“Avant garde got soul too” - so opined drummer Charles Moffett with some amount of amusement through a composition title on album for Savoy in 1969. The controversial observation was likely shared if unstated by William Hooker, a generation younger and just getting his start in so-called fire music after an apprenticeship in soul jazz. Light directs an edifying and expansive beam on these efforts, bringing into focus a cache of recordings that trace the drummer’s development from journeyman to self-styled Griot. Adding up to well over four hours of music, the bulk of it is previously unreleased.
Now comes the cumbrous point in this piece for the profession of personal biases. This writer has never been much of a Hooker fan. Despite familiarity with a comparatively strong showing in the company of violinist Billy Bang on the Silkheart album Joy (Within)!, the urge to explore his catalog further proved elusive. This set’s accompanying booklet contains interview snippets with Hooker that helpfully elucidates some of the whys and wherefores. He names drummer Joe Dukes as a principal influence in the text. Organist Jack McDuff’s regular drummer and a staple presence on soul jazz dates for the Prestige label in the 1960s, Dukes had a style steeped in commercial appeal with strong, frills-friendly accents and a sturdy (some might argue obvious) sense of time and rhythm.
Hooker took those populist rudiments, amplified them and discarded the pinions of strict time, often aiming instead for elemental catharsis through volume, kinetic action and force. There’s a vertical aggression to his playing, like a geyser erupting that stresses power and feeling over conventional prowess. Again, referencing the set’s notes, Hooker describes a sojourn spent in the Bay Area where he was forced by virtue of the inexperience of his playing partners to shelve much of his previous skills set. The process was at first frustrating, but then liberating as he was able to redirect energies into potentially purer forms of expression beyond those circumscribed by formal technique.
The fourteen selections in the box encompass both the perils and premiums of embracing such an elemental approach to music-making. The first two discs contain material from Hooker’s self-produced debut double-album, … is eternal life, opening with “Drum Form”, an eighteen-minute solo percussion suite performed at Columbia University in the spring of 1975 that largely represents the former through a ritualistic, diffusive examination of his kit’s components accompanied by sporadic spoken word. A radio air shot from the same college campus six years later traces a tighter, more disciplined trajectory. Hooker moves from pugilistic brushes into a coloristic exploration of sticks and mallets-struck surfaces with accompanying, politically-charged poetry at the close.
More consistently engaging is “Passages”, a nearly twenty-minute free form face-off with tenorist David S. Ware recorded at the Langston Hughes Library, NYC in February of 1976. Hooker goes at his kit full steam for the duration, approximating all the velocity and violence of orbital reentry as Ware howls, soars and screams beside him. It’s collective ecstatic expression at its most frenzied and ferocious and a convincing case for Hooker’s instincts-oriented approach. A 42+-minute marathon medley with trumpeter Roy Campbell, Jr. and tenorist Booker T. Williams from a Roulette Club hit in early 1988 largely justifies its length, evolving as an extended distillation of the leader’s protean ability to bridge meter-resistant patterns with robust and even danceable beats.
Such conclaves with fellow Loft Jazz veterans were common and the set contains other enthusiastic, long-form improvisations in the company of tenorist David Murray, altoist Jemeel Moondoc, pianist Mark Hennen and trumpeter Lewis “Flip” Barnes. It’s no coincidence that only a single piece involves a bassist (Mark Miller, amplified and doing his best to remain relevant) as Hooker’s dogged rhythmic dynamism frequently has a habit of making the instrument appear superfluous. Murray, also on the gig, gamely engages his colleague on the strings, but the driving link is routinely most tenacious between saxophone and drums.
Hooker works assiduously and assertively in the varied contexts, but he’s conspicuously most cacophonous in the company of reedists and regular running mates Les Goodson and Hasaan Dawkins. “Pieces I, II”, which opens the second disc, presents part of another coarsely-captured library gig with the three players hitting a bull’s-eye in terms of shared, sweat-stained, ecstatic elevation. Hooker’s been unjustly marginalized for much of his now lengthy career, soldiering on in the face of relative indifference and recurring privation and relentlessly following his muse. No Business rights some of those wrongs with this set, presenting a portrait of the percussionist with pre-existing materials that puts the positives of his highly personal methodology into a persuasively profuse package. Hooker late-bloomers like yours truly are most certainly welcome.
Derek Taylor
credits
released March 1, 2016
NBCD 82-85
CD 1 - ...IS ETERNAL LIFE
1. Drum Form (includes) - Wings - Prophet Of Dogon - Still Water - Desert Plant - Tune) 18:06
2. Soy: Material / Seven 26:48
3. Passages (Anthill) 19:27
Track 1
William Hooker – drums, percussion, vocal
Track 2-3
David S. Ware – tenor saxophone
William Hooker – drums
Track 1 – recorded on 28th May, 1975 at Columbia University, New York City by Joe Walker
Track 2 – recorded on 4th May, 1975 in performance at the Cubiculo, New York City by Carl Williams
Track 3 – recorded on 5th February, 1976 in performance at the Langston Hughes Library, Corona, New York City by Carl Williams
All compositions on Disc ONE and 1-2 tracks from Disc TWO were originally released on a double LP “…is eternal life” on William Hooker’s label Reality Unit Concepts / RUC – 444
1. Pieces I & II 18:46
2. Above and Beyond 4:50
3. Others (Unknowing) 4:57
4. Patterns I, II and III 14:54
5. 3 & 6 / Right 13:15
6. Present Happiness 16:47
Track 1
Les Goodson – tenor saxophone, flute, percussion
Hasaan Dawkins – alto saxophone, flute, percussion
William Hooker – drums and percussion
Track 2
William Hooker - drums
Track 3-4
Alan Braufman - alto saxophone, flute
William Hooker - drums
Track 5
Mark Hennen - piano
William Hooker - drums
Track 1 – recorded on 20th May, 1976 in performance at the Columbus Branch, New York Public Library, New York City by William Hooker
Track 2 – recorded on 19th November, 1976. It is an excerpt from TOWARDS THE NEW MUSIC / Public Broadcast Special for WHNB-TV, Channel 30, West Hartford, Connecticut
Track 6 - recorded in 1980 / previously never released
Tracks 3-5 originally released on a double LP “Brighter Lights” on William Hooker’s label Reality Unit Concepts / RUC – 445
1. Anchoring / Inclusion / 3 & 6 (Right) 24:16
2. Clear, Cold Light / Into Our Midst / Japanese Folk Song (traditional) 42:32
Roy Campbell – trumpet
Booker T Williams – tenor saxophone
William Hooker - drums
Recorded on 22nd February, 1988 at Roulette Club, New York City with assistance of Jim Staley and staff / previously never released
1. Contrast (With A Feeling) 11:56
2. Natutally Forward 32:20
3. Continuity of Unfoldment 16:18
Track 1-2
Lewis Barnes – trumpet
Richard Keene – soprano, alto and tenor saxophones, flute
William Hooker – drums, spoken word
Track 3
William Hooker - drums
Track 1-2 – Recorded on 12th February, 1989 live at “Chumley’s” in the Castle at Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts by Brian Crawford and staff / Broadcasted on 100.1 FM WBRS
Track 3 – Recorded in1981 at WKCR-FM, Columbia University, New York City
supported by 16 fans who also own “LIGHT. The Early Years 1975-1989”
After a precision liftoff in Tabasco and setting a course to travel the space ways from planet to planet, the album peels away through a wormhole just past Saturn in the eponymous track Mayan Space Station to journey through time and space in Canyons of Light. eric F
