The 360 Degree Music Experience

Beaver Harris had been playing drums for barely five years when he moved to New York in 1963, was encouraged by Max Roach to pursue music seriously, and started working his way through the free jazz scene, recording with Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Marion Brown and Roswell Rudd before the decade was out. In 1968, Harris, trombonist Grachan Moncur III and pianist Dave Burrell formed the 360 Degree Music Experience as a cooperative, a rotating ensemble built deliberately around the idea that jazz could hold African, Caribbean and Asian music inside the same performance without any of them losing their specificity. The membership shifted constantly across the 1970s and 1980s, with Hamiet Bluiett, Jimmy Garrison, Ron Carter, Ricky Ford, Buster Williams and Don Pullen all passing through, but Harris and the concept remained constant: a band that genuinely meant the name. "In:Sanity" (Black Saint, 1976), the double album recorded at Generation Sound Studios in New York across two days in March of that year, remains the most collected entry in their discography. It brought Bluiett on baritone saxophone, Cecil McBee on bass, Azar Lawrence on tenor, Dave Burrell on piano, organ and celesta, Sunil Garg on sitar, Titos Sompa on congas, and a six-player steel drum ensemble arranged by Francis Haynes, across four sides that moved between free improvisation, Caribbean melody and something that had no prior name. Harris died on 22 December 1991, aged 55.

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