Paul Flaherty - A Willing Passenger (Relative Pitch, 2025)
By Stuart Broomer
I first listened to A Willing Passenger on Bandcamp and thought it
was great. When I got the CD, I realized I was missing an important
component. There’s a liner note with a background narrative by Flaherty,
describing an incident with a group of construction workers in the 1980s
when he regularly played solo saxophone on the street. It’s a strong, if
not essential, complement to the recording, as well as the source of both
the CD title and the individual track titles. I don’t wish to burden Paul
Flaherty’s music with the special burden of the post-Ayler saxophone’s
history, perhaps even theology, but I think it’s strong enough to carry it.
One of Flaherty’s most powerful statements -- both musical and titular – is
a duet recording from 2000 with drummer Chris Corsano. It’s essential
music, in a couple of ways, but its title is essential too: it’s called
The Hated Music. It’s out-of-print in all its forms but Bandcamp,
but its ideal form is the two-LP reissue on Byron Coley’s Feeding Tube
label with extraordinary cover art by Gary Panter and a certain physical
mass that the music seems to demand. There’s something both brave and
determined about that title, pre-emptive acknowledgement of some element of
a music’s reception, free music’s edgy and complex legacy.
It’s a music sometimes tracked by madness, so out of courtesy to the masks
and mouthpieces of many, I won’t go so far as to name names, but I’ll make
one careful distinction that shouldn’t be ignored. Consider the late Peter
Brötzmann, one of Albert Ayler’s first and greatest disciples, who
dedicated to Ayler both a recording and a band named
Die Like a Dog
, a vision of life cruel enough to suggest even a canine shelter gassing or
a KKKanine lynching. There’s a crucial difference between the sounds of
Ayler and Brötzmann, even given the relative harshness of some of Ayler’s
earlier recordings. It long ago occurred to me that Brötzmann’s music sounds
like Albert Ayler without transcendence, without God. I know it’s a
theological reading, but it’s rooted in timbre, the way Ayler, live or on
any decent recording, had a sound that’s full of light, that light a matter
of singing high frequencies breaking through and hovering over a sound that
could suggest gauze or grit. If Ayler could, at his most enlightened,
suggest angels’ wings in an updraft, Brotzmann, with high overtones barely
evident in his sound, might supply a hydraulic drill attacking concrete.
Paul Flaherty’s music is deeply rooted in the work of Albert Ayler --
vocalic, impassioned, explosive -- which can be a blessing or a curse. Any
close listener of free music will know, or perhaps at least suspect, that
it regularly inspires both the greatest and worst of music from profoundly
spiritual and existential orations to the most clownishly vacuous
exuberance one will ever hear. The style’s explosive core can mask
distinctions only so long before the poles of the practitioners get sorted
out. It’s a music I’ve been around in various forms for 60 years. Along
with Coltrane and Sanders [together] and Albert Ayler, I even managed to
hear Charles Gayle in 1966, long before he became memorable. I have heard
prophets and poseurs. In case I’m somehow mistaken, I make a practice of
never writing about those I consider the latter, unless circumstances make
it unavoidable and then its brief, suspecting that the low level of rewards
in the field make them at least sincere poseurs.
Flaherty’s opening “Do You Know” defines the recording’s level of
intensity. It’s a dirge, beginning in funereal melody, but one that will
stretch to the tenor saxophone’s expressive limits – high-pitched squeals
to overblown fundamentals in the lowest register that then become
multiphonic blasts that cover multiple registers at once, then phrases that
range suddenly from contorted to lyrical to circulating lines that stretch
amongst all of those boundaries – avatars of music’s ultimate range.
“Would you like to take a ride?” is superbly lyrical alto saxophone, every
technique subservient to expression, like Flaherty’s ability to mutate tone
from note to note, bending from interjective squawk to sudden illumination
in long recirculating lines embodying an essential lyricism.
“Oblivious to Surroundings”, taken on tenor, initially suggests a
refraction of something Coltrane may have played but soon proceeds with a
distinctive Flaherty mode, a pattern in which a lyrical phrase is then
remodelled, clean pitches turned to ambiguity and multiphonics, smooth tone
turned to abrasive wail. In the case the exploratory passages become
tremendously intense, suspended
The title track is another fine alto performance, the identification based
as much on register as tone, for Flaherty has the same breadth of sound on
alto that he possesses on tenor, following the same imagination. The work
again follows that rapid route from the lyrical to the expressionistic
ultimately compressing them into single phrases – moving from torture to
sweetness and vice versa.
“Small Lonely Looking Cloud”, on alto and just three minutes long, has an
extended melodic exposition that suggests the uninterrupted transfer of
image from a vision in nature to a single expository line with expanding
sympathy and resonance, recalling certain shakuhachi recordings.
“Almost Finished”, is a powerful envoi on tenor, as expressive as
one might be, and a reminder that in this particular field, the intensity
of conviction, the depth of expression, is form itself.
A Willing Passenger is, clearly, often harsh, but it’s always
vital. Much of it, most of it, has its own intense lyricism. Its greatest
strength may be its immediate emotional intensity which in Flaherty’s mind,
hands and breath becomes form. Even when there is a sense of
developed melody (and virtually everything here is melody), it’s the
keening emotional input and a corresponding attention to nuance that
defines the shape of individual notes and short phrases. It is as human a
document, with as substantial an emotional punch as a recording by Son
House, (say “John the Revelator”) or Blind Willie Johnson (maybe, “God
Moves on the Water”).
There’s a fine on-line interview with Flaherty where he talks, among many
other things, about playing with massed frogs and a train. It’s a great
introduction: https://15questions.net/interview/paul-flaherty-about-improvisation/page-1/
There’s also a fine account by Nick Metzger on Free Jazz Blog of Flaherty’s
previous Relative Pitch solo release, Focused & Bewildered,
from 2019.
