Jack DeJohnette - Special Edition (1980 Japanese Pressing, ECM Records Vinyl LP)

Jack DeJohnette - Special Edition | Vinyl LP - 1980 ECM Records Japanese Pressing (PAP-9196, Trio Records distribution)

Jack DeJohnette's career as a sideman would have been enough on its own. He replaced Tony Williams in Miles Davis's band in 1969, played drums on the sessions that produced Bitches Brew, and spent the 1970s in Keith Jarrett's American Quartet alongside Dewey Redman and Charlie Haden. By March 1979, when he recorded Special Edition at Generation Sound Studios in New York, he was ready to lead. The quartet he assembled was deliberately provocative: David Murray on tenor saxophone and bass clarinet and Arthur Blythe on alto were both products of New York's loft jazz scene, both members of the World Saxophone Quartet, and both playing with an edge that had more to do with the AACM and the downtown avant-garde than with ECM's usual aesthetic. Peter Warren plays bass and cello underneath them, and DeJohnette himself plays drums, piano and melodica across the five tracks.

Three of the compositions are DeJohnette's own. "One For Eric" is a tribute to Eric Dolphy, and you can hear Dolphy's influence in the way Murray and Blythe thread their lines together, sometimes in unison, sometimes pulling apart. "Zoot Suite" stretches past eleven minutes with DeJohnette driving the rhythm while the saxophonists build over him. The two Coltrane pieces sit on side B: "Central Park West," a ballad taken at a pace that lets Warren's arco bass and the reeds breathe, and "India," which opens with DeJohnette at the piano before Blythe enters with a solo that between Sound and Space's reviewer called one of his finest recorded moments. DeJohnette produced the album himself. Manfred Eicher served as executive producer and mixed the record alongside Martin Wieland. Tony May engineered the session. This is the 1980 Japanese pressing (PAP-9196), distributed by Trio Records with Japanese liner notes by the critic Masahiko Yuh (悠雅彦).