Sunny Murray - Sunny Murray (1975 Japanese ESP-Disk' Vinyl LP)

Sunny Murray - Sunny Murray | Vinyl LP - 1975 Japanese ESP-Disk' pressing (BT 5057, ESP-Disk' 1500 Collection)

Sunny Murray was one of the drummers who broke jazz open. Playing with Cecil Taylor in the early 1960s and then on Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity, he threw out the steady beat that had anchored jazz drumming and replaced it with something looser and more elemental, waves of pulse, cymbal shimmer and colour that moved with the music rather than keeping time for it. This self-titled album, cut for ESP-Disk' in 1966, was among his first dates as a leader. He surrounds himself with young firebrands: Byard Lancaster and Jack Graham on alto saxophones, Jacques Coursil on trumpet and Alan Silva on bass. The four pieces, three of them Murray's, are free collective improvisations, high-energy and abstract, the horns crying and tumbling over Murray's restless drums. This is free jazz at its most uncompromising, the sound of a music tearing up its own rulebook.

ESP-Disk' was the New York label that documented the free jazz avant-garde when nobody else would, home to Ayler, Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders, and its records have become cornerstones of the music. The catch has always been the sound: original US ESP pressings are famously rough. That is exactly why the Japanese ESP pressings are so prized, cleaner and fuller-sounding than the American originals.

This is the 1975 Japanese edition on ESP-Disk', part of the 1500 Collection series manufactured by Nippon Phonogram.