Sunny Murray’s Untouchable Factor
Studio Rivbea
New York City, NY
6.29.1975

01 Untitled Improvisation

Total time: 1:01:55
Byard Lancaster - bass clarinet & reeds
David Murray - tenor saxophone
Kazutoki Umezu - alto saxophone
Juma Sultan - electric bass
Monnette Sudler - electric guitar
Sunny Murray - drums
sounds like a master FM cassette, possibly of a WBAI-FM broadcast; slightly repaired and remastered by EN

original lineage: FM > CDR > secure rip > FLAC
updated lineage: DIME FLACs > WAV with DBpoweramp > Sound Forge 11 remasterizzations > FLAC 8 with DBpoweramp > DIME > your ears

Thanks to carville for originally sharing the show on DIME, and all subsequent seeders of this top-notch hour of molten power.

notes on the remaster
12.9.2017
We lost the Maestro and his surging waves of momentumizing cymbalism on Friday last, so I set about tweaking this astonishing, single-track set to memorialize the immortal drum deity Sunny Murray. I did very little to it except repair several dropouts to make them less noticeable, plus I sprinkled a bit of Sound Forge 11 Graphic Dynamics over it to get it sounding less dullish and brighter in the bell-tones of the horns and Sunny's always-standard-setting work at the top of the kit. I also fixed the very end to not sound cut off and removed the loud click at the conclusion. Using my extensive, world-renowned powers of web-research prowess I cleared up who the players are, verified the date in a very extensive online discography... and a title, a tag, and some new fingerprints later I decided it sounded like enough of an improvement over the original to get it circulating this way, so here it is.

There will never be another Sunny Murray and this performance, a Loft Jazz history lesson in its own right straight from Sam Rivers' legendary Studio Rivbea at 24 Bond Street in Lower Manhattan at the peak of the era, illustrates several aspects of why. It's also somewhat unusual in that it has Juma Sultan -- who most notably played percussion with Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock and on Dick Cavett's talk show in the summer of 1969, but began his musical life as a bass player -- on electric bass, which leads the ensemble into a few ostinato passages along the way that start to sound less like a fiery Free Jazz freakout and more like Miles Davis' "Dark Magus," or even the noodlier, jazzier improvs of 1971/72 King Crimson.

Of course it does feature plenty of those maelstrom Out pyrotechnics, and we certainly know that Sunny created something unprecedented and of a very high energy in his 81 years at the forefront of improvisation, idiomatic and not-so-idiomatic. The whole Free thing may never have gotten anywhere had he not done so much to lend rhythmic guidance and a controlled, furious drive to its silent ebbs and hot-lava flows, so please never forget Sunny, without whom the trajectory of the music we love would surely not have been the same. Beyond that, R.I.P. to the Maestro and of course do enjoy this remaster of an unbelievable and historic concert, transmitted by galaxy-class explorers from the heart of a golden age in the endless annals of Jazz lore.--EN

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