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Ray Murray – baritone sax, percussion, vocals.
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Steve Patterson – tenor sax, percussion, vocals.Pierre Chrétien – electric piano, clavinet, organ, guitar, bass, percussion, vocals.The band has had three Juno nominations: Instrumental Album of the Year ( Rising Sun, 2011), and World Music Album of the Year ( Solidarity, 2013, and Resistance, 2016.) Their Resistance album release tour of Europe, all October/November 2015, sees them among others in London, Liverpool, Zurich, Paris, Lyon, Milan, Barcelona, Madrid, Berlin, Cologne, Vienna, Prague, Athens, Marseille. In 2012, the band completed two US tours that included stops in cities such as Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and Chicago. Other musicians signed to Strut include "Ethio-Jazz pioneer Mulatu Astatke, Motown guitarist Dennis Coffey and Ghanaian highlife singer Ebo Taylor, to name a few." Īccording to AllMusic, the band's "overtly political 2006 single "Mista President," off second album Freedom No Go Die (Do Right!), really increased their audience, voted to the number nine spot in the 2006 Top 30 of BBC DJ Gilles Peterson's Worldwide programme. But the group's impulse to dismantle and globalize their sound (or their refusal to settle on one) is admirable, and their efforts to do so result in some inventive moments.The band signed to London-based Strut Records, a UK record label that focuses on dance music and afrobeat. The band’s recent interest in more introspective and less tightly structured music doesn’t always play to their strengths, namely, their ability to devise and deliver taut and constantly mutating arrangements. Inner Fire's biggest problem is a sporadic lack of energy. “Celestial Blues”, a cover of a Roland Kirk-styled piece of 70s avant-soul by Gary Bartz NTU Troop makes one curious about the original record, but the SJO’s version itself ultimately comes off as inert. The spare, blues-inflected dirge “East Flows the River” lacks some much-needed disruptive element or event to keep it from sounding like a jazzy piece of boom-bap rap production without an MC.
The souljazz orchestra freedom no go die full#
Inner Fire falters when the ensemble attempts full pieces in the “spiritual” mold, as on “Black Orchid", a slick piece of lite-funk. Steve Patterson and Ray Murray, the SJO’s tenor and baritone players, often channel the legendary saxophonist in their solos, and Chrétien frequently emulates the keyboard flourishes of McCoy Tyner and Alice Coltrane. The band has always claimed the style as a source of inspiration-their 2007 album Freedom No Go Die features a rendition of Pharoah Sanders’ hypnotic half-hour opus “The Creator Has a Master Plan”. “As the Crow Flies”, the single finest track, unites an unsettled horn theme and modal chord changes that would be at home on a pre-electric Herbie Hancock record with a bossa nova backbeat.Įqually fundamental to the ethos of Inner Fire is the school of spiritual jazz that blossomed in the wake of John Coltrane’s Eastern-influenced explorations of the mid–1960s. The album’s highlights are its most culturally ambiguous selections, like “One Life to Live”, which mixes rhumba and reggaeton rhythms, and “Sommet En Sommet”, a dense, three-against-four shuffle influenced partially by Guinean music. The driving polyrhythms of Nigerian folk music that marked their earlier work are set aside in favor of more laid-back percussion indigenous to the Americas. Much of Inner Fire consists of intricately arranged, harmonically adventurous Afro-Latin jazz this sound, when paired with the lush piano and vibraphone backgrounds Chrétien favors, creates resonances with Mulatu Astatke’s Ethio-jazz.