Here is where we take a giant step into the future. Tony Williams is the most formidably talented jazz drummer to rise in the Sixties; his thundering polyrhythms push other soloists to breathtaking heights of invention, dizzying chances taken and brilliantly realized. An alumnus of such towering organizations as Jackie McLean's '64 quintet and Miles Davis' current group, he's never been satisfied to rest on his laurels, and thus it's no surprise that his own new group turns out to be the most innovative to emerge this year. This trio puts out a bigger, more driving sound than we have heard from any "jazz" group in some time. Larry Young has long been recognized as an up-and-coming organist
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out to liberate that instrument from the oppressive Jimmy Smith mould. His work here is a study in controlled distortion and free improvisations that never fail to make
emotional sense.
But the real star here is John McLaughlin, a young English guitarist who has absorbed every important style of the last decade and come up singing his own song, laying down the most exciting sounds I have heard from that instrument in some time. There are traces of people like Gabor Szabo and Eric Clapton, but he has so thoroughly absorbed them that what is contrivance in their hands becomes a driving, thundering Statement. Make no mistake, McLaughlin is his own man. Like Young, he uses distortion as an essential component, but it is so masterfully controlled that the listener is carried along almost unaware of the experimentalism. These men are true musicians of the rarest type; they compromise neither to the hysterical charlatanism of the avant-garde nor to moribund traditionalists. They are jazz musicians who have seen through the smog of pop artifice and picked up on the very best that rock has to offer, making their music a totally unique entity, the kind of dedicated super-inspired workmanship that promises to set styles for years to come.
The tracks are mostly jams that run through brilliantly-timed changes, shattering climaxes brinking soft mesmeric explorations that never fail to keep you right there, breathlessly waiting for the next stunning turn in this revelation's flashflood course. Williams, Young and McLaughlin have achieved a telepathic interaction rarely known in recent jazz and even more seldom in rock, exuding great waves of pure joy, not only believing in what they're doing but understanding it. Only negative factor is Williams' preachy, pretentious vocalisms, which shouldn't be held against him. The instrumental interplay supporting those clumsy lyrics is so absorbing that after the first couple of listenings you don't even notice the words.
There is a new music aborning which gives the lie to all classifications by school and idiom, whose passions alone are sufficient unto its identity. It is found in the work of Miles Davis, of Captain Beef-heart and Don Cherry and the Velvet Underground. More than anyone els
