ISSUE Project Room and Qbico Records Present Qbico U-Nite XIII
5 sets:
Saxophonist/flutist/singer Arthur Doyle is hardly alone in his position as a marginal jazz figure. In an art form known for its many trials and tribulations (both artistic and financial), Doyle hasn’t made his situation any easier by attempting to carve a singular path along the music’s outskirts. The fact that he has done so, however, is what makes his music so unique. Performing in a style he calls “free jazz soul,” Doyle combines the liberated freedom flights of the avant-garde with the gritty, gut-wrenching emotion of gospel and R&B.
The second of five children, Arthur Doyle was born in Birmingham, AL, on June 26, 1944. He attended college at Tennessee State University where he quickly built a circle of contacts in the Nashville music scene, playing with Louis Smith (Horace Silver) and Walter Miller (Sun Ra). Following brief stints in Detroit, playing in a big band led by Charles Moore, and back home in Alabama with R&B outfit Johnny Jones & the King Casuals, Doyle left for New York at the age of 23.
Still essentially a bop player, Doyle quickly became acclimated to the more radical environment surrounding the city’s bustling loft scene. Shortly after his arrival, the saxophonist hooked up with drummer Milford Graves and began sitting in on dates with Pharaoh Sanders and Sun Ra’s Arkestra. Declining a possible job with the latter outfit, Doyle instead joined a small combo led by Noah Howard, performing on the sessions that produced The Black Ark (1969).
Concerted efforts by jazz’s mainstream to stifle the practitioners of the “new thing” took their toll, however, and Doyle vanished from the scene from 1972-1974. He would not appear on an album again until 1976, ending a seven-year period of recorded silence with his blazing tenor work on Graves’ Babi Music. The following year, he led a quintet of his own in a performance at a New York loft dubbed the Brook. The results were documented on his landmark Alabama Feeling and released in a limited pressing of 1000 copies.
Amongst the crowd that night was an admiring guitarist named Rudolph Grey. The pair met that evening and soon devised plans for an outfit of their own. Debuting at Max’s Kansas City as the Blue Humans, they proceeded to play a series of New York dates with drummer Beaver Harris. Doyle abandoned the project shortly after, the increasingly bleak situation for free jazz players in the states convincing him to move to Paris in 1982.
Not long after his arrival, however, the saxophonist was arrested on false charges, spending the next five years in prison. Horn-less, Doyle wrote prolifically nonetheless, producing the first compositions for his songbook: a massive, 300-piece aural memoir. Once released, Doyle returned to New York where he recorded the new music, capturing his hollers, shouts, and singing (along with his flute and tenor work) in gritty fidelity on a boombox. These recordings subsequently appeared on the albums Plays and Sings from the Songbook (1992), Songwriter (1994), and Do the Breakdown (1997).
The 1990s saw Doyle performing with a number of different musicians from the jazz and improv schools including bassist Wilber Morris, drummers Rashid Bakr and Sunny Murray, and guitarists Keiji Haino, Thurston Moore, and old spar Rudolph Grey. The first studio recordings since his 1969 date with Howard emerged as well: Dawn of a New Vibration (with Murray) and Prayer for Peace (with Jim Linton and Scott Rodziczak). (from allmusic.com Nathan Bush)
Acid Birds is a trio composed of Andrew Barker, Charles Waters and Jaime Fennelly. Barker formed the trio ACID BIRDS in order to perform the composition of the same name. Along with saxophonist / clarinetist Charles Waters, and multi-instrumentalist Jaime Fennelly, the trio premiered in 2004 for the artist collective Free103point9, and their creative music event entitled Assembled: Free Jazz + Electronics. In November of 2007, Barker, Waters, and Fennelly convened for a second time to record ACID BIRDS with longtime collaborators Jeremy Wilms and Torbitt Schwartz on QBICO records (Italy).
Andrew Barker is a drummer, multi-instrumentalist, and composer living in Brooklyn, NY. Barker has appeared on recordings with a wide range of artists such as bassist William Parker, saxophonists Rob Brown, Daniel Carter, Sabir Mateen, and Charles Waters - with whom Barker founded the durable Gold Sparkle Band in 1994. Barker plays in a wide variety of musical settings, most recently writing and playing guitar for his new heavy metal band, Hallux.
Multi-instrumentalist & artist Jaime Fennelly maintains a practice of musical performance & composition which borders on near ritual praxis in its approach and conception. He is a founding member (along with Chris Forsyth and Fritz Welch) of the iconoclastic group Peeesseye, a transcontinental amalgam of minimalist rock, noise, folk, drone, psych, improv, sound poetry, and absurdity that has produced seven CDs, one 7-inch, over 145 concerts in Europe and the US, and untold blown minds since forming in 2002. Jaime is also a member of the elusive and rarely spotted quartet Phantom Limb & Bison, the intermittent pranksters Manpack Variant and the noise/akshuntist cover band peeinmyfacewithsurgery. His music has been released by Digitalis Records, QBICO, Archive Recordings, 8mm, Misanthropic Agenda, Chocolate Monk, Unframed Recordings, Utech, Deep Fried Tapes, Locust Music and Evolving Ear. Currently he is working on a series of photographs documenting his own slow unraveling whilst living on a remote island off the state of Washington.
Saxophonist Charles Waters lives in Brooklyn. He works with grids, particles, and alpha notational systems in the mystical realm of nuzion science. He still loves coffee!
