Stanley Cowell

It's Time

(Steeplechase)

In a very special place in my vinyl collection sits Stanley Cowell's first album, Blues For The Vietcong, cut in 1969 on the Freedom label, with Andrea Klein's compelling sleeve design of the Vietnamese flag peppered by bullet holes but still defiantly unfurled and flying.

Cowell was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1931 in the same city of earlier piano genius Art Tatum, who used to stop by at the Cowell household when Stanley was a boy to practise at their family piano.

"He played so much piano," Cowell remembered, "that he scared everyone. One day when he played, my mother ran out of the house and refused to return until he stopped."

Cowell studied classical piano from four years old, before working with local R&B and dance bands as a teenager.

He trained in music at Ohio's Oberlin College before spending a further year of study in Mozart's city, Saltzburg.

While at the University of Michigan in 1966 he joined up with avant garde altoist Mario Brown, where he formed what was to become a long-lasting creative partnership with trumpeter Charles Tolliver, with whom he established the influential Strata East label in 1971, which issued a series of powerful albums including some by the Tolliver/Cowell band Music Inc and the redoubtable Gil Scott-Heron.

Cowell's most recent album It's Time (2011) has the same imperative title as two powerful predecessors.

In 1962 Max Roach, an ardent supporter of the civil rights movement, cut his album It's Time as a vibrant successor to his epochal 1960 album We Insist! The Freedom Now Suite, with its referencing of the struggle against racism in both the southern US states and South Africa.

Then in 1964 there was another It's Time, the Blue Note creation of a quintet led by the fiery New York alto saxophonist and Charlie Parker inheritor Jackie McLean.

Tolliver, making his recording debut on the album, was McLean's front-line partner.

So given this history, it is not surprising to discover that Cowell's retrospective Civil Rights Suite is an integral part of his own It's Time album more than four decades on, composed of a hornless trio session with bassist Tom Dicarlo and drummer Chris Brown, both of whom are Cowell's ex-students at Rutgers University.

Yet it is Cowell's musical reflections on the 1960s space exploration, happening simultaneously with the civil rights struggle, that begin the album with the two pieces Cosmology and El Space-O.

White people in the US were going for rings around the moon and finally stepping on its surface as their black compatriots organised and campaigned for rights always denied their communities.

Cowell's complex patterns of notes provoke long thoughts of such truths.

He expresses his internationalism towards Indian and Chinese realities with the three parts of his Asian Art Suite, inspired by his reactions to exhibits in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Cowell's dramatic two-handed eloquence, Brown's flickering cymbals and Dicarlo's heart of earth combine to carry the jazz message to faraway terrains.

But it is a long way home for the Civil Rights Suite, beginning with Roach's own It's Time, as it always was for the momentous drummer born in New Land, North Carolina, in 1924.

Cowell stomps along his keys full of energy, his eyes and hands still on the prize, while Brown lets fly on his skins and Dicarlo unleashes his deep soulbeat.

Next comes King, composed by Cowell's old tenorist confrere in the Roach band, Roland Alexander.

A ballad and praisesong, its notes are noble and strong, and Dicarlo's long solo is full of muscled beauty.

Finally there is the wit and solidarity of We Shall 2 with its sonic connections to the great anthem We Shall Overcome.

It is the African link for Long Vamp when Cowell, after starting on piano, shifts to his Kalimba, or thumb piano, with Dicarlo digging deep beside him.

And it is back to 1969 for the album's final tune Abstrusions, written by Cowell for the Roach album Members Don't Get Weary, recorded shortly after the murder of King to help the movement hold on to its faith and stamina.

It is as if the long-campaigning and beautiful music of Cowell refuses to go away and is as determined as it is ancestral.