Revival (Live At Pookie's Pub)

Sound DNA

• Jazz
• Post-Bop & Modal

• raw
• intense
• smoky

About

Elvin Jones will always be known for the way he reconceptualized time itself in John Coltrane’s classic ’60s quartet with McCoy Tyner and Jimmy Garrison. One might reasonably assume he launched his solo career after leaving Coltrane, but in fact Jones was recording as a leader by the early ’60s—even 1958 if you count <i>Keepin’ Up With the Joneses</i>, his inaugural outing with brothers Thad and Hank Jones. From the mid-’50s onward, well before Coltrane, Elvin was a sideman with Art Farmer, Miles Davis, J.J. Johnson, Paul Chambers, Sonny Rollins, Pepper Adams, Steve Lacy, Mal Waldron, and more. <i>Revival: Live at Pookie’s Pub</i> was recorded in late July 1967, two weeks after Coltrane’s death. Even as Jones asserts his own identity and conception, there’s no denying Coltrane’s strong and lasting influence: in tenor saxophonist Joe Farrell we hear a direct descendant, one of the first in a post-Coltrane tenor lineage that includes George Coleman, David Liebman, Steve Grossman, Frank Foster, and other prominent Jones tenor sidemen. (Farrell contributes the modern uptempo blues “13 Avenue B.”) Wilbur Little, who would go on to record <i>Poly-Currents</i> and three more albums with Jones, appears here on bass alongside the obscure Billy Greene, playing a rather rough-sounding house piano. Greene’s tune “M.E.,” which Jones recorded in the studio one month prior to this gig for the 1968 album <i>Heavy Sounds</i>, gains intensity in a live setting, where Farrell stretches mightily, as he does on Sonny Rollins’ “Oleo.” Two points of interest: Organ great Larry Young sits in on piano for the Jimmy Heath burner “Gingerbread Boy,” and Farrell switches to flute on “My Funny Valentine” and “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise.” The former is refreshingly distinct from Miles Davis’ iconic trumpet rendering, yet Greene and Little are not together, and Greene appears not to know the tune well enough. It’s the bandstand—anything can happen, good or bad, sometimes at the same time. Hearing the “off” moments can make authentic documents such as these all the more valuable.

via Apple Music

Tracklist

Credits