None of the drummers who helped define '60s free jazz really sounded anything alike. Andrew Cyrille was sparse, sensitive and intensely precise; Milford Graves was taut, virtuosic and startlingly alert; Rashied Ali was busy, flowing and irrepressible. Among these artists, Sunny Murray was the outlier. Speaking as a drummer, it's hard to even say what he did behind the kit.
When I heard the news of his death just now, I threw on the 1964 radio recordings with Albert Ayler, Don Cherry and Gary Peacock, some of my favorite Sunny Murray music. What a peculiar concept, to match Ayler's swaggering, prayerful vibrato with fluttering, impressionistic snare swells and tinkling cymbal chatter. Even as the music rises to a boil, Peacock's booming, agile bass work seems to drive the rhythm section, while Murray hovers as a kind of restless background spirit. It might seem too convenient to equate the supernatural overtones of Ayler's music ("Spirits," "Ghosts," etc.) with Murray's place in the music, but I think there is something inherently otherworldly about his playing. I think of it not as a mere instrument in the ensemble but as a sort of eerie shroud that descends over the band as they play.
Cyrille, Graves and Ali were (and in Cyrille and Graves' case, still very much are) all deeply, you might say consummately, interactive players, right there in the mix with the soloists; Murray, at least by the time of these Ayler recordings (you can hear him playing relatively conventional time on the classic 1961 Cecil Taylor tracks released on Gil Evans' Into the Hot), was operating on some other weird, insular wavelength. His tendency to moan as he drummed, an integral part of the texture of these classic early Ayler sessions, only heightened the sensation of some kind of gusting, whooshing force that seemed more to swirl around the music than to exist within it. (Paul Motian, who was working contemporaneously with some of the same players and starting to develop his own startlingly original concept, would later bring this sort of ghost-rhythm into the fringes of the jazz mainstream.)
But I want to be careful not to underrate Sunny Murray's genius here, to portray him as some inscrutable savant. The fact that his enormously idiosyncratic style worked as well as it did not just with Ayler but in the context of Cecil Taylor's magical 1962 band with Jimmy Lyons tells us something about how hard he worked to develop an original voice, seemingly distinct from the traditional jazz-percussion values of flair and virtuosity, that could resonate with, and complement profoundly, the equally bold concepts put forth by a variety of future musical icons.
His later work, from the thrilling and highly evolved Murray we hear on the classic Jump Up live LP (with Lyons and John Lindberg) from 1980 to the shaggy and deliberate one found on the excellent 2000 Murray / Arthur Doyle duo LP Dawn of a New Vibration, conveys the same sort of alchemical charge. (The Eremite catalog also features a number of important late-Sunny titles, including We Are Not at the Opera, with Sabir Mateen; the beautifully recorded Tiresias, by the Louis Belogenis Trio, is another gem; there are also several noteworthy releases with Tony Bevan and John Edwards, some discussed here.) It never got any easier to figure out what he was really up to back there behind those drums, or any harder to fall under his strange rhythmic spell.
As I've discussed on this blog in the past, the sound, and maybe more importantly, the sensation, of Sunny Murray's percussive art is in my blood — it's something I'd return to often over the years, a sort of refuge from more, for lack of a better term, literal forms of rhythm. Sunny Murray changed not just how jazz sounded, but how it felt, deep down in your bones, all the way to your spirit.
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*The 2010 documentary Sunny's time now [sic] is an essential portrait from Murray's later years.
*Looking over some key primary sources — Val Wilmer's As Serious as Your Life and Garth W. Caylor's Nineteen+, both of which feature stand-alone mini-profiles of Murray, the former likely based on interviews conducted in the '70s, the latter catching Murray in '64 or '65 — I found some intriguing Murray quotes, referring to his desire to move beyond conventional ideas of drumming and rhythm.
Via Wilmer:
...[Murray] considers that the drums as we know them are virtually obsolete. "First, there is nothing more you can do — all the way down to breaking the bass drum or making the cymbals split. There is no more there, and that is actually reaching the point of unmusical music — it's below the cultural octave or something." With this in mind, Murray has been trying to develop a different kind of drumset that uses electricity to sustain oscillating pitches. This, in effect, will be "more in touch with the human voice in terms of humming and screaming and laughing and crying."Then, later:
"I've sent to Washington for musicians, given auditions, but I've seen them drop out because people usually expect the feeling of drums, and they aren't ready for what I do. I work for natural sounds rather than trying to sound like drums. Sometimes I try to sound like car motors or the continuous cracking of glass."He later makes reference to his playing suggesting "...not just the sound of drums but the sound of the crashing of cars and the upheaval of a volcano and the thunder of the skies."
Via Caylor:
"I know where I'm going. I have an instrument I'm making — everyone thinks I'm talking through my hat because I don't have the money to put it together, but I have the drawings and studies of it. Max Roach said maybe he could get me a sponsor for it."I'm curious to know how far Murray got with these experiments, if he ever played his self-built instruments live or on record, etc. Anyone have any further info on that? Can't think of any documentation I've seen or heard.
"Is this instrument a drum?"
"Not really. It's just a percussion instrument — I wouldn't want to call it a drum — I'd want to call it 'Sunny Murray,' or 'Blank,' or 'X,' or whatever. Max said he had one he wanted to make when he was playin' with Bird, but I told him 'No, baby, I know what you have in mind: boom-boom-boom, no.' I had to explain this to him because he was so quick to categorize my acts — a lot of old cats tend to do that. I can hear it in my head — it's like an instrument made up of all the resources of nature — I can't make it about words. I've been tryin' to get it together for four years, studying physics and making tuned aluminum sticks. ...
"The traps have become obsolete to me. I can't hear my son talking or the subway crashin' or my baby crying in my trap set, but I can hear it in something that I can construct."
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