Year: 2025
Time: 73:41
File: MP3 @ 128K/s
Size: 68,8 MB
Art: Front
( 4:04) 1. Movement 1. Anonymous
( 9:37) 2. Movement 2. Juxtaposition
( 5:31) 3. Movement 3. Pulmonary Edema
(12:03) 4. Movement 4. New York
( 9:46) 5. Movement 5. Europe
( 8:26) 6. Movement 6. The Texan...The Soldier
( 6:59) 7. Movement 7. Mother...Sister...Lover
( 8:37) 8. Movement 8. Pragmatism
( 6:11) 9. Movement 9. Identity Politics
( 2:22) 10. Movement 10. Closure
“I once heard a colored man sum it up in these words: ‘It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient’”. The quote, wry, lightly expressed yet heavily charged, is typical of the text that inspires saxophonist Mark Turner’s ambitious new suite here, as of his own playing and composition.
It comes from the novel in the title, a meditation on race in the USA 100 years ago from the point of view of a black man able to pass as white. A penetrating work by the remarkable author and civil rights activist (also diplomat, lawyer, and university professor) James Weldon Johnson, it grabbed Turner’s attention because members of his own family including his mother were able to pass, so the issues of presentation, perception, identity, status, and self-determination it poses were intensely familiar.
Twenty years later, the ten movement suite he presents here uses words from the book on around half the tracks. The leader’s brief passages of measured narration – in keeping with the prose style set the scene for long musical responses. Bringing words and music together not as songs but as separate strands of the work is always risky. The music or the words may not quite work, or they may not work together. Here, the combination succeeds brilliantly. ‘I wanted to have music that was enhanced with words, not words that were enhanced by music’, Turner tells us in the notes. That is just what he has achieved.
And such music it is. The state of the art quintet assembled here includes Turner’s closest recent associate Jason Palmer on trumpet, David Virelles on piano and – here and there – synthesisers, Matt Brewer on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums. The compositions generally begin simply, gathering complexity as they go. Piano, bass and drums furnish an atmospheric backdrop much of the time, with occasional more prominent contributions. Saxophone and trumpet do most of the heavy lifting, and provide one of the most striking twin horn leads on a connected suite of compositions I can recall since Bobby Bradford joined David Murray on the former’s deeply affecting Death of a Sideman.
Like Bradford, Turner displays a cherishable ability to unroll long lines each of which sounds like someone following a fresh train of thought. Some in the past (not me) have suggested that his playing can be stronger on intellect than emotion. If that ever happened, it is certainly not the case here. Every piece fizzes with feeling that the understated narrative preludes mostly prime but do not let loose until the music allows it to emerge.
That culminates in part 9, Identity Politics. For once, the music sets the mood first, Turner and Palmer playing as one in a through-written duet, at once slightly fretful and ruefully resigned, for four minutes. Then Turner voices the protagonist’s closing regret at turning away from his heritage, and the struggle that comes with it, to live in relative security, while Virelles underpins the words with the chords of Lift Every Voice and Sing, for which Johnson also wrote the words to go with his brother’s music.
It’s an indelible moment from a work that lodged firmly in the mind from first hearing.
I thought Turner’s previous release, Live at the Village Vanguard, from 2023 was perfectly achieved music. Reflections, though, feels like a new high water mark for an artist at the peak of his powers.
Mark Turner appears with Jason Palmer’s quartet at Ronnie Scott’s on Weds 15 Nov and Birmingham Conservatory’s East Side Jazz Club on 16 Nov.https://ukjazznews.com/mark-turner-reflections-on-the-autobiography-of-an-ex-colored-man/
Personnel: Mark Turner - Tenor Sax & Narration; Jason Palmer - Trumpet; David Virelles - Piano, Profit & Organ; Matt Brewer - Acoustic & Electric Bass; Nasheet Waits - Drums
It comes from the novel in the title, a meditation on race in the USA 100 years ago from the point of view of a black man able to pass as white. A penetrating work by the remarkable author and civil rights activist (also diplomat, lawyer, and university professor) James Weldon Johnson, it grabbed Turner’s attention because members of his own family including his mother were able to pass, so the issues of presentation, perception, identity, status, and self-determination it poses were intensely familiar.
Twenty years later, the ten movement suite he presents here uses words from the book on around half the tracks. The leader’s brief passages of measured narration – in keeping with the prose style set the scene for long musical responses. Bringing words and music together not as songs but as separate strands of the work is always risky. The music or the words may not quite work, or they may not work together. Here, the combination succeeds brilliantly. ‘I wanted to have music that was enhanced with words, not words that were enhanced by music’, Turner tells us in the notes. That is just what he has achieved.
And such music it is. The state of the art quintet assembled here includes Turner’s closest recent associate Jason Palmer on trumpet, David Virelles on piano and – here and there – synthesisers, Matt Brewer on bass and Nasheet Waits on drums. The compositions generally begin simply, gathering complexity as they go. Piano, bass and drums furnish an atmospheric backdrop much of the time, with occasional more prominent contributions. Saxophone and trumpet do most of the heavy lifting, and provide one of the most striking twin horn leads on a connected suite of compositions I can recall since Bobby Bradford joined David Murray on the former’s deeply affecting Death of a Sideman.
Like Bradford, Turner displays a cherishable ability to unroll long lines each of which sounds like someone following a fresh train of thought. Some in the past (not me) have suggested that his playing can be stronger on intellect than emotion. If that ever happened, it is certainly not the case here. Every piece fizzes with feeling that the understated narrative preludes mostly prime but do not let loose until the music allows it to emerge.
That culminates in part 9, Identity Politics. For once, the music sets the mood first, Turner and Palmer playing as one in a through-written duet, at once slightly fretful and ruefully resigned, for four minutes. Then Turner voices the protagonist’s closing regret at turning away from his heritage, and the struggle that comes with it, to live in relative security, while Virelles underpins the words with the chords of Lift Every Voice and Sing, for which Johnson also wrote the words to go with his brother’s music.
It’s an indelible moment from a work that lodged firmly in the mind from first hearing.
I thought Turner’s previous release, Live at the Village Vanguard, from 2023 was perfectly achieved music. Reflections, though, feels like a new high water mark for an artist at the peak of his powers.
Mark Turner appears with Jason Palmer’s quartet at Ronnie Scott’s on Weds 15 Nov and Birmingham Conservatory’s East Side Jazz Club on 16 Nov.https://ukjazznews.com/mark-turner-reflections-on-the-autobiography-of-an-ex-colored-man/
Personnel: Mark Turner - Tenor Sax & Narration; Jason Palmer - Trumpet; David Virelles - Piano, Profit & Organ; Matt Brewer - Acoustic & Electric Bass; Nasheet Waits - Drums
Reflections on: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
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