Noah Howard “The Black Ark”

The records featured here to date have been at what might be the sedate end of expectations of 1960s free jazz – small groups working with free-flowing theme, quiet listening and interplay in developing, discarding the structural rigidities of hard bop. "The Black Ark" occupies another place, so let's go for that counter example.

Here the space is recognisably that created by the late Coltrane group: a “constituting power” which has become a “constituted power”. The muscular melodicism of Coltrane's 1966-7 performances – the lyricism that time forgot – is a clear influence both on Noah Howard himself and on the wider grouping. From the start, one can hear the “Meditations” format being embraced and extended.

“Domiabra” begins like one of those repetitive riff platforms that became common as the 1960s became the 1970s, but that begins to dispel as soon as the theme is stated. The three horns slurp at the phrases over a swirling sea of percussion. The often problematic Arthur Doyle is kept back – obviously not restrained, intensifying and thickening the sound, but contained in time and contribution. Trumpeter Earl Cross is someone I recall from a more restrained post-bop trio setting some 10 years after this recording; here he contributes powerful intensity. The busyness of the double percussion backwall and Sirone's fine prodding bass may conceal the extent of the traditional structure here, the essential sequentiality that allots each their solo space.

"Mount Fuji" has particularly pronounced Coltrane influence, much of the time close to being a version of Coltrane's “The Father, Son and Holy Ghost”.

In recent years, “The Black Ark” has risen well beyond its original reception and come to be seen as a free jazz classic, a landmark album. And yet, landmark of what? What is to be said of the “Mount Fuji” - “Queen Anne” side effectively being a replay of the first side of “Meditations”? Is that a bad thing, denoting some lack of novelty? Perhaps it is simply the sign of a community who had grasped it as the basis material for a shared music.

Another view: Free the Music