John Tchicai — Archie Shepp Quartet
Rufus (Cool music 2044772)
The New York Art Quartet
Mohawk (Cool Music 2044774)

RUFUS (Swung, his face to the wind, then his neck snapped) is an Archie Shepp tune which grew from the very gut of the US civil rights movement. Originally recorded on this album in 1963, its context of racist terror and lynching has never gone away. Remember the nine black citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, gunned down in June 2015 at a church prayer meeting, not by white-hooded murderers of the Ku Klux Klan, but by a young white man who wore adoring emblems of the Confederacy, racist South Africa and Ian Smith’s Rhodesia? How much has changed, and how much has not changed.

So the reappearance of this long-unavailable album is terrifyingly apt. Its co-leaders are Shepp and the Danish-Congolese tenor Saxophonist John Tchicai (pictured), who formed two of the horns (with Don Cherry on pocket trumpet) of the New York Contempory Five, and both were to re-record Rufus on the much better-known Impulse! album Four for Trane in August 1964. With them on the 1963 session are drummer J C Moses and the bassist Don Moore.

Rufus begins with a stop-time theme with Tchicai’s alto and Shepp’s tenor in troubled colloquy before Tchicai breaks out, urged on by Moore’s relentless plunging bass and Moses’s percussive excitation.

Shepp’s husky phrases contine the breathless narrative before Tchicai finds unison with him and Moses’s indignant drums bring the story to its temporary end.

Shepp’s gruff tenor is the first solo horn on Tchicai’s Nettus, over Moore’s walking bass. When Tchicai enters, the contrasting clarity of his crystalline notes and their plaintive tone creates another soundscape. Moore takes a prancing solo, then carries on with his ceaseless walking before the horns join to reprise the theme.

Tchicai is also the composer of the sprightly Hoppin’, opening the way for an adenoidal Shepp. Then Tchi-
cai’s chorus flies off his notes with a lyrical deftness. Drummer and bassist take their solo moments before the horns palaver and unite for the closure. Then it is For Helved, another Tchicai piece, and an opportunity for him to find a keen sonic pace with Moses’s skins breaking beside him. When Shepp takes over the speed is sustained as his tenor chews into Moore’s throbbing bass notes.

The album’s closing track is Funeral, an elegy for the huge civil rights campaigning energy of Medgar Evers, the NAACP organiser ambushed and murdered outside his house in Jackson, Mississippi, in June 1963. It is very much a collective tribute, and as Victor Schonfield, jazz scholar and Morning Star reader, wrote more than 50 years ago in his powerful sleeve notes: “Four strong identities come together in this poignant lament.” He is as right today as he was then, and its fusion of unity, love and determined anger make it a deeply moving end to a momentous album which is ripe for our times too.

Tchicai became a key member of the New York Art Quartet which was formed in New York City in 1964, and recorded the album Mohawk in July 1965 in that city where much of the construction work of its great towers and skyscrapers had been done by Mohawk high-altitude iron-workers from Canada.

With Tchicai was the trombonist from Sharon, Connecticut, Roswell Rudd, a member of the New York Contemporary Five with Shepp; the bassist Regie Workman from Philadelphia who played with Coltrane as well as being one of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers between 1962 and 1964 — and the prodigious free polyrhythmic drummer Milford Graves from New York.

The opening track is another version of Rufus called Rufus 3rd, begun by Workman’s hurrying virtuoso bass, with Graves’s percussion everywhere. Tchicai’s alto soars and swoops and Rudd’s growls make a stark contrast. The two horns converse on Charlie Parker’s tune Mohawk with a galloping intensity, but it is in Rudd’s Banging on the White House Door that the music really flares up. This was 1965 — the year of struggle for the Voting Rights Act, the march on Selma, Alabama, and the “War on Slums” in Chicago.

Graves’ drumming is furious, the horns sound as if they are making a call to action and Workman’s bass is the power beneath it all, like a people awakening.

Mohawk is another epochal but neglected album, marked by Tchicai’s tenderly wandering alto solo on a beautifully free-born reading of the songbook ballad Everything Happens to Me — and it did, for millions throughout that year, right across the US.