Strata-East Records

Black Spirit, Black Power, Black Music

by
Kevin Moist

Consensus musical history being what it is (i.e. superficial, based on incomplete knowledge, etc.), many readers of this here publication have at some point likely encountered the view that the whole artist-led DIY idea was invented by a bunch of disaffected middle-class white youth in the years following the late 1970s punk rock “explosion” (reactionary teapot-tempest that it looks from 2003). Which of course is completely off beam.

Independent record companies were a staple of musical documentation from its earliest days, and by the 1970s even the concept of artist-released recordings was obvious to anyone paying attention, through the likes of John Fahey’s Takoma label and of course Sun Ra’s massive stream of Saturn records output. In addition to these greats, any honor roll of crucial musician-generated recording labels would absolutely need to slot legendary jazz imprint Strata-East near the top of the list.

Started in 1971 by trumpeter Charles Tolliver and pianist Stanley Cowell, Strata-East would over the next six years release some 50-odd albums that spanned the cross-genre musical ferment of jazz in the first half of that decade. As such, the label’s catalog provides a mighty historical document of the raised and expanded Black consciousness of the time as embodied in a series of recordings worthwhile as any in jazz, bridging various aspects of the tradition with a range of “new things” from the funky to the free. In its vitality and diversity, S-E all by itself makes a powerful object argument against the kind of conservified and myopic vision of jazz put forward by the likes of Ken Burns/ Wynton Marsalis, in which the value of the art form is limited to a certain historical style rather than growing from its breadth and adaptability (plenty more consensus-historical revisioning needed here too, in case it ain’t obvious). And as a procedural & philosophical inspiration for other similar projects around the US (Tribe records/magazine in Detroit, Black Jazz records in Chicago) S-E was also an important cultural force, enacting ideals of consciously community-centered outside-the-system self-sufficiency that spored outwards from the countercultures of the 1960s. Serious (though definitely not somber) stuff, you might say.

Which makes it mildly ironic I guess that the label started for purely practical reasons as much as ideological ones. The label’s first release was by Music Inc., Tolliver’s and Cowell’s own collective quartet. Both had been playing Modernist post-bop jazz in New York since the mid-60s, separately the entirely self-taught Tolliver with the likes of Horace Silver, Booker Ervin, and Jackie McLean; the Art Tatum-influenced Cowell with Marion Brown and the Bobby Hutcherson/ Harold Land group among others and together, in legendary bop drummer Max Roach’s late 60s ensemble. Like some of the other finest musicians of the post-free era, they were honing their chops with the masters while simultaneously absorbing the best of both the jazz avant-garde and popular Black music (soul, etc.). By 1970 they had settled into the collaborative quartet situation of Music Inc. along with versatile drummer Jimmy Hopps and the amazing bassist Cecil McBee (one of the finest ever on the instrument) and recorded what they thought was a fine album called Music Inc. and Big Band. The drag was, nobody seemed to want to release it. “We shopped that thing,” Tolliver recollected in a 2001 interview by Laurence Donohue-Green published in All About Jazz: New York. “If a major record company had said ‘OK we'll take that’, we would have gone with it.” Faced with a major label lack of interest, he and Cowell “said heck, we know we've got something here, let's bring it on out.” While the initial goal was not so much to start a fully-fledged business as just to get the LP out there somehow, they did pay special attention to the object-status of the album good pressing, minimal but eye-grabbing graphic design, etc. so as to have it stand up solid in comparison with major releases. The label name came from some associates of Cowell’s in Detroit who had incorporated under the name Strata in order to produce community events. Cowell recalled in the same interview, “They had the philosophy, and they had already instituted themselves as a corporation with some concerts.” Saxophonist Cilfford Jordan, impressed by the quality of the Music Inc. record, asked if they would be willing to release some sessions he had in the can. Tolliver said Jordan’s interest is what “really made this a real record operation. And from there on, we had a bunch of people knocking on the door, and it grew and grew.” The label continued until about 1977, when other opportunities and responsibilities forced them to stop releasing new recordings.

