Review Summary: Fractal sway..
Sometime in the mid 60’s, after touring through Africa and living around Europe, tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan returned stateside with the idea of recording a string of albums that would usher in jazz in its new form, free-flowing avant-garde schisms, arrangers that denounced traditional margins and reached for something infinitely wilder and inimitable. The recordings were meant to become the backbone of Jordan’s new progressive label that sadly never came to be, with most of the sessions quickly going out of print, never seeing the light of day until half-a-century later, when a wave of revivalist appreciation brought both vinyl and free-from jazz back from the brink, giving its old iconoclasts a chance to find new audiences and claim a scrap of triumph that had all but fizzled into complete obscurity.
Pharoah Sanders’
Izipho Zam was one of albums that Jordan had laid to tape, in hopes of dragging jazz past its pre-established, calcified borders. The sessions were something of a statement of purpose for Sanders himself, a declaration of sovereignty. He was breaking away from Impulse!, the safe haven vanguard of jazz recording of the era, and at the same time, taking a respectful step out of the shadow of long-time mentor and friend John Coltrane, who had spearheaded Sanders’ stylish rise through the studio ranks, and who’d died just two years before
Izipho Zam’s recording (put to tape in 1969, the LP wouldn’t see release until 1973).
Opener “Prince of Peace” is an early announcement of Sanders’ brazen, self-determined passage. Wandering and loose-limbed and yet underhandedly tense, it jitters with improvisational brio, the band clutching together into an arrhythmic vein, and journeyman avant-garde vocalist Leon Thomas lending the piece his soulful brand of asymmetrical crooning - equal parts euphoric elegance and the guttural yodeling that distinguished his take on singing as a coaxing instrument rather than focal aspect of most any piece of music. A stacked set of five percussionists underpins “Prince” in its unsettled march, big knocks whose mid-spaces are filled with spiny clattering that sound like insects moving. It all teeters on the fringe of total chaos, moody and teeming with vision. “Balance” focuses all of its tumultuous energy on usurping and warping the notion of melody, until what’s left is a heap of sound, briefly sliced up by traditionally pretty breaks, slinking in for just enough time to let you know, it’s all going to be torched again in a flash.
Sanders truly arrives with
Izipho Zam‘s centerpiece and title track. All his budding qualities as an arranger, director, engineer and experimental agitator coalesce somewhere through the piece’s half-hour run. Thomas’ jolting vox are in the mix again and guitarists Sonny Sharrock matches him in twitchy, spasm-prone strumming, while the rhythm section stirs itself into a stop-start frenzy. It seethes for the entirety of its first act, until the horns swoop in with sophisticated interplay, briefly tying the piece to the ground, giving the listener a small reprieve until the expected crescendo blows “Izipho Zam” wide open with so much anarchic heat and verve, that one wonders how someone could even begin to conceive such perfect ruination. Sanders’ piercing, wounded saxophone squeals like a jilted prophet, certain with new knowledge that abandoning past boundaries is the only thing left, both futurist and entirely unconcerned with what lays ahead.
In purposeful absence of form, the adhesive force that keeps a structurally-nihilistic piece of music from cracking at the seams is sheer skill, which the collective Sanders gathered for
Izipho Zam boast in grand numbers. Sharrock’s guitar, choppy and fitful and still jauntily smooth, is a marvel to listen to. Howard Johnson’s tuba lays itself over the record like something viscous and dense, a perfect moving part in Sanders’ golem. To the keen musical ear, the havoc that drives
Izipho Zam is built on tightly-wound overlapping patterns, but with a bit of suspension of disbelief, the LP flourishes into what it was truly meant to be – something that did away with modality, rhythm and archaic poetry to become a moment of utter freedom, taking big, hungry breaths that giddily, eagerly run the risk of collapsing your lungs.
