In an interview in 2015, the celebrated jazz star from Los Angeles, Kamasi Washington, was asked about his fellow musician Horace Tapscott, who was also working in Los Angeles. Kamasi Washington was highly euphoric about the latter’s work in his response. Twenty years after the death of the avant-garde jazz musician, the Soul Jazz label is now honouring Tapscott with a series of reissues. The album opens with a concert recording from 1979 with his band, The Pan-African Peoples Arkestra, founded in 1961, from the Immanuel United Church of Christ. This two-hour document is highly spiritual. And for Horace Tapscott, avant-garde does not mean tearing apart the bulk of the form and harmony of the jazz tradition in free jazz style. Instead, it’s as if the Sun Ra Arkestra, instead of soaring into space, were simply exploring the skies above Los Angeles. You can get quite far by doing that. In reality, Tapscott has centred his activities around the Watts district in the south of the city, which may have contributed to the fact that it is only now that he is being rediscovered. As did the fact that his closeness to the Black Panthers attracted the scrutiny of the FBI and brought his studio career to a halt for almost a decade from 1969 onwards. On »Live at I.U.C.C.« the musicians compress the open spaces of the extended pieces into wonderfully floating concentrated moods, and when things get really dissonant, as they do on »Noissessprahs«, backwards for »Sharps Session« (one of the performers is saxophonist Jesse Sharps), it sounds less shrill and more like an added layer of compression. Poet Kamau Daáood provides further diversity on »McKowky’s First Fifth« with a text for Eric Dolphy. Already now one of the new releases of the year.
Various Artists
In The Beginning There Was Rhythm
Soul Jazz