Americans in Paris: The fruitful partnership of Frank Wright and Noah Howard

Zeroing in on four outstanding collaborations between the two saxophonists, recorded in France in 1969–70

Welcome to any new subscribers! Thanks so much for tuning in. This time around, apropos of nothing other than my own recent listening obsession, I’m going to take a look at four excellent albums featuring the saxophone tandem of Noah Howard and Frank Wright.

After I published last week’s post on spiritual jazz, my friend Clifford Allen, a consummate historian and chronicler of free jazz among many other styles, texted me to let me know that the themes of the piece had immediately made him think of alto saxophonist Noah Howard’s cult classic The Black Ark (a killer album, featuring a young Arthur Doyle, recorded in ’69 but not released till ’72). I’d checked out some of Howard’s work in the past, but it had been a long while, so I started to delve back in, and as I sifted through his copious early discography, spanning the second half of the ’60s and the first half of the ’70s, something piqued my interest: I’d never before realized that he’d been a part of a prolific and under-recognized working group around this time.

After performing at France’s legendary Actuel Festival in the fall of 1969, Howard, tenor player Frank Wright (his classmate, as it were, in the post-Ayler cohort that debuted on the ESP label in the mid-’60s) and pianist Bobby Few went on to record four collaborative albums during the next year or so with two different drummers, Muhammad Ali and Art Taylor. I’d done some prior listening dives on a related band, the Center of the World quartet featuring Wright, Few, Ali and bassist Alan Silva, but this Wright/Howard material was less familiar to me, with some of it being entirely new, and spending time with these albums during the past few days — three released under Wright’s name, One for John, Church Number Nine and Uhuru Na Umoja, and one under Howard’s, Space Dimension — I’ve been frequently floored. This is a brilliant band, well worth your time if you’re not familiar, and one that reveals the surprising range of so-called free jazz at the turn of the ‘70s. (Note: only one of these albums, Uhuru Na Umoja, seems to be widely in print, so for the others, you’re best off searching YouTube or whatever other means are at your disposal. You can apparently still pick up a 2019 Italian reissue of Space Dimension on vinyl.)

The chronology of these albums is a little fuzzy. Session info tells us that One for John was recorded in December of 1969, with Church Number Nine following in March of 1970. Both Space Dimension and Uhuru Na Umoja (the title means “freedom and unity” in Swahili) seem to have been tracked in 1970, but I can’t find exact date info for either. It would make sense to me, though, that these came after the first pair, as they’re considerably more nuanced in their approach than the prior two. And interestingly, it seems that Uhuru was really a Howard-led session. “It’s got Frank’s name, but that’s my session,” Howard said of Uhuru in this illuminating 2006 Wire interview by Phil Freeman. Whatever the name on the spine, the writing credits as well as the similarity in approach between Uhuru and Space Dimension — and their clear contrast with the long-form blowouts that appear on One for John and Church Number Nine — amply back up Howard’s account that it was really his date.

Before we dive in here, it’s worth setting the scene a bit. Here’s Howard on how the band originally came together, from the same Wire interview:

“Frank went over to play with another band, but me and Bobby and Muhammad came together, and then we co-opted him and brought him into the thing. It was a strange thing, because we didn't have a bass player. At that point, we couldn't figure out who could fit into the compositions we were writing, so we said fuck it, we don't need a bass player. There was only two groups living in Paris at the time, between 69 and 71-72, two American bands playing this new music, and we ruled the universe. That was our group and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. We were all friends, we hung out together and sometimes played together.”

I can’t recommend the two Howard-led records highly enough. Thanks to the combination of Howard’s varied writing and the unusual presence of Art Taylor — a drummer of course best known as a hard-bop master, who had settled in France roughly a decade before the arrival of this new wave of musicians, and who adapts just beautifully to their freer, post-Trane/Ayler mode — on the entirety of Uhuru and all but one track of Space Dimension (Ali steps in for a version of “Church Number Nine,” which I believe dates from after the one that takes up the entirety of the Wright album of the same name), these albums really sound like nothing else I can think of.

Take, for example, the absolutely gorgeous ballads that appear on each. “Aurora Borealis,” from Uhuru — note that the same composition appears as “Queen Anne” on The Black Ark — is tremendously effective, with Few unfurling a magic carpet of flowing rubato harmony, as the two saxists float on top. Howard’s sound here is heartbreakingly tender, a potent foil here and throughout these sessions for Wright’s more gruff and commanding presence. It’s a treat here to hear him adapting to the subtlety of the piece and blowing in more measured and reflective way. The title track from “Space Dimension” has a similar kind of dreamlike suspension, with Howard and Wright intertwining plaintive lines like adjoined shapes on a mobile — Taylor’s presence is a bit more active and insistent here than on “Aurora Borealis”; it’s wonderful to hear a drummer best known for no-nonsense swing lay down turbulent yet thoroughly attuned texture here. Both of these pieces are absolute gems.

