Arthur Doyle & Sunny Murray - At Glenn Miller Café

Johan Lif, Västmanlands Länd Tidning

Hard, insensitive, unclean - necessary.
Genius or charlatan? The tenor saxophonist Arthur Doyle puts the old hackneyed questions about free jazz on its edge.

Arthur Doyle is a musician who still manages to split the critics in two camps, as in the 60s regarding Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane.
Some put him off. He simply can't play, they say. Others find in his music a raw, expressive beauty.

"Free Jazz Soul Music" he calls it himself. "It has come from belly, like you are throwing everything out of it" he writes in the liner notes to this cd.
The cd is a duo recording with the drummer Sunny Murray, recorded live 2000 at Glenn Miller Café in Stockholm and released by the Swedish fiery-spirit Ayler Records.

This is a necessary entity till the trend sensitive jazz, which surround us today. Arthur Doyle's music sounds hard, insensitive and quarrelsome. It refuses to apologize. He stretches after the painful high registers with tenor saxophone tone, which is as ugly and unclean as it can be.
His fraises are short and cut. This is music which all the time criticizes itself, music which all the time interrupted it and starts over again. It is a materialistic derision against the conception about a refined, perfect music.

Sometimes Doyles puts down his tenor saxophone and plays flute without any tonal inhibitions what so ever. And sometimes he sings, or what one may entitle his melodious and abstract vocal outburst. It sounds like a child who just has discovered the language.
The same striving to the origin, the clean and unadulterated feeling, permeates all the music.

Like Arthur Doyle, Sunny Murray has a long faithful service within the uncompromising free jazz concept. In the 1060s he played with Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler, and he has continued to be radical and questioning musician. Here he plays with a characteristic violence. rhythms explode and fly away in different directions.

The first three tracks of the CD are duos with Murray and Bengt Frippe Nordström. This is Nordström's last performance - eight months later he passed away and his playing is marked by his illness. In spit of that Nordström was the first to play free jazz in Sweden he was seldom seen as anything else than margin eccentric.
Jan Ström at Ayler Records says that these recordings are released more from human than musical reasons, but there is something strange light and beautiful in Nordström's naivism. He runs through simple major scales and plays every tone, as it was the first time.

Live at Glenn Miller Café is a tribute to free jazz, its visions and its forgotten heroes.
A better way to get ones ears cleaned upright now doesn't exist.