When Elvin Jones left the John Coltrane Quartet in March 1966, signaling the end of the postwar era’s most formidable jazz band, Rashied Ali found himself in an enviable position, as Coltrane’s sole drummer. Ali was a 32-year-old with strong avant-garde credentials but little mainstream name recognition when Coltrane brought him into the fold for the Meditations sessions the year prior, as a second drummer to deepen the foundation for the saxophone titan’s late-career explorations in free rhythm and tonality. “I can really choose just about any direction at just about any time in the confidence that it will be compatible with what he’s doing,” Coltrane said of the young drummer, who favored a non-linear approach to time-keeping. If Jones was as dynamic and powerful as a freight train, Ali roved at will like a forcefield, protean and ever-shifting.
One day in February 1967, just 5 months before Coltrane’s death, the saxophonist took Ali to New Jersey’s storied Van Gelder Studio to record, without any other members of the band. The stark horn-and-drums-only format was all but unimaginable at the time, and the resulting album, Interstellar Space, sat on the shelf for seven years before its first release in 1974. But the dizzying and intense music the duo recorded that day would prove highly influential in the decades to come, inspiring the next generation of free jazz musicians to turn the duo into a sort of standard format for the genre. When the New York Times’ Ben Ratliff asked free jazz pianist Borah Bergman why this duo format became so prevalent over the years, he deliberated over his answer for days, then responded via fax with one word: “economics.”
The economics of jazz shifted as the ‘60s neared its end, as the music was beset on all sides by popular genres like rock and soul, and a club culture that didn’t always support musically progressive artists. Ali saw the tide turning, understanding that jazz artists would need to be self-reliant if they were to survive. He established his own infrastructure for the lean years to come, including a venue, Ali’s Alley in New York, and a label, tellingly called Survival Records. The imprint’s first release was Duo Exchange, an incandescent session between Ali and tenor saxophonist Frank Lowe, recorded after Interstellar Space but released a year before. After shuttering in 2009 and relaunching last year, Survival is reissuing Duo Exchange with an hour of additional material from the original session, and a heretofore unknown recording of Ali performing live with an ad hoc group in 1967.
Duo Exchange’s status as one of the most caustic free jazz albums was assured well before Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore put it in his personal top ten for Grand Royal magazine in 1996. Lowe might have been new on the scene in the early ‘70s, but his afterburner of a horn on recording sessions for Alice Coltrane and Don Cherry showed he was a formidable sparring partner. For long stretches of the set, Ali and Lowe burn like a dragon dueling with a flamethrower. When Lowe’s needling high frequencies strafe across an alternate take of “Movement III,” it suggests a durational outpouring of fury. But the reissue also reveals moments of quiet and nuance from the sessions, presented here in their entirety.
Amid his piercing overtones, Lowe’s reed playing sometimes brings to mind Coltrane’s famous “sheets of sound,” working to exhaust every possibility in his cascading runs. He seems to reach for a pure sound beyond notes per se, reflecting the squalor of early-‘70s New York through his horn. His tone is piercing, jarring, wearying, like the brakes on a train, an overheated tea kettle, a feverish baby. Ali is there with Lowe’s every breath, shattering the rhythm around him and propelling him to even greater extremes.
Work your way past the shrieks and squeals and other qualities come to the fore—like Lowe’s hushed, vibrato-heavy tone midway through “Movement I,” or his fluttering against Ali’s shaken bells on the tranquil “Movement IV,” an oasis from the onslaught. Lowe even does his best ballad playing on the subtle “Movement V,” with Ali slipping in and around him, elbowing the drum skin to elicit strange new tones. After all the searing music that has come before, it makes for a sweet finale.
Ali worked at the physical boundaries of the music, as he once told the Jazz Times: “Say we play a standard...we try to exhaust the tune. It's like all of a sudden gravity don't work no more.” Duo Exchange is a study in exhaustion, of that last two miles of the New York marathon, the 12th round of a heavyweight fight. It’s intense and cathartic, with little to diminish its harshness some forty years on. But it also has a sense of reverence: the sound of two men fighting against the city around them and pushing toward something new.
The exhaustive quality of Duo Exchange also comes into play with First Time Out: Live at Slugs 1967. Found on two 7” reels of tape in Ali’s archive, it’s the lone evidence of a May 1967 performance at a notorious downtown Manhattan jazz dive. The liner notes suggest it was a last-minute booking, perhaps even unrehearsed. There’s no photo of the quintet that convened that night, and nothing to suggest they ever played together again. Live at Slugs is only the third known recording of Dewey Johnson, who played trumpet, in existence anywhere. Saxophonist Ramon Morris would later record a jazz-funk album, but here he is in Coltrane mode, taking long, winding solos.
If you’re familiar with Ali in the context of iconoclastic giants like Coltrane or Keiji Haino, hearing him in a more relaxed and supportive role on Live at Slugs is startling. His cymbal work skitters and creates waves around the tunes, and he lays back frequently. Rather than the breathless sprints of Duo, the group exhausts each tune at a flâneur’s pace, offering only brief glimpses of the incandescence of Duo Sessions. The drunken meander of “Ballade” would remain in Ali’s repertoire for decades to come, while “Study For As-Salaam Alikum” would reappear in a tighter, transfigured form on another Ali album from the early ‘70s. But most of the other music would not be heard again. The tapes suggest that the recorder was set near Ali’s kit, as there’s times when the pianist Stanley Cowell and bassist Reggie Johnson can scarcely be made out.
Murkiness aside, Live at Slugs is a fascinating snapshot of what turned out to be an idyllic moment in jazz history. The brutal race riots of Newark and Detroit and the “Long, Hot Summer” were still two months away, a string of cataclysmic events in urban epicenters that would undermine black communities and hasten “white flight.” Coltrane was still alive, as was his fellow free jazz firebrand Albert Ayler. It would be another 5 years before Lee Morgan was shot to death inside of Slugs’ Saloon. These two reissues capture that hard shift in economics: a quintet in the summer of ‘67 exploring at its own pace and a lean, snarling jazz duo just five years on, fighting for survival.
Buy: First Time Out: Live at Slugs 1967 - Rough Trade, Duo Exchange: Complete Sessions - Rough Trade
