Jon Jang - River Of Life (2002)

This is very fine music, a CD of exceptional sensitivity, intellectual depth, and artistic excellence. David Murray is, of course, for these just got to the planet, the "State of the Art" on the tenor saxophone, an innovative soloist, exciting composer and one of the most imaginative arrangers and band leaders on the set. One contributing factor of David's importance to the music, is the diversity of his concerns and the striking ensembles he puts together, the musicians and the instrumentation, to play them. When I first heard David, I thought of Albert Ayler, the broad, powerful sharply aggressive sound and swaggering path of tone and timbre. Since then, Murray has developed and broadened his musical pallette, consistently creative zooming ark of rhythm based harmelodic narrative, that characterize his solos. The historically enhanced aesthetic of his choices. David Murray is at once an authenically daring and advanced player, with a musical persona shaped by the Was the Is and the Will Be. Jon Jang is relatively recent, though he has played with some of the most respected names in the music. Emerging, it seems, fully matured, from the vineyard of the historically hip and the contemporarily creative. Jang also brings theEast Wind of international digging up front. He is yet another important voice reflecting the multi cultural multi national nature of any actual "America". Like D.D.Jackson, from Canada, or Vijay lyer, whose parents are from India, or Rodney Kendricks, orinally from Trinidad, or the ubiquitous dazzling presence of "The Latin Tinge", via David Sanchez, jerry Gonzalez, Hilton Ruiz, and the Puentes, Bauzas, Bobos, Mongos, Palmieris y todos los otros. the confluence and interfunkistry of the world inside the real U.S. Murray and Jang are actually very contrasting players in many ways. Jang, an almost tender lyricist, who spreads the funk, like petals of light when he rushes across the keys. But he can also be Largo, Staccato, powerful as the classic Chinese "Boxer". Murray, of course, carries the huge timbre of the blue wailing night, the explosive cries of the middle passage, the low down out of the gone. Both are very skilled players, whose imagination and taste are their only musical parameters. But for all there oppositeness, like everything else, they form a dialectic that is constructed of both contradiction and identity. So that at times, even though superficial presumption might give them no chance to connect, on the contrary they are as this picture in front of me showing Mao and Dr.Du Bois laughing together in Tiananmen Square. And the nature of the dialectical process, sometimes, they become each other. David, with his upper register lyricism, Jon hammering the box with a percussive emotional depth. So that the opposites like the polarities of Ancient Africa, the Ying and Yang of the Ancient China are sonideografed through us, as if we are hearing such aesthetic completion for the first time.What is further intriguing about the CD is that it is a Duo, two marvelous artists creating at the top of their knowing. From the Outset, "Moon Reflected Over Lake" by Hua Yan-Jun a sweet imagist ballad, that reminds one of the Odes, the Classic Anthology of Chinese Lyrics, the expert rendering of which Confucius said was the test of a Wise Man. An indication of historical knowledge and appreciation of beaty and tradition. Jang's exquisitely expressive opening, blues inside with David Murray's undering it into Djali yet reflective Afro-Asian tale, a ballad of meditation and tender memory which grows more animated as it is recalled. The names of the works convey the intellectual depth and social grasp of these musicians very clearly. Sometimes with delight, at times with humor, but by the results, always seriously. "Two Portraits of Capital Punishment (if you do have the capital you don't get punished)". "Sketches of Capital Punishment", which reflects what Mao called for from Progressive Artists, to create that which Artistically Powerful and Politically Revolutionary. Dig this, the statement comes open with the sound and rhythm of the Native Peoples, whose purloined land has been transformed into capital, near genocide has been their punishment. The striking relevance of these concerns, e.g., "Free Mumia Now", screams at us everyday, especially in a world where a Bushman governor has killed more people on his watch than all the other states combined. Or the Grizzly headlines the title "Eleanor Bumpurs" recalls of the elderly black woman murdered by New York's fiendish. Here retold as a slowly twisting swallowing, tragic yet forthright musical drama. The horn searches for description, the piano elaborating, rumbling, running, dramatizing the horror, together, as provocative and inspiring as our will to live. Mumia is anthem and call...colored by the sadness and madness of this place. Moving adventurous music. Advanced social ideas contexed and projected by advanced artistic concepts. As it should be. I am especially flattered by the naming of a few of these tunes after poems of mine. A few years ago, in homage to the long reading of the Japanese Haiku form, Icame up with an Afro American tribute form, The Low Coup. No fixed amount of syllables like the classic, just short and sharp. Jang and Murray use two of the first, one called "lowcoup", which essence is Truth is in The Act, the other, "TheHeir of theDog", re: American middle-class concern about animals more than humans. The Lowcoup, featuring Murray on Bass Clarinet an instrument to which he has brought much distinction, and Jang laying amplifying chords under the rhythmic pop of the horn producing what has to be a new dance step...humorous and lilting, but funky. Finally, "Lift Every Voice And Sing", called in my youth, The Negro National Anthem, James Weldon and Rosamund Johnson's Harlem Renaissance example of artistic and cultural Self Determination, which our own World Music ensemble, Blue Ark, finished our historical work, Funk Lore, as the denouement, over which Amina Baraka read her moving Ode To Malcolm. Jon and David render it at full lyric and narrative power, creating an anthem, a penetrating "sorrow song" and another hymn of revolutionary democratic consciousness, like another movement of the Internationale, to demonstrate the changing conditions that had Lenin change Marx's classic "Workers Unite" to "Workers and Oppressed Peoples Unite".