Music of unity

THE partnership between saxophonist Charles Lloyd and virtuoso drummer Billy Higgins was a deep, spiritual, yet technically brilliant musical union.

Higgins began his drumming with West Coast R'n'B and blues bands, became a part of the Ornette Coleman Quartet in 1958 and, then, through the next four decades, played with just about every great jazzman of the times, from Monk, Coltrane and Rollins to Milt Jackson, Dexter Gordon and David Murray.

His final setting was with Lloyd's quartet - hear them on the ECM CDs Voice in the Night, The Water is Wide and Hyperion with Higgins, all recorded in 1999.

Higgins, who died four months after making this duo album in 2001, was a Muslim, while Lloyd is a long-time student of Vedanta.

On this album, Lloyd plays tenor, alto, flutes, Tibetan oboe, taragato and piano.

Higgins plays a universe of drums and percussion, guitar and north African guimbri and he sings in Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese and in US English, from the heart of the blues.

Its message is in itself. Music of human unity, of peace and multifaith internationalism, of humanity and love.

It is the antidote of the US Establishment's war, its crusading evangelism, its belligerence and hate to which Britain is tethered.

So listen to it. Listen to Lloyd's springing alto on Hanuman's Dance or his serene piano on Sky Valley or Sea of Tranquillity.

Then, there is Higgins's Blues Tinge, played on solo guitar and his recourse to Senegalese, Guinean and Indian hand drums throughout the albums.

Tenor and drums merge flawlessly through Wild Orchids Bloom, Perfume of the Desert and Windy Mountain on the second record, together with Lloyd's invocation of the holy city of Benares, where he plays Tibetan oboe with passion and a sense of mystery. Two and a half hours of truly cosmic music.

John Abercrombie is the guitarist of Charles Lloyd's current quartet, an upstate New Yorker who started out as a rocker, but who came to jazz next to Johnny "Hammond" Smith's blues-baked organ and Chico Hamilton in the late 1960s.

His own longstanding quartet includes the astonishing virtuoso violinist Mark Feldman, whose eclectic skills have sounded in contexts from classical repertoire to bop, free jazz and Johnny Cash, with drummer Joey Baron and Marc Johnson on bass.

Class Trip is an extraordinary expression of individual musical genius, path-making within a collective endeavour.

If you take the track Descending Grace, for example, which begins with Johnson's shimmering bass under Feldman's melodic explorations and Baron's forever tapping cymbals and Abercrombie's comping chords, you know you are hearing the quartet as a whole, while you marvel at the sheer virtuosity of its four members.

And, when Abercrombie comes through with his fleet and skipping solo, playing head tunes, as is his wont, almost totally with his thumb and urged on by Baron's propulsive drums, the music is both brilliant and mesmerising.

Abercrombie calls the quartet "a perfect band for playing free, improvised stuff, where there's little or no talk about what you're going to do."

Quicksilver is more like it - sheer discovery in sound, exhilarating for the listener and Feldman's dark shades of sound are a forest in themselves.

When they play Bartok's Soldier's Song, now transformed by the jazz imagination, it is reinvented by a new beauty.

This is a record to play and play and, still, you will not know all its secrets.

ALBUMS:

Charles Lloyd and Billy Higgins - Which Way is East (ECM)
John Abercrombie Quartet - Class Trip (ECM)

CHRIS SEARLE