The label setup ran on what Cowell calls a “condominium” concept, in which the artists had authority over and responsibility for the recording of the music, then assigned the master tapes over to the label for release. This gave the artists great artistic control over their own recordings, a relative rarity for jazz (or any music really). Coupled with the label’s broader philosophy of inclusiveness, what this meant in practice was that already established artists could release more aesthetically personalized music than they’d been allowed to elsewhere, and also that some younger unknown musicians were able to put out recordings that never might have been made otherwise. And of course, none of this was happening in a cultural vacuum, but as part of a larger set of African-American community-focused creative and social efforts that paralleled the sort of free thinking /doing practiced by-the dropouts in mid-60s Haight-Ashbury, for instance. The continuing public image of the Black Power movement is one of raised-fist militancy, but the reality was much more about cooperative empowerment, funding and organizing a whole range of independent programs. The idea was to try and develop an independent cultural space outside of the mainstream that could function self-sufficiently and be genuinely participatory for its members. The goal was to live in an engaged way where art, society, spirituality, and politics could all come together holistically in an integrated existence.

That (sub)cultural renewal is embodied in the kind of music midwifed by Strata-East. Though, as mentioned above, conservatives and purists like to view early ‘70s jazz as in a period of confusion and decline, for those with open ears and minds it seems like anything but that. The diversity and experimentation of the music, plus the great quality of many of those experiments, make it seem like more like a creative golden age in which the dominant idea was new ideas mixing and blending cultural styles and artistic genres (exactly what the purists hate about it no purity [just like the real world]) or pushing existing styles into new extremes (they hate that too). And the Strata-East catalog contains great examples of just about all of it, from free jazz energy music to bumping jazz-funk, from the swingingly in-the-pocket to the outwardly mobile, much of it soulfully grooved and just about all of it spiritually turned on.

Now, I cannot claim to have heard every last release on the label (anybody with The Warm Voice of Billy ‘C’ could drop me a line for a tape trade if they wanted to…). But I’ve listened to a whole big lot of ‘em, so I feel moderately comfortable offering up a purely subjective list of 10 Most Righteous Strata-East Recordings. No particular ranking order here, this’s just how they were sitting in the pile…

1. MUSIC INC. Live at Slugs’ Volumes 1 & 2 (1972, rec. 1970)
If I had to choose just one Strata to be placedwith me in my sarcophagus this would likely be it, as there’s a vibrancy to these live recordings that elevates even beyond the group’s formidable studio LPs. Music Inc.’s great strength, in addition to sterling musicianship, was its range, and nowhere else on record do they stretch as comfortably as here. The quartet epitomized the label philosophy in which tradition and freedom were mutually inclusive, specializing in graceful extrapolations that handily scuttle concepts like “inside” and “outside” by changing the correct answer to “All of the above, at the appropriate time.” They make their musical and spiritual roots clear, sometimes referencing aspects of John Coltrane’s epochal quartet of a decade earlier feel how the spacy droning intro and interludes in Cowell’s Orientale bookend frantic driving sprints racing along the edge of rhythm and mode. The quartet can play as intensely as any of their peers, dig the edgy charge of Tolliver’s Spanning, which echoes the fiery post-free-bop he laid down w/Jackie McLean a few years earlier. But what makes Music Inc. so endlessly listenable is the sweet subtle skill with which they execute their changes dig how the laidback soulful slide of McBee’s Felicite opens out into a spacy rattley jungle behind the bass solo in the middle. Man, this is fine, fine stuff all around. (Note: It’s worth tracking down the vinyl versions of these albums, as the CD release inexplicably cuts off one of the 6 lengthy tracks, even though it would all’ve fit on one disc…)

2. CLIFFORD JORDAN QUARTET Glass Bead Games (1974, rec. 1973)
One of the coolest things about S-E was how it provided a space for previous-generation players often considered “too mainstream” by the freejazzers and “too weird” by the mainstreamers to move and grow in personalized ways. In the late ’50s and early ’60s Clifford Jordan was generally heard as a “Coltranesque” player, in his earlier classic style; but most of this Hesse-monickered double LP finds Jordan sailing beyond straight-ahead into deeper skies much more open and spacious. The homage to the inspiration of using swinging hard bop as a base for spiritual exploration is explicit on the tune John Coltrane, with its chant of “…Black Spirit… first newborn…”. While Jordan proves periodically here that he can wail whenever he wants to, mostly his tone and attitude are much less anguished than ’Trane’s often were, instead fountaining forth with a bountiful and dignified good-ness of nature that is at times almost buttery rich in its glow. Seemingly entirely recorded on “Stormy Monday, October 29, 1973”, there’s a loose but charged feel about the proceedings, probably accentuated by the session’s setup: Jordan and drummer Billy Higgins are constant on all tracks, but the bass and piano roles are divided between edgier cuts featuring Stanley Cowell and bassist Bill Lee (Spike’s dad), and more classicist numbers with pianist Cedar Walton and Sam Jones on bass. It’s easy to imagine everyone hanging around the studio egging each other on and feeding off the vibe of great musicians playing for themselves; much good spirit and positive energy radiate from this record.

