moses.
Ali makes you think of drumming differently. He called it 'multidirectional' and for that he was an innovator, a style that students write PhDs about and free-form drummers admire because of the way the anti-groove envelops and morphs into a mysterious pulse that allows all improvisation around it to be open and responsive without the direct need for anyone to respond to patterns or strict meter. There is a highly abstract force at work that operates like a study of touch, or intuitive response might be another way of putting it.
An event release and such an inspiring listen at least what I have heard so far First Time Out: Live at Slugs 1967 I have never heard at all before today and I am blown away all over again on these samples not because it is pristine audio because it isn't [they are from private tapes belonging to Ali who died in 2009] but because of its emotional impact, a painterly serenity sweeping over its entirety, Ali with a soliloquising Dewey Johnson (trumpet); Ramon Morris (tenor saxophone); Stanley Cowell (piano) and Reggie Johnson (bass).
According to the issuing label, Survival Records (via rashiedali.og): ''This obscure appearance may have been only the second time that Ali had led a band in public… the tunes they play predate all known segments of Rashied’s career as a composer or bandleader.'' SG
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