Dave Liebman - Live At Small's
(Cellar Music Group, 2023)
National Endowment of the Arts Jazz Master saxophonist Dave Liebman is not new to "free jazz." He was present at the beginning, part of the New York City loft scene, the mythic period in the 1960s when Liebman shared a noted downtown loft with Dave Holland and Chick Corea where the trio was sharing temporal and aural space between Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz (Atlantic Records, 1961) and John Coltrane's late period Ascension (Impulse!, 1966), who was experiencing his creative emergence and relinquishing his tether to structured music.
Free Jazz might best be defined using the language of postmodernism, being a musical equivalent of deconstruction, defined in Jacques Derrida's words, "...the tension between memory, fidelity, the preservation of something that has been given to us, and, at the same time, heterogeneity, something new, and a break." A musician with their personal experience entering a dialog with other musicians sans all preconceptions. Everyone sits down and plays. To most ears, this may sound like a recipe for free-wheeling cultural anarchy, when in reality, the performance of free jazz requires all that comes before moving forward. Live at Small's embraces that aesthetic.
When the performance was scheduled, Liebman contacted musicians he had played with at different times and under different circumstances, but never as a unit. This provided a tension of excitement catalyzing the conversion of potential to kinetic on the bandstand. The 75-minute performance was divided into three lengthy parts allowing Liebaman's quintet (with pianist Leo Genovese, bassist John Hébert, drummer Tyshawn Sorey, and trumpeter Peter Evans) plenty of time to feel on another out and progress forward, showing that a free jazz performance is not unlike a soccer match, they both require a well-practiced participant to play and patience and attention to watch and hear. Such is the way to approach recording.
That's a helluva band.