3. CHARLES BRACKEEN Rhythm X (rec. 1968)
As with the first Music Inc. LP, some of the recordings released on S-E had been hanging around awhile awaiting a proper home. Charles Brackeen’s Rhythm X was recorded back in ’68 and put out by Strata-East in the early ’70s as #4 in their “Dolphy Series” of archival albums. One of the most full-on classic energy-music items on the label, this session found the tenor saxophonist accompanied by Ornette Coleman’s legendary band of Ed Blackwell on drums, Don Cherry on trumpet, and Charlie Haden on bass (another contender for finest ever), & it’s just great to hear them reunited & in full flight some six years post-O. The Brackeen compositions are unsurprisingly somewhere in Ornette territory, bluesy but non-chordally based; though if anything Brackeen honks with even more gutbucket lungpower than his fellow Texan (but then, it is harder to get an alto to squonk well). Four tracks of buoyant lope, skittering frenzy, floating tonality, and forceful drive, stretched out like dancing power lines across a sunbaked desert.

4. PHAROAH SANDERS Izipho Zam (My Gifts) (rec. 1969)
Number 2 in that same Dolphy Series was a session by legendary tenor saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders recorded in 1969 right around the time of his second Impulse album Karma but never given proper release. Sanders was a huge figure in free jazz by the early ’70s, following his stint as designated flamethrower with the late Coltrane groups and his continuing association with pianist Alice Coltrane after her husband’s death. Pharaoh’s music was loved by underground rock fans (cited by the MC5 etc.) and hated by jazz purists for pretty much the same reasons extreme volume, heavy rhythmic drive, a predisposition toward high-energy freakouts, etc. The 13-piece ensemble on his only S-E release is almost an embarrassment of riches, including four percussionists (both Billy Hart and Chief Bey among them), a couple of basses (Cecile McBee and Sirone), Sonny Sharrock ripping holes in the wall with his electric guitar, Lonnie Liston Smith’s percussive piano pounding, and Sanders’s hoarse melismatic screams dueling with alto sax and elephantine tuba (!). When everybody freaks out at once, which happens periodically to glorious effect, it’s not unlike a rampaging herd of wild beasts driving directly down on your poor little mind. But it’s not all unstructured insanity; in fact what’s most remarkable is how such a seemingly unwieldy ensemble can flow with organic grace up and down the intensity scale throughout an extended piece like the 29-minute title track, so that it’s like watching a tempestuous storm rolling in slowly across the savannah (as opposed to listening to the monkey house at feeding time, which sometimes happens on the outer edges of free music). And at the whole other end of the continuum, Prince of Peace features one of Pharaoh’s simple sing-songy gospel chant melodies and features the inimitable Leon Thomas doing his soulful Afro-yodel thing over a flowing river of sound. One of Pharaoh’s many classic records, and near the top of the pile really.

5. GIL SCOTT-HERON / BRIAN JACKSON Winter in America (1973)
Another already well-known artist who dropped by S-E long enough for a single LP was poet/singer/pianist Gil Scott-Heron. Over the previous few years he had developed an instantly recognizable persona via a series of releases on the Flying Dutchman label, and even reached some wider public ears with the dead-on wake-up call of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. This was Scott-Heron’s first full collaboration with fellow keyboardist Brian Jackson, and it even further jazzified his mixture of street poetry, soulful spirit, political commitment, and Black cultural expression. Radically charged but musically mostly stark and low-key, melodic and soulful as hell, sometimes full band flow while at others just voice and piano, all hanging tight under a melancholy cloud of belatedness even the beautiful A Very Precious Time attempts to recall a love long gone. Thematically, the album reaches back even further than its predecessors (“Rivers of my fathers, carry me home”) in drawing on Black cultural energy as a source of power for facing down the coming political/cultural Ice Age in America (one we’re probably still in the midst of, though the advertising/propaganda industry does a fine job convincing most people that it’s actually a subtropical consumerist paradise; some relevant thoughts from the liner notes: “In the interests of national security, please help us carry out our constitutional duty to overthrow the king.”). But Scott-Heron was never a one-dimensional ranter, and his pen is as double-edged here as it ever was, slicing into the growing self-destructiveness (addictions, in The Bottle) and sell-out/buy-in tendencies (Peace Go With You Brother) that were fragmenting the Black community, as incisively as it stabs at the jowls of evil in the White House (H2Ogate Blues). As badass as it is understated, and really hasn’t dated just a little bit.

