Aided by his hard-blowing role model Arthur Blythe, Murray the strong, adaptable sessioneer fires McCoy Tyner's 44th Street Suite (Red Baron). David Murray Big Band Conducted by Lawrence "Butch" Morris (DIW/Columbia) showcases his modernistic, tradition-drenched charts. Black and Black (Red Baron) is a wild, gutbucket, avant-garde quintet date. And the funkiest record he's ever made, Shakill's Warrior (DIW/Columbia), is also one of the most evocative.

The secret is the prodigiously fluent Don Pullen, featured not on piano but on the Hammond B-3 he's played for 20 years. Riding a straight-swinging guitar-and-drums groove, the two dig deep into the most declasse kind of organ jazz. The music partakes of all the style's thick sexuality and soused soul--both men clearly love this stuff. But at the same time it seems distanced, decentered, a little off, conjuring a time warp in which a smoky '60s taproom in Watts or Newark is transported not just to 1992 but to 2001--to some scary future whose strangeness seems more natural every day.

Playboy, Apr. 1992

Mar. 1992

May 1992