David Murray

The career of Oakland-born tenor saxophonist David Murray (1955) went through at least three well-defined phases after he moved to New York in 1975: a confrontational free-jazz phase in which he developed a wildly dissonant style of playing, an erudite phase in which he focused on composition rather than performance, and a phase in which his performance and composition came together into an elegant (as opposed to furious) display of idiosyncratic languages at the instrument that also mirrored a rediscovery of jazz tradition.

An alumnus in Los Angeles of Horace Tapscott’s Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, itself an outgrowth of the Underground Musicians’ Association (UGMA), formed in 1961, Murray started out as an angry young man of jazz. While he was joining the World Saxophone Quartet, Murray recorded Flowers for Albert (june 1976) with trumpeter Olu Dara, bassist Fred Hopkins and drummer Phillip Wilson. The album contained Murray’s Flowers For Albert and Ballad For A Decomposed Beauty (virtually a long solo) as well as Butch Morris’ Joanne’s Satin Green Dress, and introduced a visceral vibrato a` la Coleman Hawkins gone awry.