Giuseppi Logan

The Giuseppi Logan Quartet (ESP 1007)

More (ESP 1013)

Giuseppi Logan was one of the wild hornmen of jazz. According to ESP-DISK record producer Bernard Stollman, as Logan entered the Bell Sound recording studio in New York in October 1964 for his first session for the label, he muttered to Stollman: “If you rob me, I’ll kill you.”

Logan’s warning was a statement against the habitual exploitation of black musicians by corporate white record companies.

But ESP-DISK was tiny and progressive, treating its artistes fairly, even handing over the selection of tracks on their albums to the musicians themselves.

The label, which promoted the language esperanto, was the birthing ground of many a legendary avant-garde artiste, from Albert Ayler to Frank Wright, from Sun Ra to Marion Brown.

The results of the session were issued by ESP-DISK as an album called The Giuseppi Logan Quartet, with Logan, who was born in Philadelphia in 1935, playing alto and tenor saxophones, bass clarinet, flute and Pakistani oboe; drummer Milford Graves, born in New York in 1941 and playing tabla too; the Roanoke, Virginia-born pianist Don Pullen on piano and the Puerto Rican bassist Eddie Gomez.

Stollman had heard this quartet at the October Revolution in Jazz concert and suggested a recording session to Logan. He had already been a part of a real diversity in music.

He had studied at the New England Conservatory and played in the quasi-pop Earl Bostic band, but also with avant-garde pioneers of the era like Archie Shepp, Bill Dixon and Pharoah Sanders.

So he was a very versatile musician with very broad and free instincts.

The Giuseppi Logan Quartet album opened opportunities for Pullen, Graves and Gomez, all of whom became masters and leaders of the music.

Its opener is Tabla Suite, with Graves playing tabla and Logan’s Pakistani oboe hovering above him.

Pullen strums his piano strings and the collective sound is weirdly Asiatic, unlike the Dance of Satan where Pullen gives his keys hard knocks and Logan’s alto riffs are full of the blues — of course, the Devil’s music, wailing above Graves’s earthen drums and Gomez’s untethered pulse.

The Gomez bass seethes through the next track, Dialogue, while Logan’s alto grieves and Pullen charges headlong up and down his keys.

Taneous must be Logan-talk for “spontaneous,” for its sheer inventiveness and excitation is immediate and irrepressible, with Pullen on the edge of the improvisation, pressing its space wider and wider.

One of Logan’s critics called his sound “so laboured in its perverseness,” yet in the 16 minutes of Bleecker Partita there is an extraordinary attunement between the four musicians, with Logan’s crying tenor arising from the totality of sound like the voice of nature’s worrisome breath, and when Pullen pounds in after the horn solo there is a harrowing sense of continuity.

On May Day 1965 Stollman organised a town hall concert, featuring Logan’s Quartet and the Albert Ayler Sextet.

In 2004 an extra 10 minutes of Logan’s performance of Shebar was found at the end of the Ayler master tape and this has been added to Logan’s second ESP-DISK album, which is simply called More.

Mantu has some aerated flute from Logan over Graves’s deep bass drum palpitating and an explosion of keys from Pullen, inspired it seems from the live atmosphere, for he assails the town hall rafters in the first part of the extended Shebar, before Logan’s feral alto notes and Reggie Johnson’s bouncing and sawing bass add the testimonies.

But it is the exalted playing of both Graves and Pullen at an early apex of their artistry that you remember.

After Pullen’s brilliance, the nine minutes of Logan’s piano solo, Curve Eleven, pales away, but the closing track, Wretched Saturday, a studio performance, returns to the original quartet with Logan’s long-moaning tenor leaving its mark on jazz history with his three superb bandmates.