NO OTHER saxophonist has so mastered the jazz tradition, while simultaneously playing out of it with such musical freedom, as David Murray. Born in Oakland, California, in 1955 he became a nonpareil of jazz saxophone within the post-John Coltrane, post-Sonny Rollins generation and, as he approaches his 70th year, he is still making wondrous sounds of fire, compassion and verve, as his newest album Francesca testifies.
 
Murray’s mother Catherine was pianist and musical director of the Missionary Church of God in neighbouring Berkeley. His father Walter was head deacon and played guitar. 

Murray became president of the Junior High School in Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, in 1969 when the police used tear gas to disperse the mass demonstrations supporting the People’s Park in which he took part. Later, he became a Black Panther and campaigned for Bobby Seale to become Mayor of Oakland.

All this activism was central to his education as a young musician, “but the church and my mother’s brilliant music inspired me more than any politics,” he says. “I was inspired too by the great trumpeter and Ornette Coleman alumnus Bobby Bradford. When I went to Pomona College near Los Angeles my English teacher was the jazz critic Stanley Crouch. At that time I wanted more than anything to be a writer — the new Ishmael Reed!”

“I had learned piano from my mother at nine. Then I learned alto sax, but when I heard Sonny Rollins at the Berkeley Jazz Festival in 1967, I changed to tenor. I loved the saxophone playing of older players like Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster and Paul Gonsalves, but to me Rollins was the most complete saxophonist. I liked Coltrane too but I didn’t study him too much because every young saxman was trying to be Coltrane No 2.”

When he was 20 he went to New York. “Some great musicians took me under their wing and inspired me — pianist Don Pullen and John Hicks and drummers Billy Higgins and Ed Blackwell.”

I ask him about his love of melody, so powerfully and movingly expressed on the new album’s title tune to his wife, Francesca,https://intaktrec.bandcamp.com/track/francesca,. “I love melody. I always wanted to be known as a songwriter. Give me a poem and I’ll write a song with it. The song form is at the heart of my love of structure in music, the structure that brings freedom. Yet I want to construct and de-construct through my improvisations at the same time.” 

Inside and outside musical structure simultaneously — the true Murray musical power.

What about his use of the bass clarinet, such as on the track Richard’s Tune, composed by Don Pullen? “My bass clarinet gives my listeners a chance to breathe. The constant sound of the tenor saxophone can be overwhelming, exhausting. With the bass clarinet, particularly on slower numbers, you can really hear the wood of the instrument. And the great oceanographer, Jacques Cousteau, once telephoned me after hearing, he said, just 30 seconds of one of my bass clarinet solos. He told me the sound was like the song of the whales and it was if they were talking to him.”

The track Free Mingus, dedicated to his son and released following the great bassman’s centenary, remembers how he and his music would have been at the centre of all the protest and resistance following the Minneapolis death of George Floyd. “That kind of thing goes on every day in America,” he explains: “Thank God for those kids who witnessed it, and their phones.”

What about his young quartet-mates from a new generation of young virtuosi? “Marta Sanchez is a very powerful pianist, one of the finest of her generation. And I've played with so many great bass players — Art Davis, Wilber Morris, Fred Hopkins. Luke Stewart is in their tradition and reminds me very much of the wonderful Hopkins. Drummer Russell Carter plays like all the drummers I really like — Max Roach, Billy Higgins, Ed Blackwell. I hear bits of all of them in him.”

Who would he pick out among British musicians? “There are a lot of great ones. If I was to name them all, we’d be here a while! There’s saxophonists — Denys Baptiste, Tony Kofi — he was a student of mine, I’m so proud of him. And Soweto Kinch, I love him! And looking back there were Ronnie Scott, Trevor Watts and drummer John Stevens. They’re great, and a part of jazz history itself.”

And what is it about the qualities of the greatest jazz music? “To me it’s undefinable. It inspires its listeners and players to wonder, but it’s a science too, you can do so much with it. It excites me that I can reflect human life and emotions — some moments in our lives, sometimes tragedy, sometimes happiness!”

It’s all in Murray’s beautifully creative and relentlessly energetic sound. Give Francesca a spin and you will know.

Francesca is released by Intakt Records