Otherwise, these two albums diverge somewhat, with Space Dimension feeling more reined in and Uhuru embracing wild freedom. A tune like “Being” from Uhuru is a joyous romp, with the horns aligning up top for a simple fanfare-like riff. Once the solos take off, Taylor rockets into masterful free-time propulsion, with Howard showing off his gift for projecting an uncanny sense of poise and focus within a raucous improv setting, and Wright working up to a squealing, volcanic peak, Taylor egging him on at every step. Things get even more out on Space Dimension’s “Song for Poets,” with Few blanketing Wright’s R&B-shout solo in shimmering chromatic mist and Taylor revving up in an almost Sunny Murray–like way. Howard’s solo again contrasts appealingly with Wright’s — his singing, violin-like tone has a way of cutting through the mix of this group like a vibrant streak of crimson. Midway through the band aligns for a kind of rollicking riff that verges on backbeat territory but never quite gets there.

They do arrive at that musical zone on the riotous “Church Number Nine.” The version on Space Dimension is fun but it can’t really hold a candle to the gargantuan reading on the album of the same name, where its two parts (it’s a bit hard to tell if they’re two separate takes or one long take broken up into LP sides) occupy the full running time. There, the band, this time with Ali behind the kit, moves quickly from a freeform din into the main theme, a riotous Albert Ayler–gone–honky-tonk riff — it’s worth keeping in mind here that both Few and Wright knew Ayler growing up in Cleveland, and that Few had already recorded with him, while the New Orleans–born Howard became close to him after moving to New York in the mid-’60s — complete with pounding rock & roll piano from Few. (I’ve written about Bobby Few’s range before, for the late, lamented Destination: Out, but it really can’t be overstated how well, throughout these records, he amplifies whatever mood the moment calls for, from cataclysmic to romantic.) This is really one of the great second-wave free-jazz themes, along with the barnstorming out head to Peter Brötzmann’s “Machine Gun,” recorded a couple years prior.

On Church Number Nine, the band rocks out on the motif for a bit, with Ali adding his version of a fractured backbeat and someone (Howard?) adding good-time tambourine, but after a few minutes, the time fractures, and the piece enters pure free-jazz overdrive, a zone that Wright, Few and Ali would go on to explore with obsessive intensity in their Center of the World band. Few groups not led by Ayler or John Coltrane have ever played so effectively in this style, and even here, without Silva, when Wright is soloing, the sustained energy is a marvel to behold. Howard’s take on the contrast between him and Wright, from the Wire interview, is worth quoting here:

“Frank was an incredible energy source. I like to use the word, and not in a dismissive sense, primeval. He had that kind of concept. He had this rough thing, like an explosion coming out of the center of the earth. And being that I was from New Orleans, I would put that gumbo sweetening on it, and add some melody to it. So it was an interesting balance.”

Howard makes his own presence felt on the first half of Church Number Nine, taking a choppy, overdriven solo, spurred along by Ali’s inside/outside bashing, but his role here seems more sideman-like than it does on any of the other three sessions under discussion here. More free-jazz eruption follows on the second part of “Church Number Nine,” with the band ascending to a climax featuring clattering percussion and wailing vocals by Wright (“It’s time for the world to be at peace!”), who often spontaneously shouted along during these sessions, and I believe sometimes also added flute and harmonica.

The lengthy opening title track of One for John, part of the legendary BYG/Actuel series, bears a strong resemblance to the meat of Church Number Nine, with its constant forward rush. The recording quality is a little better here, to my ears, than on Church, which brings the power and propulsion of Muhammad Ali more to the fore. On the basis of these sessions, he’s every bit the equal of his game-changing brother, Rashied, just an indefatigable source of energy, unspooling constant rolls and furnishing a sense of skipping motion outside of metric time. Much like on “Church Number Nine,” this piece climaxes with both saxophonists adding vocal shouts over Ali’s churning current.

The second piece, “China,” credited to Few, has a bit more shape to it, with another fanfare-like theme giving it a strong direction. Again, the contrast between Wright’s expressionistic yawps and Howard’s more sinuous, subtle approach, projecting that violin-like pathos, is extremely effective. (Another interesting tidbit from the Wire interview: Apparently Howard was supposed to record his own session for BYG but it fell through after the label failed to pay Wright.)

Without covering every base here, I’ll add that there’s much more to savor on these sessions, from the laid-back Latin pulse of “Viva Black” on Space Dimension to the playful march cadence on “Pluto” from Uhuru. This was a band with enormous range and potential — and, clearly, an ambition to find new horizons to explore, with the innovations of the New York–centered ’60s free-jazz scene now firmly part of another time and place. And while I love what Wright, Few and Ali went on to do with Silva, Howard’s presence (not to mention compositional sense) was a powerful counterweight. He spoke a bit in the Wire interview about why the band parted ways.

“At that point, we had a split between the direction of the band that Frank wanted to go in and the direction I wanted to go in. So I split, and then Frank brought in Alan Silva. So then, that whole thing is a whole other history, of Frank and Alan Silva and Bobby and Muhammad. That was a point when I went off to Africa, because you can go really far out for years and years and then say, ‘I think I want to disconnect, go to a different space, sit back and reflect on what I'm doing.’”

I’m not yet as well versed in Howard’s prolific later output, but I’ve grabbed a bunch of it, including a surprisingly large amount of material available on Bandcamp and this intriguing reunion with ’60s collaborator Bobby Kapp, so I’m looking forward to exploring further, and the same goes for Frank Wright. (For the record, Howard died in 2010 after a reemergence onto the scene, while we lost Wright in 1990 and Few in 2021; Muhammad Ali is thankfully still with us!) In the meantime, it was a huge treat to zoom in on this brief period during which their paths and purposes aligned so fruitfully.

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