Arthur Doyle & Sunny Murray - At Glenn Miller Café

Uno Ohlsson, Norrköpings Tidningar

On cool day in March 2000 the duo Arthur Doyle and Sunny Murray played at the Museum of Art in Norrköping. This turned out to become a free jazz performance one will have difficulties to forget and a certain help to remember is possible to achieve by the latest release from Jan Ström's Gusum based record label "Ayler Records".

The recording was made a couple of days later at the Glenn Miller Café in Stockholm when the foremost figure-head of the Swedish free jazz, Bengt "Frippe" Nordström, could sit in with Murray on a couple of tracks before Arthur Doyle took over.

"Frippe" was at this time marked by his illness (he died half a year later) and one must notice that his playing on the alto saxophone is quite pale in the three "Spontaneous Creations" he is performing.

The charge in Arthur Doyle's tenor playing is much stronger. There is no sound which is strange for this, by most people overlooked, saxophonist. He turns himself inside out in own compositions and creates sounds from his tenor saxophone which no human ear has heard before.
When he approaches the Nat King Cole classic "Nature Boy", a rough beauty grooves up and he mumbles passionate some text phrases.

Sunny Murray at the drums contributes with free flowing playing full of ideas. He is no accompanist but a voice of his own and he is building up tension in the unpolished music.
When listening one notice that what at first could be experienced as a impenetrable wall of sounds has openings toward an essence of genuineness.