After the crucial and business success of 1985’s Overseas Intrigue, his first album for Blue Notice Information since 1966, the acclaimed jazz drummer/composer Tony Williams assembled a brand new band to take his music on the street. Aside from saxophonist Billy Pierce, they had been all rising younger stars of the US jazz scene: Trumpeter Wallace Roney, pianist Mulgrew Miller, and teenage bass prodigy Charnett Moffat. For the drummer, then 39 years previous, reverting to an orthodox jazz setting was an thrilling prospect. “I’ve never had a band like this, a so-called traditional, straight-ahead acoustical group,” he enthused in 1986. “I had a desire to write some music for this style, and to put my own stamp on that genre with a different look at it – a more full-bodied and explosive attack.” After writing eight new tunes, Williams took his band to Capitol Studios in November 1986 and recorded Civilization, a cultured cache of post-bop jazz highlighting his brilliance as a composer.
A Chicago-born wunderkind who started his skilled profession as a thirteen-year-old, Tony Williams was a musical phenomenon who profoundly formed jazz drumming within the post-bop period. He rose to fame with trumpeter Miles Davis, whose quintet he joined in 1963 at age seventeen. A yr later, he recorded Life Time, his first album as a pacesetter for Blue Notice Information, which confirmed him embracing experimental avant-garde music. A progressive musician desirous to discover new musical terrain, Williams left Davis in 1968 to type a brand new band, Tony Williams Lifetime that includes guitarist John McLaughlin and organist Larry Younger. Their specialty was marrying jazz expression with rock and funk components, an strategy Williams continued to discover within the 70s.
The drummer was with out a document deal when he was invited to play in a live performance at New York’s City Corridor in February 1985. Dubbed “One Night With Blue Note,” it was a celebration marking the enduring jazz label’s relaunch. After listening to Williams play with fellow ex-members of the Miles Davis Quintet, the label’s new boss, Bruce Lundvall, provided the drummer a multi-album recording contract.
Civilization was Williams’ spectacular follow-up to his 1985 Blue Notice comeback album, Overseas Intrigue. Like that document, Williams introduced acoustic straight-ahead jazz with a twist, augmenting his drum equipment with a drum machine. However whereas Overseas Intrigue’s digital touches had been distinguished, on Civilization they had been subtler, largely consisting of unobtrusive percussion sounds; a characteristic that has helped the album age nicely.
From the regal opener, “Geo Rose” with its stately pulse, to “Citadel,” the faintly unique, hard-swinging finale, Williams and his cohorts served up a tasty feast of small group jazz outlined by dazzling horn solos and tight-knit ensemble work. Different highlights included two waltz-time numbers: The African-tinged “Soweto” with sweetly blended brass, and the album’s slower, low-key title observe, characterised by a chic primary theme voiced by the horns in tandem with Miller’s eloquent piano. Williams and his crew additionally confirmed with “The Slump,” a playful, off-beat quantity, how they might efficiently assimilate rock music components into the music.
Largely eclipsed by Williams’ explorations within the fusion and jazz-rock fields, the often-overlooked Civilization is undoubtedly top-of-the-line albums the drummer made in a straight-ahead jazz setting. Filled with memorable, well-executed tunes and compelling performances, it reminds us that moreover being an progressive drummer who might play any type of music, Tony Williams was additionally a formidable author of music whose compositional endeavors deserved a lot wider recognition.
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