St. Thomas - David Murray

More jazz, I think. This one's a track taken from one of the rare albums on which saxophonist David Murray plays music by other people. It's a little carnival-ish at first -- work your way past that -- but it's an interesting interpretation of Sonny Rollins' classic tune St. Thomas.

At least three stories connect with this tune.

1) My first radio series as an independent producer was the NZ Jazz show, Off The Record. Drummer Tony Hopkins would speak to a guest musician, then they would play tunes in the studio. Simple concept. Each guest band would record a version of St Thomas, as well as some very short takes of the main melody for use as the intros and outros of the programme.

Over the year that Off The Record ran, I became overly familiar with the tune -- and perhaps a little weary -- even though every version I heard of it was different. But I still love it. Particularly the Rollins version -- and also the one I recorded of Nathan Haines doing it.

For a period in the late 90s, I couldn't walk into a jazz gig in Auckland without the band doing a version. It was kind of cool, actually.

2) Around the same time, since I was recording so much jazz anyway, I got involved with starting up the record label. We weren't promoting gigs, but we had a direct interest in how those gigs were received. One reviewer, whose name has thankfully fallen out of my head and can remain forgotten, decided that the way in which to assess live music performances of local jazz was to reflect upon the ways in which the performance failed to match "what David Murray would have done".

Versions of Autumn Leaves were deemed too fast. Neo-bop quartets were deemed to be insufficiently avant-garde. Sax players were declared sickly (okay, so that thing about the post-adolescent chicken pox was a fair cop). But the issue was more simple than that: not a single jazz performer succeeded to be David Murray in performance throughout that period.

3) I was at a conference about jazz over the weekend up in Leeds. Actually, the Leeds International Jazz Conference, 2007. I was there with Professor Tim Wall -- our second time representing UCE at the conference. Last year, we spoke about jazz broadcasting. This time, I specialised in jazz online, and Tim decided to talk about the 266-odd recordings in the career (to date) of saxophonist David Murray.

I've never really been huge on Murray, but I went to see him live at Tim's recommendation a while back ("greatest jazz musician who ever lived", etc.), and I thought he was really great. Perhaps not 266 albums worth of great, but pretty good nevertheless.

At the conference, Tim made an argument about Murray's music that connected his stylistic approach to the economic conditions of its production and release. That is, the kind of record label he was recording on was in alignment with the kind of music he was making. It was interesting stuff.

Anyway... along the way, he played some Murray tracks. I think I could be convinced.

Enjoy.