6. STANLEY COWELL Regeneration (1976)
If Winter in America pegs the political end of the Black Power consciousness spectrum, this 1976 album by Cowell reaches deep into the Afrocentric spirituality prominent at the time, aiming for “a reflection of those special moments of our Ancestral Stream, manifesting beauty and diversity, transcending all things, taking us higher and higher.” Not mere words but a program for action, this might be best described as Cosmic Earth Music, a jazz journey through the various beating hearts of Black musical traditions worldwide. Think of the album as a seven-stage guided tour, kinda like so: Side 1 starts out back towards the future w/a synth-solo led m-f vocal groover laid atop rippling African percussion, followed immediately by a psychedelic Moroccan trance jam on traditional instruments, a stonking Mississippi hill country fife’n’drum march hot on its heels, rounded out by a slow piano/harmonica blues; side 2 gets rolling on a breezing high-life jam w/African vocals and a soul vibe, passes the baton to a hypnotic thumb piano/flute/percussion vocal version of Cowell’s jazz standard Travelin’ Man, and floats off into the night with a hymn-like lullaby set in a darktime forest. In the wrong hands this kind of thing could be a pastiched nightmare, but the attitude throughout is honest and respectful as it digs down deep. The cast helps w/that too, an unbelievable rotating ensemble of serious players like Marion Brown, Ed Blackwell, Jimmy Heath, Billy Higgins, Bill Lee, Nadi Quamar, and John Stubblefield, among others. One of the coolest Afro-jazz fusions ever recorded, not least for its willingness to bring a jazz-soul sensibility to bear on mostly African instruments and styles, and even more for its ability to demonstrate how the same spirit can shine through many different forms.

7. SHAMEK FARRAH First Impressions (1974)
As mentioned above somewhere, as S-E got rolling one of the admirable things it was able to do was offer a platform to some more obscure artists who weren’t being heard elsewise, folks like Billy Parker’s Fourth World (including DeeDee, Ronald, and Cecil Bridgewater); the Washington, DC ensemble Juju (who evolved
from an Art Ensemble knock-off into the great jazz-funk band Oneness of Juju by the mid-70s); and alto sax player Shamek Farrah. I don’t really know too much about Shamek except that he made two great albums of spiritual jazz for Strata in 1974 and ’77 (the second and half of the first in collaboration with pianist Sonelius Smith). Both are way cool, but my favorite is probably this one, recorded with 2 slightly different ensembles but consistent in style: largely dark, minor-mode pieces w/a drone implied or explicit and executed w/plenty of edge. The playing is chunky, heavy, and group-minded; Farrah emits a glorious wail on alto sax that takes the lead on most cuts but still leaves plenty of elbow room for everybody else. The most “out” cut is the opener, Meterologically Tuned (titled perhaps for the bracingly out-of-tune trumpet & sax on the intro & outro unison melodies), skirling horns and percussive piano and a rhythm that moves in and out of focus throughout; while the album closer, First Impressions, hovers like fog above a loping bassline digging a moody jazz-funk furrow so deep it’s hard to see up over the edge (no surprise it was sampled by Tribe Called Quest some years back). One of those obscure gems that dot the catalog and are really deserving of proper CD reissue (there are relatively inexpensive vinyl copies making the LP-reissue rounds periodically; I am uncertain as to legality of parentage on those & so will resist exhorting their purchase).

8. JOHN HICKS Hell’s Bells (1973)
Another hidden gem in the S-E stack is by fairly well-known pianist John Hicks. Hicks has had a long and varied jazz career, in which he’s played it outside with the likes of Sonny Simmons and Pharaoh Sanders, & inside with folks like vocalist Betty Carter, and he continues releasing well-received albums today. Hell’s Bells is probably more intense than what current fans would expect; while most of the compositions suggest sweepingly romanticized melodicism, there’s always a creeping shadow or hidden turbulence that takes over during the improvisations. As a player I’ve always loved trios; if the musicians are on the same wavelength there is no better way to improvise on an equal-voiced basis, triangulating energy and ideas back and forth and around and about. Hicks, bassist Clint Houston, and drummer Cliff Barbaro most definitely have their antennae attuned, with intense instrumental interplay that can float like a butterfly, swing like a motherfucker, or raft up into almost-free territory with equal ease. Hicks’s playing is especially impressive, featuring lengthy lines that dance energetically up and down the length of the piano keyboard from pounding low clusters to flying flurries way up at the top, periodically laying back into clean rhythmic comping while the others take the lead. Just a really good album that perfectly represents the straight-ahead side of Strata-East.

