George E. Lewis - Homage To Charles Parker (Live 1979)

George E. Lewis Quintet - Homage To Charles Parker (excerpt)
Recorded in Moers, Germany on June 2, 1979.
Originally posted at the Inconstant Sol blog in 2015.
George Lewis, trombone
Douglas Ewart, alto saxophone, bamboo-flute, bass clarinet
Wallace McMillan, flute, alto saxophone
Anthony Davis, piano
Richard Teitelbaum, synthesizer
As George Lewis notes in the liner notes to the recorded version of the album, the piece was first performed at the AACM's annual Festival in Chicago, September 1978, with Ewart, Lewis and dancer and choreographer Rrata Christine Jones. Lewis notes that that first part of the piece "represents the life of Charles Parker - what is known, what is thought to be known, what is dreamed, heard, and said - and his 'reality', i.e. birth and death. The second part uses the traditional improvised solo with chordal accompaniment, a form which Charles Parker and other composer-performers have since brought to a rare level of perfection. The music makes loving inferences as to Charles Parker's afterlife, and points to a new appraisal of world music after his life - one in which Afro-American creative music affirms its place as a living, growing, vital part of world culture". As he later remarked: "We were doing Afro/Euro-American experimentalism. In 'Homage', minimalism, electronics and [John] Coltrane’s 'Peace On Earth' got remixed into a kind of fragility."
For this live version, flautist and saxophonist Wallace McMillan, an under-acknowledged member of the AACM, is added to the line-up, and the performance is radically extended from the record (this is an excerpt from an hour-plus version). If the recording emphasises sparser and more beatific gestures--Douglas Ewart's solo on the record could in this regard be linked to Marion Brown on Harold Budd's 'Bismillah 'Rahman 'Rahim' from around the same period--this live version is perhaps more clearly tied to the improvisational vocabulary of free jazz and free improvisation, an absorbing and extensive investigation of the further potentials of a piece that is in itself about further potential: what Muhal Richard Abrams called "things to come from those now gone".

[@henridelagardere264]

This is a real revelation to me, thank you so much. Since its release, the album has been one of the seminal moments in my journey as a listener, but I've actually never heard this live recording. Such beautiful music, a lasting homage to a great soul, a paradise island in a sea of musical (and not quite so musical) tributes.