Various - Wildflowers 3: The New York Loft Jazz Sessions (1977 US Douglas Vinyl LP)

Various - Wildflowers 3: The New York Loft Jazz Sessions | Vinyl LP - 1977 US Douglas/Casablanca (NBLP 7047, Terre Haute Pressing)

The loft scene happened because the economics of New York in the mid-1970s made it possible. Real estate was cheap, the city was near bankruptcy, and the established jazz clubs wouldn't book free and avant-garde players. So the musicians made their own spaces. Sam Rivers and his wife Beatrice ran Studio Rivbea out of their loft on Bond Street, and in May 1976 producer Alan Douglas recorded ten days of performances there, releasing the results across five LPs. This is the third volume. Randy Weston opens side A with "Portrait of Frank Edward Weston," a solo piano tribute to his father played with the deep African rhythmic sensibility that defined Weston's work. Michael Gregory Jackson (a guitarist from New Haven, then in his early twenties) follows with "Clarity," an example of the younger generation drawn to Rivbea. Dave Burrell closes side A with "Black Robert," his piano rooted in the free tradition but never abandoning structure. Side B belongs to Ahmed Abdullah's "Blue Phase" and Andrew Cyrille's Maono ensemble on "Short Short." Cyrille had been Cecil Taylor's drummer for over a decade, and Maono (Swahili for "feelings") was his own vehicle for exploring the space between composition and free playing.

Robert Palmer, writing in the New York Times in 1976, called the Wildflowers albums "the most remarkable documents to emerge from the lofts so far." The scene they capture was short-lived. Rising rents and the SoHo real estate boom pushed the lofts out by the end of the decade, and the neoclassical revival led by Wynton Marsalis and the Young Lions shifted the jazz mainstream back toward acoustic bebop, sidelining the experimental aesthetic. But the loft era modelled a path for artist-run initiatives that runs directly to the Knitting Factory in the 1980s and to independent creative-music collectives today. Very little footage or photography of the scene survives, which makes the Wildflowers recordings all the more valuable.

This is the 1977 US pressing on Douglas NBLP 7047, produced by Alan Douglas through Casablanca Record & Filmworks, pressed at the Columbia Records plant in Terre Haute, Indiana.