The last time the AACM veteran Kalaparush Maurice McIntyre recorded for Delmark was over three decades ago, as the leader of the 1970 album Forces and Feelings. His new Delmark release, Morning Song, features the current edition of his band The Light, nowadays a trio featuring the 30-year-old drummer Ravish Momin and the 22-year-old tuba-player Jesse Dulman. Sad to say, it’s an inauspicious homecoming. McIntyre does an excellent impression of a man talking to himself: his attitude to rhythm, pitch and chords isn’t so much “loose” as just indifferent, and he rarely bothers to pay much attention to what the other players are doing. Momin’s Indian-flavoured drumming shows promise but it’s unsteadily pulsed and sometimes unforgivably messy, and Dulman is simply not ready for prime time yet: filling a bassist’s role he’s passable, but his solos are the work of a man grasping at straws. The trio occasionally blunders into some worthwhile music – bits of “I Don’t Have An Answer Unless It’s God” are quite all right, for instance – but there are also plenty of tracks like “Noon,” where no-one seems to be listening to each other at all.

Drummer Ted Sirota’s Breeding Resistance is a much more worthwhile album, despite some flaws. In his lengthy, heartfelt liner notes he dedicates the music to “the spirit of resistance and struggle against oppression.” In the current political climate it’s a timely gesture, even if there’s a peculiar whiff of 1960s radical-chic to the enterprise (Sirota tips his hat to Mao Tse-Tung and the Black Panthers), and even if his rhetoric sags into vague talk about “the struggle,” “change” and “revolution.” The album itself is a bit of a grab-bag. The one dud is the hectoring “Chairman Fred (I Wish Fred Hampton Was Here),” sprinkled with snippets of Hampton’s rallying cries, and rounded off with shouts of “Power to the people!” I’m also not so sure about the reggae piece “This Is a Takeover” – it’s done well enough, but like many other attempts at blending jazz and reggae it sounds rather beside-the-point. Much better is Sirota’s African-inspired “Saro-Wiwa,” the album’s spirited opener; saxophonist Geof Bradfield’s three tunes are also winners (especially “D.C.,” a tricksy line in tribute to Don Cherry); the brief, dignified “Huntsville, TX” is worthy of Sonny Sharrock; and the album ends strongly with bassist Clark Sommers’ “Pablo.” Bradfield plays very well, though he sounds more conventionally Coltraneish here than on his marvellous Rule of Three (Liberated Zone), one of last year’s most exciting debuts. Trombonist Jeb Bishop and guitarist Jeff Parker hold up their end, though both are at something less than their best. Bishop, in particular, is having an off-day: he contributes a good tune, “Knife,” which sits halfway between 1960s spy-movie music and Jazz Messengers hard bop, but when he comes to solo on the piece it sounds like he’s playing in handcuffs. Sirota and Sommers keep things cooking nicely throughout, though – Sirota’s Blackwell touches on “D.C.” are particularly gratifying – and on balance the hits here outnumber the misses.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, July 2004