Lloyd McNeill & Marshall Hawkins - 1969 - Tanner Suite

Lloyd McNeill & Marshall Hawkins

1969

Tanner Suite

01. Black Expatriate 11:20

02. Tanner Blue 9:50

03. Daniel In The Lion's Den 10:43

04. The Banjo Lesson 10:47

Tribute to African American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner at the Smithsonian National Gallery Of Art.

Improvised and recorded in the galleries of the National Collection of Fine Arts, at the Tanner Exhibition, July 20, 1969.

Bass – Marshall Hawkins

Flute – Lloyd McNeill

"Lloyd McNeill is a multidisciplinary artist – a painter who lived in Paris in 1965 and was a friend of Picasso, a musician who has worked with Nina Simone, Nana Vasconceles, Ron Carter, Cecil McBee and many more and a music anthropologist, poet and teacher. In the 1960s he was involved in the civil-rights movement and produced music for ballet, paintings and installations. His music mixes jazz with Latin, Brazilian and African rhythms that McNeill learnt was studying anthropology in his travels through much of Africa and Brazil (where he joined with Dom Salvador, Paulinho da Viola, Paulo Maura and Martinho da Vila)."---Souljazz Records

Transcendent 70's spritual jazz delicacy. Flautist Lloyd McNeill & bassist Marshall Hawkins offer their improvised musical tribute to African American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner at the Smithsonian National Gallery Of Art on July 20th, 1969. Released in a mono edition of 1000 on McNeill's own private imprint, Asha Records, of Washington DC. The mighty Souljazz Records just gave its welcome treatment to Asha #1. 

Tanner Suite is one of the most beautiful and by far the rarest of all of McNeill’s records, a unique piece of music especially commissioned by the Smithsonian National Gallery Of Art in the late 1960s to accompany an exhibition of the work of Henry Ossawa Tanner, the first African-American painter ever to gain international success.

Tanner Suite was originally released in 1969 as a private individually numbered pressing of 1000 copies on McNeill’s own Asha Record company and has never been issued since. Soul Jazz Records new pressing of this album is also limited to 1000 copies each on vinyl and CD. Both editions come in heavyweight exact-replica hard tip-on USA card sleeve original artwork.

This beautiful and intense set of pieces based around improvisation was the soundscape to the significant exhibition of Tanner's work, created at an important point in post-civil rights African-American self-definition. The music is both profound and spiritual.