Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre
Humility in the Light of the Creator, Forces and Blessings and Morning Song
(Delmark)

BORN in the blues country of Clarksville, Arkansas, in 1936, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre imbibed the church and the blues through his boyhood and never left the huge and raw power of their sounds.

McIntyre grew up in Chicago’s South Side and became one of the leading advocates of the influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) which cut a trail for the new free music alongside confreres like pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and Chicago hornmen Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell.

He made his own recorded debut on Mitchell’s innovative album Sound, cut in Shytown in 1967, and also blew on Muhal’s first album Levels and Degrees of Light in 1967.

In 1969, Delmark — the local label which had recorded both Mitchell and Muhal — turned to Kalaparusha and a group of AACM pioneers for the session that led to his first album, Humility in the Light of the Creator.

In the first sentence of John B Litweiler’s sleevenotes, he describes Kalaparusha in these terms: “Maurice McIntyre is a visionary of our times, a William Blake offering his songs in the deadly streets of 1969’s Cities of the Apocalypse.”

Some praise indeed, and a comparison to the great London poet who wrote that “my streets are my ideas of imagination.”

For Kalaparusha, even before the Chicago streets it was the very house walls and floors: “I grew up with music. When I was a little boy, the family in the apartment below all played their instruments — the mother, father, kids, the pictures on the walls. Even the mice in the floor had their own axes.”

Humility begins with a suite called Ensemble Love, which crystallises the AACM collective commitment.

It seems they needed their solidarity as their new, much freer way of playing made them enemies of the sectarian “bop snobs” who, as Kalaparusha remembers, used to try “to chase them off the stand” when they played their “outside” music.

Even now, the audacious sound of Humility belies the album’s title.

Ensemble Love begins with a rapturous outcry from Kalaparusha’s tenor above Malachi Favours’s plunging bass, and Thurman Barker’s drums pound thunder. Kalaparusha plays a rasping clarinet on Pluto Calling and George Hines’s wordless vocal prefaces a wondrously galloping tenor solo on the aptly named Life Force.

The second suite is called Ensemble Fate, bringing in the gospelised beauty of Amina Claudine Mysers’s piano and two more horns, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and John Stubblefield’s soprano saxophone.

Favours’s bass is deep, deep and powerfully agile throughout its 19 minutes and the sheer speed of Stubblefield’s chorus alongside Kalaparusha’s chiming bell is startling. Wadada blows a lyrical passage above pounding drums and bowed bass in the euphoric movement Melissa.

Kalaparusha returned in 1970 with his second album, Forces and Feelings. His subliminal spirituality is strongly to the fore in Rita Omolokun’s vocals and the pioneer free bassist Fred Hopkins creates inspired harmonies with the guitarist Sarnies Garrett.

Kalaparusha storms forward on Sun Spots and is reflectively serene on two versions of Ananda. The free spirits inside his horns, tenor and clarinet burst out of Twenty-One Lines.

Some 33 years later, which is more than the ages of his two new confreres, Kalaparusha re-emerged to cut his third album with Delmark, which he called Morning Song.

With him were New York tuba player Jesse Dulman and drummer Ravish Momin from Hyderabad, India, in a trio called The Light.
“Play it out there in space. Don’t follow no rules, but the rules still apply,” is Kalaparusha’s dictum and applied to this session it seems to make very good contradictory sense.

Dulman’s bulky horn is a revelation as a solo instrument as well as a rhythmic mainstay and Momin’s cosmopolitan drumming further intensifies the internationalism of the trio’s sound.

Hear Dulman’s gruff chorus on Here Comes the Light and Kalaparusha’s vibrant solo on Let Us all Relax beside Momin’s sparkling drums.
Kalaparusha is rhapsodic in his unaccompanied opening to In My Morning Song, as if the years have truly watered his age-defying hornsong and the difference of generations within his trio is firing him forwards.

Dulman’s astonishing solo in Against All Odds is almost an emulation of Kalaparusha’s very different instrumental sound.

But the album’s true apex is the radiant track Morning.

Here are the young, learning and infusing the spirit of the elders and leaving their own sonic message in all our ears.