Anthony Williams - Spring (1971 US Blue Note BST-84216 Vinyl LP)

Anthony Williams - Spring | Vinyl LP - 1971 US Blue Note Reissue (BST-84216, United Artists era)

Williams had been playing professionally since he was thirteen and had joined Miles Davis's quintet at seventeen. By August 1965 he had already appeared on Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch!, Andrew Hill's Point of Departure, Jackie McLean's One Step Beyond and Herbie Hancock's Empyrean Isles, made his own debut with Life Time in 1964, and cut E.S.P. with Davis in January. Fourteen Blue Note sessions in two and a half years, and this was the last of them. What makes the record hold up is that it is not a drummer's showcase. Williams wrote all five pieces and then built them so that everyone has somewhere to go. The traditional roles come apart: Peacock's bass roams rather than walks, Hancock comps percussively and pushes into the upper register, the two tenors weave around each other rather than trading in the usual sense, and Williams keeps the propulsion going without holding a time signature down. It sounds like 1965 in the best way, with the structures loosening and nobody quite sure yet what the music was becoming.

Sam Rivers is the reason to hear it as much as Williams. He was 42, considerably older than everyone else in the room, and had spent the previous year playing with Davis before Shorter took the chair. His playing here is free and hard and completely unlike Shorter's more oblique approach, and the contrast between the two tenors is what gives the album its charge. "Extras" opens with both horns and runs past eight minutes. "Echo" follows as a solo drum performance, five minutes of Williams alone working a tiny theme into what amounts to an improvised composition. "From Before" brings Hancock in. "Love Song" is the piece most often singled out, an eight-minute performance in shifting meters that sounds fluid rather than mathematical. "Tee" closes the album at over ten minutes with everyone playing.

This is the 1971 US pressing on Blue Note BST-84216, from the United Artists era, with the blue and white divisional label.