Aqui Se Habla Espanol (David Murray)

Abstract No career in jazz during the past 30 years has proven more consistently unpredictable and rewarding than that of David Murray. When he first showed up in New York—a 20-year-old student on furlough from Pomona College, playing “Flowers for Albert” in Stanley Crouch’s Bowery loft—he had two big things going for him. First, he didn’t sound like anyone else, certainly not Albert Ayler, though one could imagine that Ayler’s example encouraged his penchant for the split-tones and squeals of the so-called hidden register. The classic Texas tenor Buddy Tate, who also favored upper-register cries, once advised young musicians to find their own sound, which isn’t only easier said than done but almost impossible to do. The sound is you and not something out there awaiting discovery. But Tate came up in the ‘20s, when every saxophonist—every musician—of note had a distinctive sound. That Hawkins, Webster, and Young existed in the same world indicated the tenor saxophone’s extraordinary range; if those three and others (like Herschel Evans, Bud Freeman, and Chu Berry) represented unmistakably distinctive attacks, the spaces between them offered all kinds of possibilities. Tate, for one, started out blending Evans and Hawkins before finding his own place. The ‘70s offered a parallel challenge: the post-war tenor hierarchy had handed down alternatives no less distinct in the work of Gordon, Gray, Getz, Rollins, and Coltrane. Yet for a while it looked as if the tenor would be buried in a welter of Coltrane imitators. Murray, however, proved to be merely the youngest in an influx of musicians who demonstrated that many “sounds” were yet to be had—especially, for some reason, on alto sax (no fan could confuse Anthony Braxton, Arthur Blythe, Julius Hemphill, and Oliver Lake), but that’s another story.