Muruga & Perry Robinson Duo with special guest Badal Roy
Muruga Booker was born Steven Bookvich in Detroit, Michigan on December 27, 1942. His father, Melvin Bookvich, was a shoemaker who played accordion. He has a wife, Shakti; a son, Aaron; and a daughter, Rani. Booker and his family moved back to the Detroit area from Oakland, California in 2000 and currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Booker first played the accordion before taking up drums as a pre-teen. He studied drums under Misha Bischoff, a Russian music teacher. He first professionally played drums with “The Low Rocks” in Detroit as Steve Booker. Under that name he also achieved local recognition playing with the “Thunder Rocks” and Ted Lucas and The Spike Drivers, and was known for his long, driving drum solos. He shared the bill at venues like Detroit’s Eastown Theatre and Grande Ballroom with Ted Nugent (2/23/70), Traffic (6/5/70 & 6/6/70), Jack Bruce (2/13/70 & 2/14/70), and others.
At the first Woodstock Festival, where he played drums with Tim Hardin, he met Swami Satchidananda who gave him the name Muruga. In the late 1970s and early 1980s Booker lived in New York and played with David Peel on “King of Punk” and “Death to Disco,” then moved back to Detroit in 1980 where he connected with funk legend George Clinton and became an official P-Funk All-Star. His band at that time, Muruga and the Soda Jerks, had several albums produced by George Clinton.
In mid-1985 he moved to Oakland, California and formed the band Muruga UFM, which included Big Brother and the Holding Company guitarist James Gurley. In 1990, after performing with Prem Das on the classic drum meditation album Journey of the Drum, he joined Merl Saunders and formed Merl Saunders and the Rainforest Band with Jerry Garcia.
In 2000 Booker formed the band Muruga and The Global Village Ceremonial Band, which released the CD One Global Village, featuring P-Funk vocalist Belita Woods and jazz clarinetist Perry Robinson. They played at several festivals including the Starwood Festival, Rhythm Fest 1 with Mickey Hart, and Rhythm Fest 2 with Airto Moreira. In 2002 his recording company Musart and the Association for Consciousness Exploration co-hosted the SpiritDrum Festival, a tribute to Babatunde Olatunji, also featuring Sikiru Adepoju, Badal Roy, Jeff Rosenbaum, Halim El-Dabh, Perry Robinson, and Jim Donovan of Rusted Root[1]. In 2004, with most of the same musicians as Muruga & GVCB, Muruga formed the band Free Funk (also featuring Trey Lewd, and Louie Kabbabie), which plays mostly in the Detroit area. He also plays with Mark Hershberger, and Richard Smith as the Global Village Trio. Booker continues to work with George Clinton and play with the P-Funk All Stars whenever they performed in California, and occasionally elsewhere.
Perry Robinson grew up in New York City and attended the Lenox School of Jazz in Massachusetts in the summer of 1959. His first record, Funk Dumpling (with Kenny Barron, Henry Grimes, and Paul Motian) was recorded in 1962. He also appeared with Grimes on The Call in 1965. Robinson served in a U.S. military band in the early 1960s. Since 1973 he has worked with Jeanne Lee and Gunter Hampel’s Galaxie Dream Band. He contributed to Dave Brubeck’ s Two Generations of Brubeck and played with Burton Greene’ s Dutch klezmer band Klezmokum. He has led his own groups in performances and on record, with albums on the Chiaroscuro, WestWind, and Timescraper labels. More recently, he worked with William Parker and Walter Perkins on Bob’s Pink Cadillac and several discs on the CIMP label.
From 1975 until 1977, Robinson was member of a band called Clarinet Contrast, featuring German clarinet players Theo Jörgensmann and Bernd Konrad. He has recorded with Lou Grassi as a member of his PoBand since the late Nineties, and with Lou Grassi, Wayne Lopes and Luke Faust in ‘The Jug Jam’, an improvisational jug band. He plays in a free jazz and world music trio along with tabla player Badal Roy and bassist Ed Schuller, with whom he recorded the CD Raga Roni. He has played with Dave Brubeck and Muruga Booker in the MBR jazz trio, and has also played with Booker in the Global Village Ceremonial Band, and has played with them at the Starwood Festival, SpiritDrum Festival, and RhythmFest with Sikiru Adepoju, Halim El-Dabh, Jeff Rosenbaum and Badal Roy[1]. Robinson also played an integral part in the formation of ‘Cosmic Legends’ an improvisational music/performance group led by composer/pianist Sylvie Degiez which included musicians Rashied Ali, Wayne Lopes, Hayes Greenfield, and Michael Hashim among others. In 2005 he was featured on his cousin Jeffrey Lewis’ album “City and Eastern Songs” on Rough Trade Records, produced by Kramer. His most recent release was OrthoFunkOlogy in 2008 with the band Free Funk, also featuring Muruga Booker, Badal Roy, and Shakti.
Amerendra ‘Badal’ Roy Choudhury arrived in New York in 1968 with a pair of tablas and eight dollars in his pocket. In three days he took a busboy job and then waiting positions in various Indian restaurants. Soon, instead of waiting on customers he was entrancing them with his drumming. Badal’s passionate style of playing is free-flowing and always from the heart, and when Miles Davis heard him play, the superstar warmed to him and spread the word. Soon he received his big break: an invitation to record with John McLaughlin and Miles successively.
Direct Current is a new band featuring Daniel Carter, Dave Nuss, and Atiba Kwabena-Wilson. Kwabena is a musician (flute, djembe, vox) whose roots with Carter go back to the 70s and 80s nyc free jazz scene. His focus currently is on poetry and storytelling in the African folkloric tradition, as well as his band “Befo’ Quartet”, performing every Sunday at the St. Nich’s Pub. Daniel Carter is a ubiquitous presence on the nyc scene who presumably needs no introduction, only to say that his energy and musicality are unsurpassed. Nuss is a member of the No-Neck Blues Band who made several records with Carter in the mid 90’s, and is currently recording a theatrical score with Kwabena. “Direct Current” is the result of these three channelers providing an unmediated experience of new tradition.