9. BROTHER AH Sound Awareness (1973) My cat Pearl insisted I include this on my list; it’s her personal favorite from the label. She likes the weird stuff; if music is too organized she bores quickly, but put on some splayed-out shaking freedom and she’s all ears. I think it has something to do with a preference for sounds that aim closer to organic nature, where there’s no such things as 4-4 time or chord progressions; her all-time pick seems to be Dave Holland’s great 1972 LP Conference of the Birds. Whatever, she definitely digs this album, & it’s decidedly among the most out-there things released by S-E. Brother Ah is Robert Northern, a former Arkestra associate who played on some of Sun Ra’s greatest way-out sides (the LP Atlantis, for instance). Sound Awareness is made of two long tracks, one spread across each side (remember those?). Side 1 is taken up with Beyond Yourself (The Midnight Confession), a self-described “mystical mind trip” that chronicles an individual’s late-night meditational battle with his inner demons; what it mostly sounds like is a music for a Venusian avant-garde ballet. While the instrumentation is simple Ah on French horn, flutes, and “natural sounds”, accompanied by hovering wordless soprano vocal, bowed/sawed cello, and plenty of rattley percussion the outcome is psychedelic as all whatzis, drenched in insane amounts of echo and reverb, vaguely identifiable sounds swirling back and forth across a cavernous stage. Pearl sits right up between the speakers for this one, following the instruments as they pan between channels, apparently watching the sounds floating in the air above her head, swaying in the sonic breezes, totally digging it. Over on side 2, Love Peace features Ah with Max Roach and his M’Boom percussion ensemble, & if side 1 is outer space, this is way back yonder church. Roach lays down a preachin’ rap about the title concepts while the large drum ensemble works its way from shaking thicket to full-on thunder as low-end brass makes wildebeest noises and a 90-voice choir chants along behind. Pearl usually lays down and closes her eyes for this one, lets it wash over her, ears twitching in time w/the sermon, paws pawing along as the rhythm builds and builds, dreaming she’s deep in the jungle watching the tribal ceremony from a safely hidden perch. We should all enjoy music so much.

10. VARIOUS ARTISTS Soul Jazz Love Strata East (1996) and Strata-2-East (1997) (Soul Jazz Records)
In the mid-90s, with free jazz back in semi-vogue, not to mention the electronica-led reevaluation of lots of great 70s fusion styles from jazz-funk to kozmik space jazz, plus of course hip-hop’s ongoing mining for rare grooves, the excellent UK label Soul Jazz dipped into the more knees-up end of the S-E catalog for a pair of highly motivational compilations. Limitations first: Given the reissuing label’s purview and raison d’etre, these tend toward a fairly narrow swath of the broad musico-conceptual territory occupied by the label no spaceward fantasias or barnyard blare to be found, no matter how hard you listen. Greatly out-balanced by the strengths however: Both comps work as extremely solid selections of some of S-E’s primest and rarest groovers. Vol. 1 gathers a felt-lined bucketful of the more-known and -sampled moments in the catalog, while Vol. 2 dips the ladle a bit deeper and comes up with some even rarer gems (may I direct your attention to the John Betsch Society’s swirling Ode to Ethiopia or the slinky slide of organist Shirley Scott’s Keep on Moving On [featuring Harold Vick, Billy Higgins, and Music Inc.’s Jimmy Hopps no less]). These may in fact be the preferred manner to engage that end of S-E as connoisseurs have long bemoaned, the soul-funky end of jazz recordings is often plagued by inconsistency, the unbearably rumptatious sharing LP space with the merely pleasant (or worse, the fuzak); so it’s really kind of a public service to gather together the label’s most deeply dug excursions into two handy packages. Plus there’s only a wee bit of track overlap with the other items on this list, so these make perfect companion-piece context-providers for the individual items above. I believe at least one of them may have recently gone OOP, but the kind of intrepid explorers perusing this fine mag should have little difficulty scaring up a few copies. So whattaya waitin’ for, huh? Hop to it brothers and sisters!
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I am eternally grateful to Kevin Moist for writing this piece, and for his essential music publication Deep Water that has been an inspiration to myself and many others for a long time now.
I’d also like to suggest that you give a listen to these additional Strata-East recordings that I figure are fairly essential.
Stanley Cowell Musa (1974, rec. ‘73)
Charles Rouse Two is One (1974)
Juju A Message from Mozambique (1973, rec. 72)
Shamek Farrah & Sonelius Smith The World of the Children (1977, rec. ‘76)

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