A rare stray from AACM member Muarice McIntyre from 69. Maurice is a weltering saxophonist who crops up on a few sessions (I forget which ones exactly) here & there, but scorched the steeple black on Richard Abrams superb ‘Levels and Degrees of Light’ debut. This is his first LP as a band leader, & he has conjured a considerable entourage that extols the likes of Malachi Favors, Claudine Myers, Thurman Barker & more from the AACM quorum. The album is quite flawed (to me), but is considerably novel, curiously intriguing & has some excellent tributaries periodically. A recurrent theme is Maurice lallating some kind of Native American vocalization…a technique or discipline that he does not sound like he has mastered to well. Fine enough as a junction or brief overture, it is unfortunately reenacted on multiple occasions & becomes actually quite intrusive & annoying, especially considering there is such an impressive assembly of participants who could all be paddling lava instead of belting-out blather from the park-bench. The construct & music is a disorganized mess, there’s an impressive jamboree of styles stuffed & stowed…its all over the place. Certainly there is a lot of hiatus & hesitancy. Very interesting ideas, posits & semi-conceptualized (at least that’s how it sounds) material & experimentation. I find the end result suffering from insufficiency & a lack of engagement. Its also a lost-opportunity to grasp the manna & just fling-it over the deck & burn em’! With such a great crowed of characters alerted, the resulting material would of inevitably been awesome. Again, there’s a wealth of formidable ideas & positioning, but the skirting, nebulous & almost reticent bulk left me a bit disappointed. Still! If your as deep into this shit, then you need to study & immerse such recordings & individuals & run the whole codex. Humility was not the lesser-known, winding-ditch gem I had hoped for, but its a bloody interesting record that radiates something out of the ordinary that was never quite pulled-off in full.

1969, Delmark