Alive with Ghosts Today
(Edition)
8/10
This is Chris Potter’s magnum opus, to date. Until now, I’d thought the saxophonist’s most important artistic statements came when he was in the late Paul Motian’s band. Alive with Ghosts Today sees him ratchet up the ambition, creating a suite memorialising the 1860 attempt by John Brown and a biracial group of 22 men to take over the US Arsenal in Virginia, intent upon freeing all slaves.
It didn’t go well. All but five of Brown’s gang were shot in the raid or executed, the latter being his own fate.
The title track conjures its ghosts with a slow parade of hair-raising harmonies, before Osawatomie Brown celebrates the nickname Brown won for leading anti-slavery forces in a clash in Osawatomie, Kansas, in 1856. Potter plays driving tenor over a muscular, medium-tempo backbeat groove, and then an ensemble passage beckons Bill Frisell’s spangly guitar, which stays suspended in a more muted mood, contrasting with Potter’s vigour.
The real interest starts with The Heavens in Scarlet, a quote from the ultrareligious Brown. Now the full imagination of Potter’s composing and arranging emerges, as he deploys his distinctive ensemble, in which Frisell’s guitar is joined by clarinet (Rane Moore), trombone (Zekkereya El-Magharbel) and violin (Sara Caswell), in addition to Burniss Travis’s bass and Nate Smith’s drums. Potter unleashes the burnished glory of his tenor’s tone over the chunky rhythm section, prior to Frisell building a Milky Way of wafting lines and chords.
Sister Annie is for Brown’s 15-year-old daughter, who was complicit in the raid’s preparations, and survived to be 82. Over a bouncy feel, Frisell solos with his singular combination of naivety and knowing, before Potter’s tenor then storms across Smith’s rhythmic crosscurrents. This World Would Have No Charms for Me, a lament in 3/4, has the violin and horns coiling around each, leading to an exquisite feature from Caswell, another understated gem from Frisell, and then a blast of anguish from Potter.
Brown referred to the slave states as “Africa”, hence Into Africa, with its bristling solo introduction from Potter, and subsequent rhythmic and melodic evocation of the Dark Continent, with Potter hugely energised amid jutting ensemble commentary, and Frisell at his most enigmatic. Mine Eyes are the opening words of Battle Hymn of the Republic, which, of course, shares its melody with John Brown’s Body. Potter does not draw on the tune, rather creating a piece of constant agitation, with darting little ensemble lines intruding upon Frisell’s introverted contribution, while the saxophonist is at his most lacerating, his sound growing in proportion.
It all drops away to something like a prayer from the trombone over Smith’s skittering drumming, before the ensemble swells to a crescendo, and Potter closes the album by revisiting the title track in looser fashion, with Frisell stepping out of his own shadow to make some fierce little asides. The recording quality is sumptuous.
https://www.birdland.com.au/chris-potter-alive-with-ghosts-today-vinyl-lp