By Nick Ostrum
I rarely analyze cover art in reviews, but maybe I should. In this case, the cover consists of a photograph flanked on either side by a firey bundles of wheat (or carpet?) and, below, paintings of a flower and a soft blue bird. Above is the title, The Ancients, crowned by vine scrolls, all in black. This highlights the center photo, in which Isaiah Collier, William Parker, and William Hooker stand on a New York rooftop, two wearing scarves, one sunglasses, all three staring at the camera. But the photo looks like a faded polaroid, primary hued with hushed blue and yellow. It looks old. The three men look like ancients, fuzzy from memory, almost haunting the image.
In other words, the image is making a claim to lineage and the album lives up to it. Recorded over two nights of concerts – two at LA’s Arts & Archives and one at The Chapel in San Francisco – in 2023, The Ancients is both urgent and classic, reaching back to the slow methodical modal build-ups of 1970s free jazz. Collier starts with a patient layering of phrase upon phrase, which accretes tension until an eruptive release about 17 minutes in. Parker lays a propulsive bass, leaping from furrow to furrow through additive embellishments and sheer drive. Hooker plays with a concertedness that betrays not age, but wisdom and experience. He is busy and rhythmic, but with precision and crisp, discernible arcs rather than free-for-all clangor. (In that, he is on par with Andrew Cyrille right now.) With Parker and Collier’s emphasis on process and development, this works perfectly and brings me back to some of my first encounters with the music of Noah Howard, Sonny Simmons, Kidd Jordan, and, of course, late Coltrane. Then again, one would not mistake Collier for them. I am not sure what it is, exactly. Maybe it is the replacement of patience and slightly longer tones, or fewer beats per measure, for the rush of those earlier works. Collier, Parker and Hooker are dealing with similar ideas and aesthetics but developing them in different ways. Take Parker’s turn to the hojǒk, a Korean instrument akin to an oboe, at the end of the second LA night, and Collier’s adoption of various unidentified “little instruments” and the Aztec death whistle, which sounds like a human scream, as evidence. Or, take the extended, spacious bass-drum duo in the second LA night, that replaces some of that early energy music exuberance with special attention to construction.
My only real criticism is the cuts between tracks. Each set fades out rather than finishes. One wonders whether this was done to fit each set onto a side of a record. If so, that is a fine reason, but one is left wondering what is missing. Somehow 22-minute cuts just are not long enough.
Now, Collier’s own words: “free jazz is an enduring high art. its greatest expressions belong to their particular moment in history, & live on to transce-nd & refract in amaranthine ways. inside our present historical moment, we are fortunate to have the master musicians in the ancients bringing us their high level creation.” Agreed, but let us also remember the current moment, and the new generation who are building on that tradition, Collier himself foremost among them. God damn, this is good music. Cheers to the ancients, the forebearers, who established this tradition, and an extra spilled libation to those of whatever generation who are keeping it alive and relevant.
The Ancientsis available as a download on Bandcamp and as a double-CD and LP through Aguirre Records.
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