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Milford Graves, Arthur Doyle, Hugh Glover, 'March 11, 1976'

In 1976, reeds players Arthur Doyle and Hugh Glover joined drummer Milford Graves in his studio-workshop in Queens, NYC, for a surging history lesson that rearranged Black American Music. Children of the Forest, previously unreleased until now, was the result.

The opening 12-minute track "March 11, 1976" seems to ask the listener: "How free do you truly want to be?" Before anyone could possibly respond, Graves unrolls polyrhythmic and roiling drum patterns and, within moments, Doyle detonates the brass plating of his saxophone through sheer force of his berserk lung power. Graves' drum-and-woodblock-heavy percussion ballasts and coaxes the trance-born blasting of Doyle. Roughly a minute from the end of the performance, as Glover growls out a gut-bucket epiglottal drone on the vaccine, a single-note Haitian bamboo trumpet, Doyle evokes a bluesy, Coleman Hawkins-style snarl — just a microsecond of jazz tradition in a purifying, holy flame of post-Coltrane and -Ayler fire music.

Copyright 2023 WJCT News 89.9

Daniel A. Brown
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