Maurice McIntyre - 1977 - Kalaparusha

Kalaparusha

1977

Kalaparusha

01. Mulberry Bush (10:42)

02. In the Field (5:05)

03. Ismac (11:59)

04. Celestial (11:21)

05. Tanuki (8:56)

Kalaparusha - reeds, composer

Karl Berger - vibes, piano

Ingrid Berger - vocals

Tom Schmidt - bass

Jack DeJohnette - drums (#1,2,4)

Jumma Santos (#3) - drums, percussion

Produced by Creative Music Communications (CMC). All tracks recorded May 30, 1975 at Woodstock Artists Association, NY, except Ismac recorde November 14, 1975 at the Creative Music Studio Auditorium, NY.

A certain kind of creative magic was happening in the mid-nineteen-sixties on the South Side of Chicago. A group of African-American experimentalists organized themselves into a collective called the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, or the A.A.C.M., that has produced some of the most revolutionary American sounds of the past fifty years. Rather than adopting any particular style, the A.A.C.M. nurtured the radical individualism of its members, blowing past the idiomatic restrictions of jazz while embracing its tradition of innovation. The combination of a supportive community of fellow outsiders with a committed philosophy of artistic independence and creative investigation resulted in an extraordinary cohort of musicians and composers: Muhal Richard Abrams, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, and Henry Threadgill, to name a few. Last week, this family lost one of its members, an artist less known to the wider public but admired deeply by his peers: Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, who passed away on November 9th.

Born in Clarksville, Arkansas, in 1936, McIntyre was raised on the South Side, the child of a pharmacist and a schoolteacher. He was fascinated by the saxophone as a child, but distracted as a teen-ager, first by football, then by drugs. He only returned to the instrument after spending two years in a federal narcotics prison in Lexington, Kentucky, where he passed time in the practice studio and studied music with fellow inmates, including the legendary bebop pianist Tadd Dameron. After his release, in 1962, McIntyre returned to Chicago and began his career as a professional musician, working with local jazz and blues artists. Soon he began crossing paths with musicians like the saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell and the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, whose Experimental Band was the communal breeding ground for the coming wave of Chicago musical rebels.

McIntyre was present at the A.A.C.M.’s creation in 1965, and appeared on three of the collective’s most important early recordings, all of which appeared on the Chicago-based Delmark label. (For the full story of the A.A.C.M., read George E. Lewis’s magnificent history, “A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music.”) On Mitchell’s “Sound” (1966) and Abrams’s “Levels and Degrees of Light” (1968), McIntyre, Mitchell, Abrams, and their fellow explorers introduced a new kind of sonic world, where delicate overtones and harmonics are intimately examined, where extended silences are juxtaposed with found sounds and stately melodies, where traditional instruments are pushed to their breaking point to discover new timbres. The third album was McIntyre’s own profound spiritual meditation, worthy of a John or Alice Coltrane, or a Pharoah Sanders: “Humility in the Light of the Creator,” recorded in 1969. You can hear the alternate take of the title track on YouTube.

Even after five decades, these albums retain their power, producing the exquisite tension of musical surprise. On Abrams’s “The Bird Song,” a solemn poetry recitation by David Moore (“doomed and shrouded in what was jazz”) explodes into a burst of thrilling energy from McIntyre and his fellow saxophonist Anthony Braxton, who told me personally of how the other A.A.C.M. saxophonists looked up to McIntyre. When you listen to his music, you can hear why. His rich tone combined the fat-bottomed breathiness of Chicago tenor legends like Gene Ammons or Von Freeman with the yearning, searching cry of John Coltrane. He played with the unbridled passion of Albert Ayler but with the technical control of Sonny Stitt. You can hear the history of the instrument and the music in his playing, but his improvisational voice was all his own; he was grounded in the present while looking to the future.

Soon after this recording was made, McIntyre adopted the self-fashioned name Kalaparusha Ahrah Difda, drawing not only from African, Indian, and astrological sources but also from his creation of a word (“Ahrah”) representing elemental sonic energy. By the mid-seventies, he had moved to New York City, where he became an active participant in the emerging loft scene of musician-run performance spaces, including the saxophonist Sam Rivers’s Studio Rivbea and Studio WIS, run by the percussionist Warren Smith, a former Chicago neighbor and childhood friend. Kalaparusha taught at Karl Berger’s innovative Creative Music Studio, in Woodstock, New York, and received opportunities to perform in Europe, first with the celebrated Muhal Richard Abrams Sextet and then with his own groups.

The A.A.C.M.’s original goal of searching for new kinds of individual and collective expression through uncompromising creative exploration was realized in large measure; that community of artists, of which Kalaparusha was an integral part, has made a lasting and continuing impression on American music, and a number of his A.A.C.M. peers and successors became professors at major universities, MacArthur Fellows, Pulitzer Prize finalists, and N.E.A. Jazz Masters. However, Kalaparusha himself rarely recorded, and he never garnered the same degree of international attention as some of his A.A.C.M. colleagues, like Braxton, Threadgill, Abrams, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

By the eighties, the music industry had wholly abandoned him. Every now and then, with the assistance of longtime friends or younger admirers, Kalaparusha would emerge with a new band, playing in underground spots in Brooklyn, or recording for true-believer independent labels. In those instances, one was quickly reminded of the beauty of his sound and the power of his conception. But his last years were difficult; he made most of his living playing in the subway, as portrayed in a heartbreaking and troubling documentary short film by Danilo Parra, available on the Guardian’s Web site, in which he sadly regards his own horn as a “starvation box.”

Some of Kalaparusha’s struggles appeared self-inflicted: he never fully escaped the grasp of his addiction. But applying the junkie-jazz-musician narrative to Kalaparusha’s story is too easy, and ultimately rings false. Kalaparusha was not the cliché but the exception. Like any group of brilliant young people, over time one is likely to burn too bright and burn out. His is an individual tragedy; whether through bad luck or bad choices, he never received the attention his artistry deserved, and never received the financial or societal support that might have allowed him to make a full recovery, or at least better manage his illness.

So let us remember Kalaparusha in all his brilliance and glory, revel in his music and his sound, and protect the creativity and vision he embodied at his best. In Kalaparusha’s own words, from a 1968 A.A.C.M. newsletter quoted in “A Power Stronger Than Itself”:

The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians is an organization of staunch individuals, determined to further the art of being of service to themselves, their families, and their communities … We are like the stranded particle, the isolated island of the whole, which refuses to expire in the midst of the normal confused plane which must exist—in order that we may, but with which we are constantly at war. We are trying to balance an unbalanced situation that is prevalent in this society.